Web Publishers Can Now Clone Trulia
In a recent conversation I had with Pete Flint he said something very telling. He said, “When what you have to offer has become commoditized, the only thing to do is to commoditize yourself.”
Trulia, with their latest offering, which they’ve playfully dubbed “Trulia in a Box” and more formally known as the Trulia Publishing Platform, is doing just that. It’s allows small to medium-sized media publishers to create their own white-labeled versions of the Trulia site.
You can see a demo of the new service live at forem.trulia.com
The service will be free for all publishers and the company is aiming to entice small newspapers and regional media (as well as bloggers) to create their own Trulia portal. In addition to the demo for FOREM, Trulia is also launching sites for Kiplinger, Village Voice Media and American Towns with this release. Agents can already embed Trulia’s search tools on their sites, albeit without the unified branding.
Much like what Ning is doing around social networks (see Create Your Own Web 2.0 Site with Ning), Trulia is trying to do with real estate search. It’s a fairly obvious progression for the company, as they’ve already started to power other media properties searches (see Tipping Point for Trulia?)
The upside to publishers is that they get a fully functional real estate search engine for no upfront investment. By distributing its platform, Trulia hopes to drive more traffic to its partners listings.
I’ll be curious to see whether Trulia will get folks to bite on their new tool – and whether we’ll soon see a bunch of mini-Trulias springing up all over the web. It’s also interesting to see the company take baby steps away from its portal model. Whether or not it takes off, one thing’s for sure though, the company is not done morphing itself quite yet.
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Halifax real estate | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
Interesting article – thanks!
Greg Knowles | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
I’m going to check this out. It sure makes some sense for the little guys to be able to take advantage of some of the programming done by Trulia.
andrew | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
is this really “in a box” because they don’t let you take the listing off the shelf (Trulia sub domain). They get the page views and the listings are not really on the your site. I haven’t looked at this in depth but seems this way. How about an embed code that displays listings on the site.
Andrew | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
Similar to how Topix has become a Comment engine for newspaper websites, Trulia is going after being a listing engine. Interesting move and clear distinction from Zillow. But I wonder why Peter was so quick to portray his product as a commodity.
Sol Sek | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
>>>>so quick to portray his product as a commodity.>>>>
Many AVMs, blogs, search engines and web 2.0 tools can be easily cloned. Better to be BASF or INTEL than compete for marketshare.
Mike | Jan 9, 2008 | Reply
I couldn’t find an email address for you Joel so I will put my suggestion here.
In the spirit of marketing, I would love for you to do a poll to see if Realtors actually do work harder to show homes with higher Buyer’s Agent commissions.
I was doing some research lately and see that there are some going for 4% and 5% trying to get agent’s attention.
My belief is there are few agents who specifically show homes with higher commissions if they don’t fit their clients needs. I may be naive. But I tell my clients that they would be giving away money to go higher than traditional percentages that I see.
Thanks,
Mike
Web Design | Jan 14, 2008 | Reply
Very interesting article indeed. Especially after I have just finished a web design project for a client from UK to clone Trulia and also currently working on another project to make exact clone of Trulia for French and Morrocon properties.
Frisco Texas | Nov 23, 2010 | Reply
Very interesting! has this worked for them? I have been looking for similar solution but have been unable to find one.