The blustery game of Bay Area real estate marketing has an important new player — Adam Koval.

His SocketSite.com — one of a number of increasingly influential housing blogs — is focused squarely on those real estate-obsessed folks who love reading about $100,000 price reductions, lawsuits against developers and open houses where the sellers not only forgot (gasp!) to stage the home, but also left it a mess.

Underneath the tart posts, however, is bona fide analysis developed by Koval, a former investment banker who has loved real estate since poring over housing flyers when he was a 12-year-old growing up in Oregon.

Jonathan Miller knows the numbers behind the mysterious world of Manhattan real estate. As co-founder, president and CEO of New York appraisal firm Miller Samuel, and a certified general real estate appraiser since 1986, he’s helped his company provide property valuations totaling billions of dollars.

Since 1994, Miller has authored several widely read reports on the Manhattan real estate market for Prudential Douglas Elliman. The reports are widely used by local, regional and national media as well as national and local lending institutions, various government agencies, the Federal Reserve, New York City Office of Management and Budget, and the Internal Revenue Service.