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Trulia expands nationwide
Posted by Marlow Harris under Real Estate
[13] Comments
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”?
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.)
13 Responses to “ Trulia expands nationwide ”
Trackbacks & Pingbacks:
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[...] Trulia.com has announced that they will cover the complete U.S. by the end of the month. For those that don’t know, Trulia is a San Francisco company that offers a residential real estate search engine that helps consumers search for homes for sale, trends, neighbourhood insights and other real estate information directly from hundreds of thousands of real estate broker Web sites. [...]
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[...] Continue on at 360 Digest. . . [...]
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[...] Just had a quick look at the Trulia beta site. As mentioned in prior posts, I always take these sites for a test drive before recommending to clients. Alas, I can not recommend Trulia for a very different reason than Reply.com. In this case, the data set is incomplete. Site has cool tools but incomplete data as further explored at 360 Digest. In other words, when you search listings on the site, you are not searching across all Chicago listings. Tested this on a few listings out of my office which could not be found. [...]
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[...] 8) How to discuss Marlow’s recent post about Trulia’s expansion without sounding self-serving??? I put together a Excel spreadsheet that examines not only how many listings each service has, but also how many “accurate” listings each service has for one zip-code (98117) in Seattle. The results highlight a bunch of interesting things like (1) Redfin’s zip-code search is broken (i.e. a search on 98117 returns results for other zip codes like 98203 and does not return all the homes that Redfin has with a zip-code of 98117), (2) Realtor.com does not have any Windermere listings (I was surprised when Marlow mentioned this, but the results pan out), and (3) Trulia has a long way to go before they are comprehensive. If someone wanted to take this data and add one more zip code in some other part of the country, I’d love to post the results. Maybe a Bay Area agent can take this on since all the sites in question have operations there! [...]
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[...] In response to yesterdays post “Trulia expands nationwide“, Dustin Luther put together a Excel spreadsheet that examines not only how many listings each service has, but also how many “accurate” listings each service has for one zip-code (98117) in Seattle. He found out several interesting things like (1) Redfin’s zip-code search is broken (i.e. a search on 98117 returns results for other zip codes like 98203 and does not return all the homes that Redfin has with a zip-code of 98117), (2) confirmed that Realtor.com does not have any Windermere listings and (3) Trulia has a long way to go before they are comprehensive. If someone wanted to take this data and add one more zip code in some other part of the country, he’ll post the results. Email him at Dustin@RainCityGuide.com [...]
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[...] My mind was elsewhere, so I don’t know if Marlow was in the lead with news about Trulia’s nationwide expansion. She’s certainly been all over the story, though, along with Trulia’s own weblog, Ubertor, The Real Estate Marketing Blog, Real Central VA and Marlow herself again. Two days later, she followed up with news that Windermere has gone Google. More from Joel on this move. My take: Okay, but an MLS is a tool wherein I can distinguish a slate roof from a tile roof and a true swimming pool from an above-ground pool. By that standard, we do not have and may never have a national MLS. [...]
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[...] set is incomplete (as is the data for Reply but search is not their main focus). The site has cool tools but incomplete data, as further explored at 360 Digest. In other words, when you search listings on the site, [...]
They most certainly have the right approach with what is going on right now in real estate & technology. Enhance companies with a good web presense and help others get on the web.
The only site I can recommend to search for ALL available properties is http://www.realtor.com
Richard,
Not all the listings are on R.com. Best place to see all the property is at a local brokers website.
Brokers are crazy to put their listings on Trulia where they are not subject to MLS rules. At least realtor.com is controlled by Realtors to some degree. Windermere was smart to not post listings to realtor.com so their agents are not charged for ads on their own listings. Want all the photos on realtor.com? You have to pay them. Trulia will do the same thing, but worse. Here’s a great post summing up how Trulia is a pimp:
http://realestate20.wordpress.com/2006/09/15/trulia-truly-a-pimp/
Looks like Trulia is making a strong national move, another site to watch on a national scale is http://www.citycribs.com. I advertise on this site in New York and it should also do well in it’s new cities.
In addition to Trulia, HotPads (http://hotpads.com) has recently added detailed neighborhood and city information, census data, and heat maps to its rental property search portal. HotPads also includes Wikipedia articles for every city and neighborhood.