A word on Trulia’s new features

Posted on November 9, 2007 by Jim Duncan

Trulia announced their “Featured Listings” product the other day to much fanfare within the RE.net. There’s little to add to the discussion but my personal experience beta testing the product.

All I have to offer are the stats provided by Trulia on my listings (click the images for higher-res) –

Trulia-Week one Stats
Trulia-Week Two Stats

1 – The increase in views for my listings is impressive.
2 – Traffic to my site increased 12 times! (from 0 to 12)
3 – The Broker-Centric nature of the site still irritates me.

Is it worth it? I don’t know. Traffic increased, but I didn’t get any emails from prospective purchasers.

The differentiation of listings is both good and bad. While similar to Realtor.com’s differentiation of listings, Trulia’s mission is clearly different – they are out to make a profit. Realtor.com is too, but they are supposed to be serving the Realtors and making a profit – which may be contradictory missions.

Some of the best analyses on the launch that I read (and there are certainly more):

Greg @ Bloodhound (with perhaps the best analogy)
Kris Berg

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About Jim Duncan

A Charlottesville Realtor who tries to stay on the bleeding/cutting/functional edge of technology and real estate trends. I have been selling real estate for the past 10 years, lived in C'Ville for twenty+ and am married to one of few Charlottesville natives left.
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  • http://sandiegohomeblog.com Kris Berg

    Jim, The broker-centric nature still bugs me as well. Clicking through my listing sends the visitor to my broker page instead of my own website. Can’t blame my broker, and to their credit, my contact information is there in case anyone is inspired to open their email editor or pick up the phone, but it isn’t exactly the personal branding I am looking for. My initial reaction is that I get very little for my $50 – A thumbnail photo and email link on the property summary view, but that’s about it. Given that I have yet to receive a single inquiry from the site (and we are generally running between 6 and 10 active listings at a time), I am seriously questioning the value.

  • http://www.realcentralva.com Jim Duncan

    Kris –

    I think we’re on the same page. It’s very similar in many ways to R.com’s “Enhanced listings” without the same inventory levels or traffic.

    While the bump in viewings on Trulia is nice – it didn’t translate into either leads, closings or visits to my site.

    time will tell, I guess. At least they’re innovating and trying.

  • http://blog.estately.com/ Galen

    0 to 12 is even more than a 12x increase – it’s an infinite increase. AMAZING!

  • http://www.realcentralva.com Jim Duncan

    Galen -

    Stupid math. :)

    Either way, increased traffic but no leads still ends up with the same result.

    Unless, of course, I was selling ads on my site. :)