Trulia

Trulia has announced that they will launch nationwide on Monday, adding properties for sale in 25 new states, detailed neighborhood data and property comparison tools.

Some of the new tools they’re offering are heatmaps that show a comparison of neighborhoods, the geographical boundaries of each, a comparison tool and a “Neighborhood Spotlight” which would include schools and crime stats. The coolest thing will be a graph that I think will show “interest”, I guess by showing how many inquiries a certain neighborhood receives. Matt Marshall in Venture Beat discusses these new features in depth in “Home site Trulia taps into “intentions” to provide real-time info”.

Liz Gannes on GigaOM Trulia expands, gets local” makes an interesting point with understated elegance:

“Opening access to real estate information is not a solved problem; large blocks of listings are not available online from independent services due to legacy relationships and barriers. However, Trulia is smartly realizing that building a near-comprehensive listing database wouldn’t make it stand out for long.”

So, just having a complete data base wouldn’t let it stand out for long. Isn’t that interesting? But having cool toys may be good enough. Tools, mash-ups, heat maps, matrix’s, metrics, charts, graphs…. even without the listings, maybe having these other cool things that a viewer can interact with may be enough to make the site sticky and cause home shoppers to click on an agents ads… which I guess is the whole purpose of the site.

B2Day, the business 2.0 blog, discusses Trulia’s announcement and offers a poll “Which startup will become the Web’s new real estate king?” and allows the user to choose between Trulia, Zillow, Reply or Craigslist. How about “none of the above”?

Which startup will become the Web's new real estate king?
Trulia
Zillow
Reply
Craigslist
Create Free Polls

Created by Erick Schonfeld

They all offer different things to a home buyer or seller, and there’s no comparison, it’s not either/or. It could be “and” or “maybe”. If you’re buying a home, you may check out Trulia or Craigslist to search. Maybe. You might look at Zillow to find out what they think the home was worth. Not sure why anyone would look at Reply. Has anyone used their “Make an Offer” function, I wonder? I’d love to read a success story, if there are any.

Anyway, getting back to Ganne’s point. Trulia can’t compete on inventory, because, unless they join all the local MLS’s (and they couldn’t in some states without becoming a brokerage), they’ll just never have all the listings. But does it have to? Maybe just having some, and having these other tools, is good enough.

But as a point of comparison, how many listings does Trulia and other popular portals & sites have?

To try to figure that out, I searched the town of Redmond, Washington, and got mixed results.

Trulia: 76
Homes.com: 19
Yahoo: 413
Redfin: 105
Craigslist: 71
Realtor.com: 377
NWMLS public site: 305
Reply: Unable to search
Zillow: Unable to search

So, then I tried using the zip code for Redmond, 98052:

Trulia: 32
Homes.com: 12
Yahoo Real Estate 255
Redfin: 74
Craigslist: 4
Realtor.com: 192
NWMLS public site: Unable to search by zipcode
Reply: Unable to search
Zillow: Unable to search

Homes.com is the definite loser here, with the least number of listings per search perameter. But Trulia is second on that list. And the portal with the most listings? Yahoo Real Estate. They get their listings directly from an IDX feed from Prudential, so I’m stymied as to how their listings outnumber the listings from the official NWMLS. On their classifieds, they have homes not listed on the MLS, but the IDX feed should be the same for all sites.

It looks like Home.com scrapes only from their advertisers. Trulia scraps from them and also from RPA (owned by Gordon Stephenson, one of the Board members at Zillow), Z57, Inc., Advanced Access and whoever else sends them a feed.

So you can have a laugh at our so-last-millenium public MLS site, but at least our MLS has a public site, something I guess some areas around the U.S. don’t have. No mash-ups or even interactive maps, but it’s still probably the most accurate of websites in our locale. Time will tell if Trulia’s bells and whistles will trump complete market inventory.

(As an aside, the most-visited real estate website in our locale is Winderemere. John L. Scott and the Coldwell Banker Bain site are more sophisticated, using Virtual Earth technology, but Windermere remains king of the heap… though I did read they’ll be unveiling a new map search soon. Windermere, being the largest real estate company in the Seattle area, is the main reason why Realtor.com will never have much value here, as they don’t allow any of their listings to appear on that site, and without the Windermere listings, it’s just an advertising vehicle for real estate agents, not a real player in real estate search.)

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