Today Trulia announced a number of enhacements to its site – Trulia Mobile, Trulia Blogs and Local News Feeds. Lets look at each in turn.
Trulia Moble
The GPS version is even better as it combines the power of the GPS device in your car with the display of available listings to allow you to plot what houses you want to see and then receive the driving directions to them. Check out the GPS version at http://www.trulia.com/mobile/gps/.
Trulia Blogs
For those who have been using Trulia for a while, you will be aware of Trulia Voices (http://voices.trulia.com/voices/) – the offer where you can ask any real estate related question and a participating realtor will answer it.
According to Trulia’s own blog, “Since Trulia Voices launched, the community has grown to more than 300,000 registered users and generated more than 200,000 questions and answers. And on average, questions asked on Trulia Voices receive 4 answers per question, and their first answer within 20 minutes.”
Well Trulia has taken this a step further and launched Trulia Blogs – a free blogging service that allows all users of the site to start their own blogs on any topic. This further enhances the social networking component of the Trulia offering – creatting not only a destination site (for searching) but also a place that people can hang out online.
Local News Feeds
Finally Trulia has announced today localised news feeds. You can set up on the home page of Trulia the news that you want for the area that you want it. You can also choose to receive this news via an RSS feed to your desk top. Check it out on the home page of trulia (www.trulia.com)
So what do all these innovations mean? Well in the US where getting paid listings is very difficult, the Trulia guys have done a great job at building a suite of products and services that truly engage the consumer and therefore keep bringing them back to the site. This engagement drives return UV’s and longer time on site and therefore allows them to keep their marketing costs low. In a market where access to listings is a commodity, Trulia are being truly innovative.
Advertising Partner
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There is an article on TechCrunch about Trulia, Zillow and smaller portals (read comments as well):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/22/how-accurate-are-listings-on-real-estate-sites/
On top of that there are some usability issues with Trulia:
For some reason portal doesn’t show all listing’s details on one page. It has only map and basic details on description page (http://www.trulia.com/property/1050869538-1017-Belle-Meadows-Way-Salt-Lake-City-UT-84121) and to see photos and description itself you have to click button, which opens another window/tab on Agent’s site powered by Yahoo. Weird.
Trulia’s map only returns limited number of listings at the time (and it doesn’t warn you). Q&A and blogs – really good ideas indeed, but implementation is not. There is no text search! Posts are ordered by date, so eventually there will be some bloggers (well, spammers) who re-blog their posts to stay them on top of the list.
It could be done better.
Hello Simon,
Congrats on the new blog. Great information and I’m curious about your thoughts regarding this… “in the US where getting paid listings is very difficult”
Obviously, the main goal from most US RE sites is to tap into the billions in traditional offline real estate advertising. The majority of the money was spent advertising individual listings, which is dynamic in nature and constantly changing.
The issue in the US is that early on most sites offered the advertising of listings for free as they needed the listings to attract consumer eyeballs. Now most are attempting to monetize sites via local agent sponsorships of areas which causes a limited supply of advertising inventory vs. say most of the UK sites which monetize individual listings which is more dynamic.
How do you think the advertising landscape in the US will change over time. Do you think the US market will eventually be able to monetize individual listings? Or do you think there will simply be continued development of related information to listings (like T Voices, Z estimates, etc.) to create advertising opportunities for individual agents based on locations?
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