Cole Perkins pretty much gets it that he’s not exactly your average 13-year-old. For one thing, he’s totally uninterested in video games. And he attends “cyber school” — a home-schooling arrangement that tethers him to a classroom teacher via computer.
Then there’s that blogging thing. Where other kids might be blogging away about sports or television or popular music, that’s just too mainstream.
Cole Perkins blogs, instead, about luxury real estate.
He recently became something of a real estate keyword after Curbed.com posted an item about Lavish-Property.com, his fledgling site that each day features a new-to-the-market estate in North America or Europe, with extensive photography and his commentary.
The site, which he began a couple of months ago, surged from about 15 page views a day to more than 2,000 in the period immediately after the Curbed post. Things have settled down a bit since then, he said, to 400 to 500 a day. The blog, he said, is an “extracurricular activity,” a byproduct of tagging along with his parents four years ago when they were house hunting in Hershey, Pa.
“I just kind of got into houses when (my parents) were looking at houses every weekend,” he said in an interview. “I found it kind of fun, looking at different styles of architecture.”