If there is any type of site that screams for a mobile edition, it is real-estate. Why print out all of those search results when you can have them on your mobile phone or in your Dash GPS car navigation device? Today, real-estate search site Trulia rolled out mobile versions of the iPhone and the Dash. (There are also new mobile versions for the Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and other phones).

The iPhone app is decent, although limited in the same way that Trulia proper is (more photos, please). And it doesn’t let you click through to the original broker’s site (where you can usually find more photos). I’m more excited about the Dash version. Although it is even more limited in its features (no pictures), it is more practical. When you are on a house hunt, typing in all of those addresses can slow you down. Being able to search on the Dash for nearby homes for sale cuts out a few steps, and automatically routes you to unfamiliar neighborhoods. (Now, how about letting me put in multiple destinations in one search?)

Another useful feature Trulia added today to its regular homepage is feeds. This is generated automatically based on your recent activity, and keeps you up to date on new listings and average price changes. It acts like a prospective search every time you come back to Trulia. Now, why isn’t this built into the iPhone app?

(Although competitor Zillow does not have an iPhone app yet (such a shame), you can try out iZillow, a bare-bones Zestimate finder for any given address which has been customized for the iPhone browser.)

Earlier this week in a post comparing real estate sites Trulia and Zillow, I suggested that the most important success factor for these sites is how comprehensive they are. The more listings the better because home buyers want to go to one place to find every home on the market. They want a single dashboard from which they can filter down the choices.

But just how comprehensive are these sites, and how accurate are their listings? Trulia offers 3.5 million listings nationwide, and Zillow has 3.1 million. But people look for houses in local markets, not nationwide. What matters is comprehensiveness withing local market

A few hours after I put up that post, I heard from Roost, a competitor to both Trulia and Zillow (with only 1.4 million listings in the markets it covers) that differentiates itself by getting its data directly from the same Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) that real estate brokers use. They just happened to have study in their back pocket (which they commissioned and paid for) that compares the “accuracy” of search results in three cities (Dallas, Miami, and San Diego) across different real-estate search services (Roost, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo, and Google). The study, which was done by real-estate industry consultants the WAV Group, defines accuracy as the percentage of listing results that match listings the MLS for that city.

The results are in the chart above and, not surprisingly, Roost comes out looking great. For each city, it returns between 95 and 99 percent of the listings in the MLS. Trulia’s accuracy in the study ranges between a pitiful 9 percent for San Diego to 61 percent for Miami. (Zillow generally does worse across the board, with its accuracy ranging between 12 percent and 36 percent across the three cities).

Trulia disputes these results. Heather Fernandez, vice president of marketing, says:

The data looks very questionable, and not in line with our internal coverage data. Our data shows that we have roughly 70% coverage in most major metros.

And indeed, if you do a search for homes for sale in San Diego on Trulia, you get 4,395 results, compared to 6,036 on Roost. That’s 73 percent. (Zillow claims 7,661 listings in the San Diego city limits). Even if half of them are stale listings or not accurate in some other way, it’s hard to get to the 9 percent that the Roost-financed study claims. That’s because for some reason, the WAV study only compared homes in each city with exactly 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, within a $50,000 price range.

That methodology seems random and flawed to me. Would Trulia’s accuracy be greater if the study had looked at homes in San Diego that cost $400,000 to $450,000 instead of $300,000 to $350,000? Comprehensiveness would have been a virtue in the study’s methodology as well as in what it was trying to measure.

Still 70 percent accuracy is not that great, and it doesn’t seem like Zillow is any better. If the MLS in any given city is the benchmark, both have a lot of work to do. And Trulia, for one, is striking deals with different MLSs to incorporate their data. But it only has 14 so far, out of about 900 nationwide. MLS-based sites like Roost and Redfin may have more listings in the markets they serve, but they don’t serve every market yet. For instance, in San Diego, Redfin tracks 6,300 homes for sale, better even than Roost. Yet neither has any listings in New York, and Redfin only has 473,000 listings total.

Yet Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman also balked at my earlier suggestion that either Trulia or Zillow are even close to comprehensive within any given market. In an e-mail to me, he said:

What got me was that almost any real estate site has more homes for sale than Trulia or Zillow.

Frenandez doesn’t think that having the most listings matters. She responds:

Listings are commoditized –there are dozens of sites that offer basic listing information in every city across the country. It’s not a competitive advantage for an Internet company.

What is more important, she says, is the filtering the site allows home buyers to do to help them make an informed decision. I’d say it’s both. Those filtering tools (heat maps, sales comps, local school info) are also becoming commodities. You want to cast your net as wide as possible before you filter down so you don’t miss out on that one house that fits all of your criteria.

Trulia, the real estate search engine and community, has released Snapshot, a new interactive housing map that is a bit more fun than it should be.

Snapshot overlays a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with thumbnails of houses on the market. Each image hovers over its proper location on the map, and users can drag them around to get a better look at the terrain if some houses are too close together. After releasing the image, it snaps back into place – complete with a nice jiggle.

Users can move a sliding bar to set the price range of houses that appear on the map. As each house appears, it enthusiastically pushes nearby pictures out of the way, leading to lots of totally useless (but fun) bouncing. There’s also a slideshow function that lets you sit back and watch as this odd combination of real estate and Jello does its own thing.

Snapshot does have some more practical functions. Clicking on a photo will present more detailed information, including the price and a link to the realtor. And the sliding price limits are handy for getting a feel for what’s available in a neighborhood. That said, there doesn’t seem to be much in Snapshot that wasn’t already on Trulia already, it just presents it in a more visually appealing way.

Trulia was founded in 2004 and has raised nearly $18 million in funding, with investors including Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Other competitors in this space include Redfin, Zillow, and Roost.

Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman has stated that he likes startups that shrink markets – “We love investing in technologies and business models that are able to shrink existing markets. If your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!”

And while he isn’t an investor in Seattle-based real estate startup Redfin, I’m pretty sure he likes their business model. The company is doing its best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers (and their absurd fees) from at least half of a home sale. If you use them when you buy a home, they reimburse 2/3 of the broker fee to you, keeping 1/3 for themselves.

60 Minutes covered the company last May, which led to a surge in business. CEO Glenn Kelman told me today that, since launching in February 2006, they’ve been involved in 1,500 transactions and have reimbursed $12 million to customers. The average refund is $10,000. The company had 2007 revenues of $5 million, he says.

They’ve just launched a new version of the website that includes more frequent MLS updates and the ability to group home sales by neighborhood and download the data. They are also providing deeper data on homes currently on the market as well as historical sales (they compete with a number of other startups in search, including Zillow, Trulia and Roost).

If you want to use Redfin, check first to make sure they cover your geographic area, which include the San Francisco/Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, LA, Seattle, Washington DC/Baltimore, and Boston. Chicago is coming soon.

Real-estate site Zillow has added 10 million homes to its Website, bringing the total to 80 million (out of 91 million homes in the U.S.). Of those, the properties it has enough information on to calculate a “Zestimate” is now 67 million, up from 53 million before. Zestimates and comparable-sales data are the two biggest draws to the site, says president Lloyd Frink, who dropped by my office on Wednesday.

I gave Frink a hard time because I always find the Zestimates for properties in New York City to be way off base. “New York is tough,” he admitted. But Zillow has tweaked its algorithm and improved the accuracy of its Zestimates by 12 percent (as measured by the actual sale price versus the last Zestimate on the day of the sale).

The algorithm improved by diving deeper into the data. “We went from having a model for each county to 20 models for each county,” says Frink. The Zestimates also now take into account more than one million corrections and facts added by home owners. The margin of error is now 8.8 percent. That is an average for the entire country. You still can’t trust the Zestimates on New York City apartments. But Frink notes that a third of the site’s Zestimates across the country fall within five percent of the selling price, and that half are within 10 percent. Still, he cautions that “the Zestimate is just a starting point.”

You’d think that real-estate sites would be hurting right now, given the severe correction in the housing market. But Frink argues that in a down market research is more important than ever and says that Zillow is still benefiting from the overall shift in real estate activities to the Web. Zillow’s ad model certainly benefits from various targeting capabilities-geographic, demographic, and behavioral. Each action on the site is zipcode-specific. Frink notes that the EZ Ads Zillow sells itself go for $10 CPMs, versus $3 to $5 CPMs for backfill ads from ad networks.

Zillow is trying to create a database of all homes in the U.S., which is a different approach than other real-estate sites. “It is the database of all homes, not just homes on the market,” notes Frink. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the downside, Zillow lists only 400,000 homes that are for sale, out of about 4 million nationwide. A deal with real-estate publisher Network Communications will bring that total to 900,000. Trulia, in comparison, has 2 million.

On the upside, Zillow has a lot more comparable data than most sites. (Although, I think Cyberhomes has better data). And since Zillow lists all existing homes, it makes it easy to provisionally put your house on the market through its “Make Me Move” feature. About 100,000 Make-Me-Move homes are on the site. And in some markets, it is a pretty significant number. For instance, in Seattle (where Zillow is based), there are 30,000 homes officially for sale and another 6,000 Make-Me-Move listings, or 20 percent of the number on the market.

The other big news is that Zillow is joining Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, Oodle, Homes.com, Realestate.com, Vast.com and others in adopting a standard way for brokers and multiple listings services (MLSs) to send in their real estate listings in a feed format. That way brokers can use the same data format for all the different real estate search engines and Websites. It is called the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). [Correction: RETS is actually a different, pre-existing, standard that the new listing feed standard will interoperate with]. That should make it easier for brokers to propagate their listings everywhere.

Zillow claims 4 million monthly unique visitors. Comscore shows 1.4 million in December, and that’s been flat for the past year. Trulia, though, looks like it just passed Zillow with 1.6 million.

Real estate search engine Trulia joins an elite Silicon Valley Club today with the announcement of $10m Series C funding in a round headed by Sequoia Capital.

Trulia moved out of beta earlier this month and launched a number of new features.

Sequoia is joined in the funding round by previous investors Accel and Fayez Sarofim & Co. The $10m takes Trulia’s total funding to $17.7million. The new money is being used for additional staff, product development and a new marketing push.

There’s a wealth of potential in the real estate market. Advertising spending alone in real estate will total $11 billion in the United States in 2007 (Borrell Associates), with over 80% of the consumers using the Internet as part of their home buying research.

Trulia is not alone in chasing this market. Zillow has raised $57 million and Redfin has previously raised $9 million in two rounds. Internet Brands also is also a competitor with Real Estate ABC.

Trulia’s main features include a comprehensive database of active real estate listings, price trend heat maps, and a Q&A service.

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.

Real estate search company Trulia announced the availability of its new API this morning as well as two interesting mashup examples made possible by that API. Outside developers will now have access to the company’s real estate data and aggregate user search data.

To demonstrate the types of things made possible by the API, the Trulia team made available two interesting mashups they built themselves. Plotornot (a play on HotorNot) correlates a variety of demographic information like gender, marital and income data for any state in the US. TruliaHolic (presumably a play on Alexaholic given the similarities) provides visualization of the differences in average list prices and search popularity for any city or county in the US. Real estate use of new web services is hot so I expect we’ll see any number of interesting uses of the new API on other sites.

One of the most notable things about today’s announcement is that Trulia created its API with the assistance of Mashery, the API management service we profiled here in November. Last week Mashery helped launch an API for traffic analytics service Compete and the company is working with three other companies on APIs that will be released soon.

One potentially mitigating factor is that the Trulia API is for noncommercial use only according to its terms of use. Though terms like this are often considered open for interpretation, I was disappointed to see it. Presumably though this is just a first step for the program; the company will likely increase its call limits (now only 1000 per day) and open itself to select commercial users in the future.

Trulia’s major competitors in the real estate search space include Zillow, who released APIs of their own in October, the crowd sourced My-Currency (our coverage) and a host of others. See our previous coverage of Trulia here.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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).