A lot of people have asked or commented about the white paper “The Truth about Real Estate Search” we released some time ago. Where did that come from? Who wrote it? Why did you publish it?

Well, to be very specific, it was one late night at a Manhattan hotel room (that in a true startup spirit didn’t even have a shower or bathroom in it) when it was all conceived in brief a moment of inspiration. We had discussed about the topic for a while, though. After the real estate industry press started mentioning search and our very own “vertical search” more and more often, we quickly noticed that apples, oranges and even prunes were sometimes happily mixed in a single bowl. Not bad for a delicious dessert, but we thought it might be helpful for the industry to clarify the search landscape and explain what the vertical search is, how the industry can benefit from it while avoiding the potential pitfalls. As we all know, new and change is often scary, so we wanted to give people to information to “judge for yourself”. And the baby, whitepaper about real estate search, was born.

In a true white paper spirit, we wanted to give as unbiased view of the search business as possible, not to promote Trulia, but to share our thoughts with the entire industry. Our basic premise is that vertical specific search - as opposed to generic or horizontal search like MSN/Yahoo!/Google - is nothing new when looking at the other verticals (such as jobs and consumer goods) and that consumers want a more structured way to search for information. You can see this by reading some of the many articles that have been written about vertical search to date. Vertical search offers consumers an application and interface that is superior to the generic search engines when it comes to a particular problem, such as researching real estate. If consumers want and need it, well, there is something in it!
From advertisers’ perspective vertical search is like choosing media between FOX and a more “vertical” OLN (Outdoor Life Network; personally I highly recommend it!) or New York Times and more “vertical” the Wall Street Journal. Besides the better ad targeting opportunity through more qualified buyers and sellers, we also concluded that real estate brokers and their web sites can benefit from vertical search engine’s nationwide economies of scale in Search Engine Marketing & Optimization, as well as from the strategically safe and sound listing advertising environment. One of these strategic benefits is the fact that a true search engine - unlike a traditional portal - is focused on sending the traffic back to the broker web site and not keeping the consumers at the portal.
On the flip side, we identified a number of challenges that brokers should keep in mind when allowing third parties to access one of their most valuable assets, property listings. Scraping, information errors, clear copyright infringements are among the potential issues brokers should be aware of.
But can you pick up the apples (personal bias!) from the fruit salad and leave the prunes? Yes you can .. and that was actually the final recommendation of the paper. It is easy to selectively protect your web site data and work with select (vertical) search engines to maximize the upside and avoid most of the downside. For technical people this is no news, but surprisingly many people still think you can only stop unlawful web site access through legal action.

If this piqued your interest, you should probably read it, even if you like mixed fruit salads. And if you have any ideas for other white papers or questions about this one, feel free to get in touch with us! Whenever we can, we’ll try to share our experiences and vision of the future to make it easier for you to navigate the world of online search.

I feel today is a special day for Trulia. I’m really excited and honored to write our first blog post. We’ve been planning on having a blog for some time, but now we have some of the resources and team in place to do it effectively. Part of the reason we were not able to launch a blog before was mostly a question of people and focus. When we launched back in September 2005, there were about 6 of us on the team and we just felt that we couldn’t devote the time to blogging regularly. We thought that when launched our blog we wanted it to start the next wave of conversations between Trulia employees, our users and the real estate industry. Now we are a little bigger we have decided to launch www.truliablog.com to share our thoughts on the world of real estate and search, and to give our readers some inside perspectives on Trulia.

At Trulia, our objective is to build the leading real estate search engine. Through this blog, we want to share with you some interesting perspectives from inside and outside of Trulia and to ask for your feedback to help us achieve this goal. What’s more, we see that today’s Web is a participatory medium, where consumers, professionals and publishers engage in huge numbers in knowledge sharing, selling, buying, discussions, and categorizing. We’d love to get our users more involved with the process and to hear from you about what you want, what thoughts you have on the world of real estate, and what you’d like to see more or less of on Trulia.

Over the last few years, we’ve been staggered at the growth of the blogosphere, and also the thousands of real estate blogs. We’re excited now to be part of this movement by launching our own blog. In a similar way that blogging has forever changed the world of journalism and the way news and commentary is created and read, we see that the real estate industry has been permanently changed with the widespread use of the Internet. Consumers are performing online real estate searches in record numbers and are more empowered and happier with their experiences than ever before. That said, we think there are many things in the real estate transaction that the Internet will never change. The overwhelming majority of home buyers will still visit open houses and work with agents to give them expert advice, information and help on what is often for many of us the biggest financial decision we will ever make.

Everyone at Trulia is excited about helping consumers, agents and brokers to navigate the world of online real estate. We look forward to you joining us on what is going to be a fascinating journey.

Trulia is a residential real estate search engine that helps consumers search for homes for sale, trends, neighborhood insights and other real estate information directly from hundreds of thousands of real estate broker Web sites. You can create your own custom search by price, number of bedrooms, neighborhood and more - without having to submit a lead form, provide personal information or wait to get contacted by a lead qualifier who may not handle the property listing.

We believe that information about properties, local neighborhoods, agents and brokers should be made freely available to everyone, regardless of status, connections, race, means, location or education. We are also convinced that the right information and the right real estate professional will help you find your dream home.

Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen founded Trulia in San Francisco in 2005 with solid backing from Accel Partners and the vision of providing consumers an easy way to access credible, unbiased real estate information online using a simple, intuitive Web interface.