Charlottesville’s Real Estate Blog since 2005.

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Technology

A word on Trulia’s new features

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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I have been been representing buyers and sellers in Charlottesville, Albemarle, and Central Virginia since 2001. Get local insight born of experience.

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