After a dozen years digging up dirt, Mark David is the old guard of the property gossip world, walking in the pioneering footsteps of legendary celebrity real estate dirt slingers like late Ruth Ryon, creator of the L.A. Times Hot Property column, and New York Post’s late and beloved real estate writer Braden Keil. Having worked as a freelance graphic designer in a slew of New York City advertising agencies and then opening and, five years later, shuttering a boutique/showroom that sold high-priced handmade home goods to rich and famous folk like Sofia Coppola and Benjamin Bratt, David fell somewhat accidentally into this kooky corner of the entertainment news world after, on a lark in 2007, he started a blog (The Real Estalker) that tracked the real estate transactions of high profile people. The sassier-than-thou, guilty pleasure website quickly found a broad and committed audience that grew to about a million unique page views per month before David teamed up with Variety in 2014 to create Dirt.