Real estate listing and search engine Trulia is out of beta, featuring some usability upgrades, a new answers service, and website widgets.
Trulia’s front page and search feature have had some usability tweaks. The new front page more clearly highlights the four different ways to search Trulia’s data and displays live data feeds. Trulia’s search page features an easier sidebar interface for refining your search. The engine will also suggest related neighborhoods to search in based on how other users have searched. Their heat map and search subscription features (RSS & email) are still there, but the email subscription will now track the life cycle of individual properties and recommend listings similar to a selected property or search (similar neighborhood, price, type, etc.).
The major release along with the revamp is their own Q&A service, Trulia “Voice”. The service lets members post and answer questions about the qualitative aspects of neighborhood. The questions can be searched by geography and tag. Each question or answer can be rated by other members, affecting an overall karma score for content you contribute to the site. This would enable a certain amount of self promotion, because asking and answering with high ratings and gets you better placement in the Q&A rankings. I’d imagine also letting posters earn listing search placement instead of paying by tying the Q&A rankings to listing placement would really set the service on fire. Zillow has a Q&A service, but it’s geared toward asking questions about specific listings.
Finally, Trulia is publicly announcing widgets.trulia.com and housingwidgets.com. The widgets site is currently home to four widgets they’ve developed off of the API they released a couple months ago. The four widgets are the housing map (pre-existing), Trulia Stats (tracks average home prices), Home roll (new listings, filtered), and a Trulia search box. Housingwidgets is a new site that aggregates links to popular widgets related to home rental listings, such as MeeboMe or MyBlogLog. Unfortunately, you can’t use any of the widgets within your Trulia postings.
Trulia is claimed 1.5 million unique visitors in April. During the same time period Zillow claimed 4 million. Both services are close in function, covering search, heat maps, trends, and guides. However, Trulia follows attention data and historical pricing trends on over 2 million live listings. Zillow powers Yahoo Real Estate’s historical pricing graphs, but also has their hallmark formula-based Zestimates for over 70 million homes.
Using widgets a competitive strategy will work great for Trulia.
But they will have to think of other strategies because it seems that
everyone has some of widget.
I have to say, widgets are the name of the game these days. If you can produce a product that can be turned into a widget, or generates widgets you are going to have a far easier time reaching market saturation in the longrun. Bloggers simply adore new methods of getting content onto their sites without having to write it.
This new Trulia looks interesting, I’ll take a gander soon.
Cheers,
Steve
howtosplitanatom.com
The jury is still out on whether the National Assoc of Realtors will pull the MLS data right out from under sites like Zillow and Trulia. There is a groundswell of dissatisfaction with NAR from local Realtors populating the databases so national sites can sell that data right back to them. If NAR happens to move according to their members wishes, the entire 3rd party market will collapse.
Some time back trulia opened its API for third party use. Now it tries to provide widgets for third party sites. Widgets is a great way to steal web real estate from somebody elses site. It is also a clever marketing tactic.
Austin -
My understanding is that the agreements that Trulia have are not with NAR, but with the individual companies - Realogy, Keller Williams, etc. What may be more likely is that the big companies will pull their feeds from NAR/Realtor.com.
Austin, Jim Duncan is right - Trulia isn’t pulling data from MLS, they’re going directly to brokers like cantury 21 and coldwell.
Widget Mania Hits Real Estate Sites! Not exactly the important portion of this story. The reason that trulia and Zillow are growing is because of the absolute need for new homeowners to access independent valuation info. Buying the wrong home for the wrong price can destroy the financial future of most people. Truila is providing the right product at the right time and thank goodness.
Nick, I feel the article is missing a direct link to the Trulia website.
While it’s correct that Trulia is pulling data directly from some brokerages (and crawling broker websites), it’s also true that if the folks at Realtor.com ever actually get off their a** and create a good product, Trulia’s days are numbered. Because Trulia doesn’t have access to the full MLS, their site only lists a subset of properties on the market. Users will always want the most comprehensive list of available properties which right now means the MLS (which is fed directly into Realtor.com).
So Trulia is in a bit of a long term quandary. They have built a great interface and have been clever about getting around their lack of access to the MLS. But if the sleeping giant of MLS ever wakes up, consumers will inevitably turn to the source that provides the most data.
Trulia doesn’t need more features, they need to focus on complete data. I was looking for a house not so long ago; when I tried Trulia, it looked great. But I stopped using it because it was missing a substantial portion of what was on the MLS. The MLS’s interface was awful, but completeness beats UI when making a purchase of that magnitude.
I like the look of the new trulia…the redesign is great.
But my questions remain…
1. If I am looking for a property in the Twin Cities…why do I want to search half the inventory available when I can simply go to an MLS enabled website and view everything?
2. If I am looking for a property in the Twin Cities…why do I want to visit one website just to be directed to another? I think success in this sector will be based on the “path of least resistance.”
I think trulia has built some great tools…but personally, I am not interested in looking at heat maps…I am interested in looking at houses for sale - all of them.
(Disclosure: We are launching a competitive site soon - http://www.istew.com)
First off full disclosure - I only spent about a minute on the website. That being said, that first minute is critical to getting somebody interested IMO. My $.02 worth is I prefer Redfin to Trulia. I’ll play with it some more later - but Redfin gets my nod.
You guys check this out http://www.tv-links.co.uk
Zillow knocks this out of the water -
Trulia? Is that pronounced “True liar”? Seems appropriate for a realtor…
“Trulia is claimed 1.5 million unique visitors in April. During the same time period Zillow claimed 4 million. ” The claims is all wrong.
According to Alexa data Zillow have 0.08 visitors and Zillow Trulia have
0.02 visitors. They are not average million visitors(It’s about thousand vistors). In fact, with false claims, investors would sell freaking shares on both company who enter IPO.
Once you get Venture captial’s money.
1.You can’t lie…
2.you can’t assume…
3. You can’t put false claim…
You should see the people at wall street and investor firm such as(ML.com, bear stern, etc). They are very aggressive. They would kill any company who assume they have million visitors.
Why need print TC correct data?
I read article online, Most VC need huge returns rather than false claims.
DEAR TC…
Just give us positive views…
Please don’t fabricate….
I enjoy the site…
people like trusted source.
edgeio is pulling data from the MLS. We have about 1.2m listings from the mls and a further 750k foreclosures and are about to post 5m rentals.
Keith
edgeio
Oh my god. Did you guys read about page?
“We ARE NOT brokers or agents. We are not looking to make a commission on your real estate transaction. We will not sell your personal information. We will not force you to become a lead.”
We will not sell your personal information. That’s lie… You can tell by sentence.
Keith Teare, yeah, but the Edegio listing format is crap and more difficult to navigate.
Trulia could really be a winner if they can get complete data.
Zillow actually is worse than in recent months, not because of data but because site navigation and usability. Seems to be swimming in Ad units that give it a chaotic look.
Keith -
Been to Edgeio and found it’s housing data to absolutely filled with link spam. For example, I searched ‘affordable housing’ and got a bunch of links to Amazon books
Does your claim of 1.2mil listings exclude the spam?
-Charlie
Sites like Trulia and Zillow, have based their business model on the aiding and abetting of an ongoing information crime. This crime, or to be more gentle, sin, has been committed against U.S. consumers by the NAR its constituents for the past 100+ years.
The information asymmetry of the MLS system is at the heart of what protects the artificially high transactional cost of buying or selling a home - when contracting a Realtor for either side of the transaction.
The entire business model of Realtor is inherently a conflict of interest. A Realtor’s relationship with the consumer is very similar to the one that used to exist with your stock broker - pre-internet. Look how the internet leveled that playing field by offering a lower-cost and more efficient transactional method. This was accomplished by slaying the beast of information asymmetry. When was the last time you called your broker to buy or find information on a stock?
Zillow and Trulia are superficial services - real estate porn with cool maps and whiz-bang widgets. Ultimately, they are doing very little to level the playing field for consumers. What consumer really need is a “truly” alternative, lower-cost transaction model. Like ETrade and their kind did.
data is the key, no mater how flashy the front end looks.
Charles - edgeio does indeed have spam, like all search engines I guess. We have a pretty decent way of dealing with it. Your search throws it up because you didn’t drill down to a city. The 1.2m does not include Spam, it is pure mls data acquired via the idx protocol.
Incidentally I love Trulia, and the edgeio data is available to them to syndicate.
Try some of these searches:
California Homes
Miami Homes
Horsedung - You are right about UI issues but remember we are a general classifieds search engine not a vertical for real estate. Our goal is to send traffic back to the publisher of the listing. Their site would have all the navigation bells and whistles. Having said that, we can do better. Expect a new UI on edgeio in a few weeks.
Keith
edgeio
Charles,
If you search for affordable housing across all of Edgeio, it’s true you do get a lot of books etc. too, because they do match your search. Adjusting relevance to meet the expectations of the average user is always an ongoing challenge, and we certainly still have work to do there.
However, we do have several ways for you to target your results if you don’t immediately find what you want. In this case: Search in the “housing” vertical, not across all results. If you click the “housing” link above the search box, or the “housing” tag in the “related tags” box on the right hand side of the page, you get this:
http://www.edgeio.com/ss/affor.....ng/housing
Which seems to be closer to what you are looking for.
Vidar
Another mover in this industry is LighthouseListings.com. We have taken many shortcomings of other real estate sites and have built a website to address these issues. We are relatively new to this space, but have made quick strides to provide the usability, functionality and presence that home owners and renters are looking for.
LighthouseListings.com is a great “do it yourself” real estate listing site where you can quickly and easily advertise your own home for sale or rent to gain greater exposure for your property over the Internet. It’s well laid out without the usual clutter of most real estate websites. It also boasts many great features such as adding your own photo slideshow, include an interactive property map, advertise your open house, ability to edit your listing anytime and much more. See what other people are talking about as the most easy and user-friendly real estate listing site on the web at http://www.lighthouselistings.com.
I agree with eBiz MBA, that consumers are clamoring for a different model. But I’ve been asking people if they’ve heard of Zillow and am surprised at how many haven’t — yet.