On the other hand, Joel's comment “Nothing terribly new here” sums it up for me: Trulia's new offering looks perfectly ok, but is it sufficiently differentiated from other offerings to make it worthwhile? Time will tell, I guess, but it doesn't look like a “must have” to us right now.

I would agree that a real-estate specific website with geographic targeting would have better results than Google or Yahoo keywords; but are the consumers interested?

As far as I understand Trulia is selling itself as a search engine on infinity for home buyers and sellers. Yet for real estate agents it has another meaning, a way to advertise their services.

As said on their Advertise page 70% of their users don't yet have agents (how that number was founded I'm not sure), which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. But do any of those home-buying customers use Trulia to find agents, or are the agent ads just an interruption on the sidelines to finding your dream home?

You got it all backwards, brah! You have the listing and it's your responsibility to advertise it. Sure, you can post your listing on Zillow and Trulia for free, but if you want the extra exposure, you have to pay for it.

Haven't you paid to advertise your listing in a magazine before? Well guess what, people don't look at home magazines and books anymore. The latest NAR study done in November 2007 shows that 1% of home buyers found their property through a real estate magazine or book while 29% found it on the Internet. So it's the home buyer who is dictating this shift in our industry, and now, if you want to be a successful agent, you have to advertise your listings on the web.

I'm gonna see what I can grab in Hawaii right now!

While the others (Zillow & Realtor) also have engines in our testing we didn't show them to be as profitable as good old fashioned Adwords.

@ Erik – Interesting thoughts. On some level, larger advertisers can already reach across multiple networks w/ our Trulia Ad Network. Trulia Pro is about simplicity and relevancy. We'll tweak where appropriate to give our advertisers the most value.

@ agent 21 – The link on the Trulia Spotlight Ad is meant to drive traffic to the website or blog of your choice, not juice. If an agent wants that, they can get that from our profile page where they can point up to 5 naked links to the site of their choosing. Additionally, if they have listings, all their listings on their profile page have no follows.

The Trulia Profile page is a great place for agents to give consumers a glimpse of who they are and what they're all about.

@ nozmo – we believe we are providing a tremendous amount of value with our new offering. See Maureen's post as she has some fantastic perspective on Trulia Pro – http://agentgenius.com/?p=2206

@ Andrew – Good feedback. We will analyze everything we do. So as we get more feedback, we'll tweak if as necessary.

@ jimlee – You will be able to see the views in your dashboard which will help you monitor which ad copy and geography is working best for you. Early adopters will see a tremendous benefit as they will see the most impressions, which are unlimited – no pay per impression.

For $40/month, this is a tough package to beat. Trulia impressions are much more targeted than Google/Yahoo ads, so we feel its money well spent for the moment.