RISMEDIA, January 7, 2011—Trulia.com, a top site for home buyers, sellers and renters, closed 2010 as one of the fastest-growing sites in the real estate category. Fortified by product introductions and user-experience enhancements for consumers and real estate professionals alike, Trulia experienced unprecedented traffic growth and gained the most market share of all leading national real estate sites, according to Hitwise.
During 2010, more than 89 million unique visitors accounted for more than 570 million property views. Mobile searches grew by approximately 400% and now account for more than 10% of overall traffic and more than 15% of weekend traffic. As a direct result of expanded consumer engagement, leads sent by Trulia to industry professionals have more than doubled in the past year. In addition to using Trulia to find homes and gather insights about neighborhoods, consumers used Trulia in 2010 to engage with more than 500,000 real estate professionals in the Trulia Voices community.
“In 2010, we listened to our users and delivered the tools they need for an informed real estate search experience. We incorporated user-friendly elements into the Trulia mobile experience, collected and surfaced local market insights and created tools to empower consumers to personalize their searches,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder, Trulia.com. “We are executing on a long-term vision and we believe there is room for further innovation in the real estate search experience for consumers. In 2011, we will emphasize mobile innovation and continue to gather and use local information and rich property data to make it easier for consumers to make smart real estate decisions.”
2010 Consumer Product Innovation
-Rental search. Users can now search for millions of rental homes and apartments posted by property managers, landlords, and real estate professionals. Rentals can be found via an advanced map and search experience, which provides the option to search by custom ranges, keywords, multiple locations, and location radius. Consumers can also save searches and review e-mail alerts to find and track new listings in their area.
-Local ratings. Consumers can now rate hyper-local areas and neighborhoods on key lifestyle characteristics such as safety, schools, traffic, transportation, walkability, proximity to parks and recreation and also submit their own reviews about what it is like to live in that area.
-Rich data. In 2010, Trulia focused on delivering rich content from sources beyond public records, including listing agents, brokers, and Multiple Listing Services, among other sources. Trulia also provides home buyers with property tax and HOA fee data to paint a more complete portrait of the total cost of ownership. Additionally, users can now review price history and transaction details to learn more about properties and find relevant comparable sales.
-Personalization. Trulia delivers real-time alerts for new listings, price changes, listing status changes and comparable listings directly to consumers determined by personal and customizable real estate search preferences.
-Trulia mobile. The Trulia iPhone app now features rental search capability, recently sold properties and also seamless synching of MyTrulia across the Web and mobile devices. The mobile version of Trulia.com now allows users to rate local areas on any mobile device, and features one of the only enhanced, interactive Web maps of search results for iPhone and iPod touch users in the industry.
2010 Industry Marketing Solutions
“In addition to improving the Trulia user experience for consumers, we focused on building the best marketing solutions for the industry during the past year. We are driving the industry forward and introducing new products to become the industry’s #1 source for connecting to qualified consumers,” said Georg Gerstenfeld, vice president of business services. “In 2011, we will continue to roll out measurable and affordable resources for the industry, just as we did in 2010 when we launched Trulia Local Ads, which has allowed agents to reach buyers and sellers in more than 9,500 U.S. locations. Agents subscribing to Trulia Pro have, on average, seen four-fold increases in buyer and seller leads from Trulia.”
Among key innovations developed by Trulia specifically with real estate professionals in mind include:
-Local ads. Trulia Local Ads provide real estate professionals with the opportunity to lock up their local markets by owning a percentage share of ad space on Trulia’s search results and listing pages.
-My leads. My Leads is a dashboard that empowers real estate professionals to quickly respond to prospective clients and more effectively track and manage Trulia leads and contacts from a single place. Real-time e-mail alerts allow agents to know when new contacts are added to My Leads. All real estate professionals can access a two-week history of incoming Trulia leads from the My Leads dashboard free of charge.
-Quick connect. Trulia Pro Quick Connect delivers high-quality leads from active home buyers and sellers to real estate professionals. By adding target locations to Quick Connect and claiming listings on Trulia, agent profiles can be automatically matched and prominently displayed to prospective clients who are searching for listings.
For more information, visit www.trulia.com.
