It’s interesting to watch the real estate agents finally start to pay attention to Trulia’s SEO strategy.
Truliamazing tricks of the trade: don’t link to your trusted partners
Trulia Widgets: Truliamazing Trojan Horse(s)
Good for BHB on breaking these stories.
Truliaholic lets you compare search traffic on their site between markets.
It’s interesting to see that in their home market of San Francisco Seattle beats them in traffic:
It’s also interesting to see that Trulia is offshoring, Technical Manager - Offshore Solutions:
Trulia is looking for an experienced technical leader, reporting directly to the VP of engineering, to drive and manage our offshore development team in India (currently 8+). The team is primarily responsible for our content acquisition technology and other selected development projects, which represent the foundation of Trulia’s exploding success.
We tried this at one time in Redfin’s history, found it to be unsuccessful. Now all our development is done from Seattle and San Francisco. Giving us the best of both worlds.
Of course Trulia is also looking for local engineers. We’ll need to post a similar top 10 list for working at Redfn. Our #10 would be that we have a XBox 360 with Rockband hooked up to our main conference room projector.
Trulia has added keyword search joining Estately and a few others in offering it. I really like keyword search and use it on Estately to subscribe to a RSS feed of new loft listings in Seattle. Unfortunately it consistently is ranked low by our customers as a feature they want relative to other features we might work on which is why we haven’t done it yet. Hopefully we get to it by the end of 2008.
FoREM has a post on how Zillow Plateaus While Trulia Grows:
According to Comscore, Trulia overtook Zillow in traffic for the first time last month (Dec. 07).
What I find more telling is Zillow and Trulia’s own thoughts on their traffic performance in 2007.
From Zillow’s 2007 - It’s a wrap:
Now, specific to Zillow, here are a few year-end fun facts. Zillow has grown significantly in the past year in terms of capital (an additional $30M raised bringing the total to $87M ), employees (from 135 people to 160), site traffic (up about 20% year-over-year), advertising salespeople, (from 5 to a team of 20; Advertising offerings (launch of Zillow Home Direct Ads), for sale listings (launched the ability to post homes for sale in early December ‘06, so a handful then vs 400K now), brokerage partnerships (zero vs dozens today), newspaper partnerships (over 280 newspapers now), Make Me Move listings (about zero then vs 100K now), etc.
From Trulia, New Year’s Resolutions for Online Real Estate and Trulia:
Today, Trulia.com is the fastest growing website in the real estate industry according to Comscore (at least amongst the top 20 sites). In December 2007 Trulia.com will have around 2.5million unique visitors, we have grown 3x in 12 months whereas many other sites have flat or declining in traffic. We consistently see double digit monthly growth and expect this to continue for the foreseeable future until we become one of the top few sites in the Industry.
Conclusion:
Trulia: 300% YOY
Zillow: 20% YOY
Trulia Voices - 71 day pulse check:
We’ll have to do a pulse check on Redfin Forums soon though I have no idea when 71 days will be because I have no idea when we launched it because I am in startup time warp land.
Trulia Hindsight is a pretty neat method of visually building trends.
What I wonder about is why they used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth for Hindsight and yet use Google Maps for their main search site. Anyone know?
We’ve certainly debated the merits of each but our conclusions are likely biased since we’ve only done a really deep dive on Virtual Earth. It would be great to hear how they feel after implementing sites with both.
Congrats to Trulia on raising $10 million led by Sequoia. The race is now on between Trulia and Zillow!
The Venture Beat article, Real estate engine Trulia shows momentum, raises $10M, on the announcement discusses the difference in inventory between Trulia and Zillow:
Trulia says it has two million homes for sale. Zillow, by comparison, has only 130,000
It’s an interesting comparison but I don’t know how relevant that comparison is for the majority of consumers.
For instance, Redfin doesn’t compete at the national level like either of those companies. However at the local level in the markets we serve, where consumers care the most about available inventory, we have both beat. Living and looking for a home in Seattle I could care less who has more inventory outside of Seattle I just care about who has all the inventory in Seattle.
Megan a PM at Trulia has a blog, Education in Entrepreneurship.
Trulia API now open to the world! Time for Redfin to get cranking on an API!