Tipping Point for Trulia?
MONEY magazine’s annual Best Places to Live feature launched today. Congrats to Middleton, WI which came out on top of the Great American Towns. As in year’s past, the list was compiled by Sperling’s BestPlaces. It also uses local market data from OnboardLLC.
This year however, CNNMoney has done something new by incorporating Trulia’s search engine into the site to power the homes for sale function. Readers can search real estate city by city or from any page on the site through a search widget.
This is a pretty big win for Trulia. One of the site’s biggest weaknesses, is that it suffers from a lack of widespread consumer brand awareness. Outside of Internet-savvy home buyers and real estate 2.0 professionals, very few people I talk to have even heard of the site. Its Puget Sound rival Zillow, on the other hand, enjoys much greater mainstream recognition — largely due to its relentless and shrewd public relations campaign.
Trulia’s deal with CNNMoney, which itself is part of the greater TimeWarner media empire, means many more consumers are going to be exposed to the Trulia brand. And if this plays out the way I’m sure they hope it will, this could be a huge traffic driver to their site.
Trulia’s challenge going forward is going to be capturing some of that traffic and retaining it, as I expect much of it will be from first time visitors. They’d be wise to welcome all new visitors coming from the CNNMoney site with some sort of unique welcome message (something Seth Godin has been advocating for a while) - one that highlights the unique features of Trulia, encourages them to bookmark the site etc. That way people won’t feel quite so alone when they land on their pages.
Aside: Wordpress bloggers can accomplish this using the What Would Seth Godin Do? Plugin for WordPress.
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Incredible Agent | Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
This is definitely a big win for Trulia. They’ve done a good job building up their website features and getting it in the search engines so far…now it’s time for them to start spreading the word a bit more.
Todd Higginbotham | Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
From Zillow partnering with Yahoo to Sphere, a blog search engine scoring deals with The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, its the norm to see a Web 2.0 startup score a deal with established media on the web.
John Schroeder | Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
Middleton, WI does have a lot going for it. Not the least of is it’s wonderful school district, terrific restaurants, and access to Lake Mendota.
Congrats Middleton, WI!!!
Nice Job | Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
Given Cyberhome’s recent tie-up with AOL Real Estate, don’t you think that this Trulia-CNN Money deal might be a jeopardy, as soon as it gets off the launch pad?
Though the flipside is that TimeWarner is such a decentralized organization that maybe the media chieftains would let a TW susbsidiary like Money Magazine (note - this isn’t really CNN, it’s really a Money Mag deal) keep a separate listings partner.
Anyone from Cyberhomes or AOL like to chime in on this one?
Tim O'Keefe | Jul 16, 2007 | Reply
This is very huge for Trulia as it hedges against its biggest weakness. Dependency on search engine placement for traffic.
Geoff | Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
Yes I would agree, Trulia has certainly scored on this one. Graphic engines are certainly adding value to consumers looking for homes on the market. I have found however that many of them are rather complicated for anyone who is not that computer savvy.
Pete Flint from Trulia.com | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
Hey Joel,
Thanks for the suggestion on the landing page. We added this in very shortly after launch and it is working well to help people understand what we are about and keep them coming back.
We’ll be doing more deals like the one with CNNMoney in the future. We think smart deals like this can drive lots of traffic to our listing partners and make economic sense for Trulia. From our site analytics, we do see that consumers do come back directly to Trulia, as they like the search interface and additional tools we provide.
We always interested in hearing from potential partners to set-up deals like this one, email us at busdev@trulia.com . Or if you’d like to see more Trulia tools on other websites, email us at the same mailbox with ideas on what you’d like us to consider building.
Thanks
Pete