Trulia Finds Its Voice
Trulia launched a pretty significant new release of its real estate search site this morning.
Big news was they finally removed the Beta from their logo, hopefully spurring many of its Web 2.0 cousins to do the same.
More importantly however, it has charged right into what’s rapidly becoming a very crowded space - the online conversations around real estate.
Zillow is trying to own the conversation about your home (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?). my-currency is trying to own the conversation around housing prices (see My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds) and YourStreet.com is trying to own the conversation around your local market (see Real Estate Geeks Unite at YourStreet.com) - just to name a few of the competitors.
Trulia’s new offering, Trulia Voices, allows anyone to ask a question about a particular neighborhood or Zip code and get an answer. The idea is that real estate agents can “own” a particular neighborhood or and establish themselves as the “neighborhood expert” - a strategy that I’ve written about many times before on this blog (see Everybody’s Going Local).
It’s a strategy echoed in ActiveRain’s Localism and could even be the basis of Move.com’s $6 million stealth project - though I see a much greater draw of consumers to Trulia’s offering. Trulia holds the “holy grail” for real estate shoppers online and has one of the best search interfaces out there - one that is aped by many.
They’ve made a concerted effort to attract Realtors - by making it easy to answer questions (you can subscribe to email alerts with new request from a neighborhood) and there’s even a Top Voices leaderboard in each city which is bound to stoke Realtor’s competitive fires.
Trulia Voices is the final piece of the puzzle for the scrappy search engine. They’ve wooed the brokers and won and now they wooing the agents. With this in place, they’re set for an even bigger push towards mainstream consumers - I’d expect to see this happen later this year.
And once they’ve gathered together the holy trinity of Real Estate 2.0; brokers, agents, consumers - they’ll be very well positioned. Either to forge ahead on their own or as a very juicy acquisition target indeed.
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7 Comment(s)
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Dave | May 11, 2007 | Reply
Hello,
I just got a new site through real estate website design they told me it takes time to gain rankings or even be listed on the search engines. Is that true? Please advise.
Thanks
Game On | May 11, 2007 | Reply
This is turning out to be a very nice little nuclear arms race between Zillow and Trulia. Zillow beat Trulia to the punch with its Q&A Service. Looks like Trulia has responded. The key dilemma is that all of these questioning services depend on a vibrant and bountiful user community. 1) How much traffic is really going to Trulia vs Zillow and others and 2) when you go to Trulia, you’re just there to search and click off to a broker site (are you now going to piddle around on some Q&A section) which is distracting you from your search?
Lastly, if you build your Q&A Service to be overly commercial (ie, tuned for advertising and agent/brokers), users will see right through it and not trust the value of the comments or responses.
I hope Trulia put a big Beta sticker on this puppy. I’m betting we’re not talking about this feature 1 yr from now. To Joel’s post, Move.com is probably the one player with enough of a user base to pull off someone like this. I can’t wait to see what they unveil.
By the way, I think the Trulia design is a total rip-off of LinkedIn’s Questions. LinkedIn is having a hard time demonstrating to its users that there is significant value proposition for participating in this kind of activity. Trulia’s questions seemed to be designed to be even broader - a neighborhood? Come on.
The Dude | May 11, 2007 | Reply
Well, I dunno man, the voices section is not just about “neighborhoods”, I saw a few in NYC related to schooling options, convenience to public transportation, and buying coops (a manhattan mainstay) - so although you may poo-poo it, only time will tell if it has legs. They also smartly integrated it into the real estate guides, so that should lead to use. I mean who really has time to blog blindly? I like the idea of just answering a question, leaving my name, number and link behind for follow-up. Or picking an area to get updated on - It is not to ask why, but why not?
Incredible Agent | May 13, 2007 | Reply
Very nice, the real beauty of all this is mainly for SEO purposes. It doesn’t really matter if anyone is reading it…all that matters is that google sees this as fresh valuable content for individual communities and it grows the Trulia rankings even further and therefore their traffic grows along with it.
This is a good strategy that everyone should be implementing. Somewhere down they road we should merge all the neighborhood Q&A’s into 1 place. Then we can all die happy people.
Shaun McLane | May 14, 2007 | Reply
First - I want to address the 2nd comment. I received that same comment on two posts in my blog, and one in another blog. WTF? Is that not the worst marketing scheme ever? Seems a little 1999-ish.
Back to Trulia - I’ve tried using Voices, and guess I like it. I will say one thing, I was having trouble posting answers, and Trulia’s customer service was lightning-quick at responding. I was putting URLs into the answer, and it was giving me an error, which I mistakenly thought was a captcha error. My concern is that most of the questions seem very fake, and like they were put there for launch content. Is it possible people have the EXACT same question for different parts of town? I saw 4 people with, “How are Parks and Recreation in anytown, FL?” It’s a legit question, but seems odd that different people asked the same question - word for word. If it is just filler, that’s fine. Just seemed a little odd.
Nicole Rufuku | May 14, 2007 | Reply
When has it ever been a good idea to steer conversations in social networking? This new Q&A model is definitely clever, but both Zillow and Trulia have an incentive to keep conversations focused on their products - the listings. Most successful user-generated sites, though, capitalize on letting users dictate the topic of conversation. We’ll see…
Joseph Ferrara.sellsius | May 20, 2007 | Reply
Damon of Incredible Agent hit the nail on the head. It does not matter who reads it on the site. It is getting indexed by Google. Want proof? Active Rain