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October 30, 2005

Real Estate vertical search with Trulia

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

Trulia is a vertical search engine for real estate. Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Stanford MBAs, founded Trulia in 2004, and just moved their ten person company into shiny new offices in San Francisco. Trulia is currently angel funded.

The site launched a month ago with California listings only. Trulia will be rolling out new states (the next one will be this week) in the near future.

Like Oodle, Trulia pulls its content from multiple, distributed sources. In Trulia’s case, its data is indexed from real estate professionals’ websites, where the most detailed information on home listings is located. Trulia often has listings that aren’t included in the MLS, either because the agent hasn’t uploaded the listing yet, or for some new home construction, they never appear in the MLS at all.

The site, which is advertiser supported, has excellent integration with Google maps and provides email and RSS notifications of new search results. Another feature that I really like are the statistics. For any given search, Trulia will show statistics on average home prices per bedroom (but for some reason no average across all home listings), average time a home is on the market, average price per square foot, etc.

Trulia does not show for sale by owner listings at this time. Their main goal, in addition to providing a rich user experience, is to serve real estate professionals by lowering their marketing costs and driving traffic to their websites. Pete tells me that indexing information from professionals’ sites is not easy - it has to be properly parsed and formatted for re-display on Trulia, and duplicate listings removed (some websites show listings from third party agents).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Kyle

    October 30th, 2005 at 11:12 pm

    2 thoughts about the site:

    1. With out giving it thorough run through, the periphery glance I gave it tonight is very impressive. Very fast, clean, and provides a great deal of information.

    2. I should probably give up all hope of moving back to my hometown/stae (Roseville, CA). HOLY COW! Those prices are outrageous!

  2. jean

    October 31st, 2005 at 1:53 am

    Is it legal to just scrape the content from those real estate sites?

  3. Dan

    October 31st, 2005 at 8:58 am

    I love it. The harbinger of a great search service is the ability to find valuable web content that you wouldn’t otherwise have stumbled upon, and that is exactly what Trulia does for me. My house hunting just got that much easier!

    Jean - It’s no different from what Google or Yahoo! Search do. Any site has the choice of opting out through standard means. That said, through all of my searches I always end up at some destination website, so most sites should crave the traffic…

  4. Suzanne

    October 31st, 2005 at 9:39 am

    Found the site interesting as I am the marketing person for a real estate company. However when I searched by zip code for our listings, (they were listed as coming from the Mercury News which we do not advertise in), they were not in the correct zip codes. Several listings we have in zip code 94528 came up in 94526 (Diablo versus Danville - and that is a BIG difference). Also a few months ago, we instituted a Map Search feature on our website that searches by Map and neighborhood that seems to be a bit more comprehensive than this and certainly more accurate.

  5. Jeremy Chone

    October 31st, 2005 at 10:57 am

    Very good interfance. I have been a big user of ZipReality.com, but this one has a much better interface. You get what you want in 5 seconds.

    Great job Trulia!

    Keep up ZipReality ;)

  6. Aiden Walker

    November 1st, 2005 at 11:24 am

    Had a bit of a play, very nice - we could do with this in the UK.
    The Website seems very quick and from a UK point of view would be ideal for someone looking for a property in the USA.

  7. Houston Apartments

    November 3rd, 2005 at 11:38 pm

    Wow sounds like a great site for real estate. Now I can have easy access to finding aparment complexes when I am seeking to purchase them.

  8. mannyb

    November 16th, 2005 at 4:48 pm

    for new york city check out http://www.cribseek.com

  9. webmaster

    May 16th, 2006 at 4:53 am

    Check out Roseville california directory for all the info for this beautiful california town. http://www.rosevilleca.us.

  10. Kalpa

    June 21st, 2006 at 10:38 am

    For NY: particularly for Manhattan, Brooklyn - sales and rentals you’ll find thousands of listings on http://www.urbanregistry.com. Thanks, and for New Yorkers, happy house-hunt this summer.

  11. Holly Hill Real Estate

    September 8th, 2006 at 2:48 am

    Find Holly Hill Homes For Sale, REALTORS, home values, Residential Properties. Holly Hill is located on the west bank of the Halifax River in Volusia County.

  12. Los Feliz Real Estate

    September 8th, 2006 at 2:49 am

    Find a Los Feliz Area real estate - MLS listings, REALTORS, homes for sale, home values and real estate information for Los Feliz Area.

  13. Eagle Rock Real Estate

    September 12th, 2006 at 1:39 am

    I am one of the real estate agent and I found that “TRULIA” is a good search engine for real estate.

  14. john

    September 12th, 2006 at 10:10 pm

    I was look on real estate site and on http://www.holly-hill-real-estate.com i found good information for a home and the information is nice. The one thing lacking are Photos and or Virtual Tours
    Most people don’t call an agent when they first start looking for a home. They start on the Internet and most go to Realtor.com. Then they call the listing agent or seller.

    Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes when it comes to the Internet. Do you think they aren’t going to click on that little box that says show me Virtual Tours first? They will and do.

    I see so much money wasted on News Print. What do you think a home seller will want more? Ask them this the next time you go to a potential listing. “How do you want me to market your home? I can put your listing in front of most listings on Realtor.com and in front of millions of potential home buyers by doing a Virtual Tour or I can spend the same money for a 4 line ad in the local paper.” I am not saying News Paper Advertising is bad but that’s all you “aged agents” know how to do outside the MLS.

  15. Calculator

    September 30th, 2006 at 8:24 am

    Trulia is a joke for the serious home shopper. They don’t have all the listings nor do they have all the details.

    The truth about Trulia http://realestate20.wordpress......ly-a-pimp/

  16. John

    October 13th, 2006 at 2:44 pm

    Trulia, Zillow (http://zillow.com), and HotPads (http://hotpads.com) have recently added detailed neighborhood and city information, census data, and heat maps to their search portal. The areas are outlined on the maps.

    This will help housing shoppers not only to see exactly where different properties are located but also to learn about and compare different locations.

    HotPads.com even includes Wikipedia articles for every city and neighborhood.

  17. Dave Dugdale

    January 12th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    I love these heat maps from Zillow and Trulia. I am a little disappointed with Hotpads heat map. I am in the rental space like Hotpads and i am currently developing a rental heat map for each metro area based on current rental prices and not census data. Keep a look at for when i release it on http://www.rentvine.com/map/

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