The photos are glossy, the subjects curvy and lush and the comments are heated and catty. With a blend of sex, gossip and schadenfreude, Lockhart Steele's Curbed.com blog has been tracking New York 's real estate market for almost two years, becoming essential reading for the city's housing fetishists. Now the 32-year-old Steele is expanding his empire. Curbed LA launched in the fall, and Curbed SF (www.curbed.com/sf) rolled out last month from the keyboard of Phil Ferrato, covering dog battles in Bernal Heights , San Francisco fireplaces and the change in Japantown ownership.

As the blog gets down and dirty in other markets -- Steele's wish list includes Boston , Washington , D.C., and South Florida -- a country already obsessed with real estate will get to sample Curbed's "Rear Window"-style take on the property market. The formula is simple: Steele and his editorial team track local buzz, compare dueling listings and offer "floorplan porn" for the city's most decadent apartments and townhouses; a Flickr placement on the page lets readers post their own juicy images. The tone is sassy, salacious and just a little bit aspirational.

In short, it's real estate as pornography.

Frankly, it's hard to recall a time when San Francisco didn't obsess over its real estate. For decades, we've dished on housing values over dinners with friends, whispered our rental steals to workout partners and spent Sunday afternoons cruising open houses to snoop on our soon-to-be-former neighbors. "If I do an open house in a neighborhood I know, I'll see five or six of the same couples I've seen repeatedly at other open houses," observes Matthew Borland, the managing partner of Zephyr Real Estate. These couples aren't seriously in the market, he points out -- they're window-shopping for the thrill of it. "They're just addicted; they go week after week. ... It's like real estate is porn. They can't seem to get enough of it."

But where real estate used to represent a private passion, it's now become a public fetish -- and several new media seem ready to exploit it. Equity, a new magazine aimed at California homeowners and real estate investors, is set to launch in May. It's ostensibly focused on helping homeowners make the most of their housing investments, but early features include not only personal finance and home improvement advice but also decorating tips and ways to spot a hot neighborhood.

Meanwhile, local cable TV show "Open House" cozies up to what founder Tim Gaskin calls "real estate enthusiasts" with eye-candy property tours and Q & As discussing mortgage rates and housing regulations (albeit with the show's sponsors). Gaskin just spun off an hourlong "Open House" magazine-style program on Quake radio (960 AM); the show airs Saturday nights and repeats Sunday mornings.

Even the New York Times has gotten into the act, rolling out a special real estate edition of its weekly magazine last month. The heavily hyped issue, weighed down with an extra 50-plus pages of advertorial copy, salivated over private casinos, private jets, indoor saltwater pools and hunky real estate developers.

Steele says 25,000 viewers a day read the original New York edition of Curbed, with the entire family of sites (which also include architecture and dining blogs) getting about a million page views a month. That's still small potatoes compared with a site like BoingBoing -- as of early March, Curbed's popularity ranking on Technorati, which tracks links from other parts of the blogosphere, was a measly 1,253; BoingBoing is in the top spot -- but it's enough to get people talking. One measure of its influence: When Craigslist announced a new fee for its New York rental listings in an attempt to calm manic repeat postings by local brokers, founder Craig Newmark personally monitored Curbed's heated comments column, jumping into the fray periodically to respond, absorb feedback and soothe tempers.

Steele himself doesn't like to think of Curbed as covering real estate so much as focusing on neighborhoods; the site is actually an outgrowth of a personal blog Steele had started to track action in his own neighborhood, on the Lower East Side . Still, he admits, there's an inherent voyeurism in keeping tabs on your neighbors' domestic life: "It's almost a spectator sport."

How did real estate go from dust-dry reports on new-home construction to juicy Peeping Tom coverage? "I think it comes down to voyeurism, plain and simple," Curbed SF blogger Ferrato says. "It's about being able to look into people's homes when they aren't there. Peeking is a pretty basic human reaction."

Other observers argue there's more to it than that. With real estate prices sky high, the sheer dollar values involved have gone through the roof, making plenty of homeowners paper millionaires. "The everyday person has become wealthy because of his house; we all became celebrities," says Brad Inman, publisher of real estate news wire Inman News and a longtime observer of the Bay Area real estate scene. "American home-ownership policy has been an awesome spreader of wealth."

Others simply credit the explosion of online media turning the spotlight on house and home. Just-launched Zillow.com identifies recent sale prices for neighboring homes; Property Shark aggregates public records in some cities; and blogs such as Curbed draw in community -- and gossip -- with their comment boards. "The amount of info on the Web has really changed things," says Zephyr's Borland. "You can get involved in real estate porn with friends at the office, or online at home -- there are just a lot of points of reference."

And at the luxury end of the spectrum -- particularly in high-gloss real estate markets like New York and South Florida -- it is developers who have been driving the trend, marketing fancy apartments as they would designer jeans. At one development in New York 's downtown financial district, Steele points out, apartments come decorated by Armani/Casa. And a pair of Richard Meier-designed condos in New York 's far West Village had the equivalent of celebrity endorsers -- initial buyers like Nicole Kidman and Martha Stewart, whose names were widely reported during the building's sales process but who never got around to actually moving in.

In San Francisco , the man watching the local rumblings is Ferrato, a transplanted New Yorker, full-time corporate chef and architecture and design junkie. Ferrato approached Steele last year about launching a San Francisco version of the Curbed blog, figuring that a city as technologically savvy, neighborhood focused and real-estate obsessed as San Francisco was ripe for Curbed's snarky commentary.

"People here are incredibly engaged in their neighborhoods," Ferrato says. "This is a city where cyclists and dog owners are serious constituencies. And that's a peculiarly San Francisco way of doing business."

Ferrato cautions against expecting Curbed SF to mimic its New York parent. San Francisco is a much smaller market, for one, with far fewer apartments and almost no high-rises, giving residents here more elbow room. San Francisco is also short on outsized real estate personalities like Donald Trump and Barbara Corcoran. Lifestyle issues such as parking and public transportation are likely to get more online ink here than in the New York version, while modern architecture -- a mainstay of the New York site -- is almost anathema in San Francisco 's preservation-minded landscape.

What Ferrato does want is for the San Francisco iteration to generate the kind of community buzz that its New York sister has stirred up. Steele repeats endlessly that he doesn't know anything about real estate, and that it's just Curbed readers who are willing to share their tips. Ferrato doesn't claim to be a novice, at least when it comes to architecture and design -- he drops architects' names like hot potatoes -- but even he says the site is more about attitude than assessments.

"Curbed isn't about expertise," he insists. "It's about interest. No one is going to make a real-estate decision based on what we write."

That may not be such a bad thing. It is perhaps telling that some of the people most involved in turning homes into celebrities are, when it comes to real estate, on the outside looking in.

Neither Ferrato nor Gaskin of "Open House," own their homes. In fact, when Gaskin began the show a year ago, he says, he was on the verge of being evicted from his rental unit. Steele rents an apartment on New York 's hip Lower East Side , and Jeff Swenerton, editor-in-chief of Equity magazine, owns a condo -- a "loftominium," he jokes -- but he had to trade in the Western Addition for West Oakland in order to afford it.

Even on a national level, house hunting has slipped into the realm of fantasy, as home ownership has become a greater reach than at any time in recent memory. By the end of 2005, housing payments nationwide had climbed to 21.6 percent of income -- the highest level since 1991, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. In the final analysis, perhaps it's that availability factor that has most significantly pumped up the allure of the real estate market.

"People think buying a home is the American dream," says Gaskin. "But the median-price home in San Francisco has tripled in the last nine years. I'm a third-generation San Franciscan -- and I'll never own a home here."

Rachel F. Elson is a writer, editor and real estate addict in Brooklyn, New York . She still misses her flat in Bernal Heights .