“We are excited to offer our advertisers the opportunity to expand their online presence through Google AdWords,” stated Glenn Goad, Network Communications’s executive vice president of consumer strategy, in a press release.

He then continued, “The model for how consumers search for and sell homes continues to change and the Internet has been a driving force behind this evolution.  Our partnership with Google allows us to provide even more highly effective and targeted online real estate marketing services and products to our customers.”

Online real estate has been a pretty hot field lately; just in the past couple of weeks, Yahoo Real Estate partnered with NewHomeSource.com and Redfin secured $12 million in funding.  That’s one competitor and a lot of cash on the move, from Google’s perspective (although I suppose it’s me, not Google, that regards $12 million as “a lot”).

So the arrangement with Network Communications shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.  But as the official release notes, “The signed deal makes NCI the first company in the real estate marketplace that Google has partnered with in this way.”

Hat tip to the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal.

Not too long ago, Redfin was fined $50,000 by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service; many onlookers saw this as a way of silencing Redfin’s honest (and therefore sometimes less-than-complimentary) property reviews, and felt rather bad for the company.  That’s no longer necessary.

“We expect this to be our last round of venture financing,” announced Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO, in a press release.  The release went on to provide some corporate background information (though it did steer clear of the whole NWMLS mess).

“Since Redfin’s last round of financing in May 2006, the company has completed more than $350 million in real estate transactions, saved its home-buying customers nearly $6 million in commissions, increased revenues by more than 2,000 percent, expanded into four new markets, and been featured on ‘60 Minutes.’”  That’s pretty impressive.

And now a few more people will be able to experience that “impressiveness,” as Redfin just launched its service in the D.C. area; that means its area of coverage now includes Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, California, Virginia, and our nation’s capital.  Everyone else will have to wait, but with a fresh $12 million in Redin’s pockets, the delay might not last long.

Hat tip to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s John Cook.

The blog had offered property reviews, but the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) “deemed our reviews (particularly the harsh ones) as an advertisement,” according to Redfin’s Glenn Kelman, and “advertising another broker’s listing” is against NWMLS rules.

So the NWMLS whomped Redfin with that $50,000 fine.

This action has been condemned in the “3 Oceans – San Francisco Bay Area Real Estate Blog,” the “Square Feet Blog,” and countless other industry sources.  Techdirt’s Joe Weisenthal compares it to a “War Against The Web.”  And, naturally, the Redfin people aren’t happy.

Kelman applauds his writers’ work, describes the Sweet Digs blog as “wildly successful,” and then writes, “The MLSs don’t seem to realize that outdated rules against commingling MLS listings with data from other sources will preclude any brokerage site from accepting the basic premise of the Web 2.0 paradigm for building sites: mashing up data from many different sources to give consumers a comprehensive portrait of a market.  These rules are dooming us to obsolescence.”

This obsolescence – assuming that no sort of reversal takes place – will be most notable on the west coast and in Boston (Redfin’s areas of operations).  And no, I’m not sure how the company ended up with that one geographical outlier, but Redfin should soon enter Chicago and our nation’s capital, as well.