One of the most positive signs that Trulia is onto something with our real estate search engine model is public endorsement by well respected real estate organizations across the country. Not only are top brokers using Trulia.com as a marketing tool to direct traffic to their Web sites, but now we’re receiving the thumbs up from leading franchisors including Realty Executives International and Help-U-Sell Real Estate.

Both franchisors have signed marketing agreements endorsing the Trulia search engine, through which millions of consumers across the country will be able to search Trulia.com and be pointed back to the property detail pages on their franchisee Web sites.

What does this mean for consumers? When all is said and done (by October 2006), they’ll be able to easily access another 65,000 listings through our search engine, including nearly 50,000 from Realty Executives and 15,000 from Help-U-Sell.

What does this mean for real estate professionals? The train is leaving the station…it’s time to hop aboard! Forward-thinking brokers and franchisors like Help-U-Sell’s Steve Ozonian and Realty Executive’s Rich Rector are taking proactive steps to help their brokers and agents market their listings effectively online and create more direct, efficient paths for consumers to search the property information on their broker Web sites. Testimonials from other broker partners can be found here.

. . . is being hosted by The Future of Real Estate Marketing this week. Some interesting posts, go check it out.

We have heard from many brokers and agents how they like the map interface on Trulia. Now we are making that map available to brokers and agents to showcase their listings on their own sites-and best of all, it’s free. You can now have a free and simple way to enhance your website or blog and to show off your listings on a great map interface.

Creating your own TruliaMap is easy and can be done in less than 2 minutes, but it only works if your listings are currently on Trulia. If you are not currently on Trulia, you can find out how to be included here.

How does it work? Visit the Tools For Your Site section of Trulia and click on TruliaMap. Enter your website URL and we’ll quickly tell you whether we’ve indexed your listings. You can then customize a TruliaMap to make it your own. Options include size (narrow or wide), colors, and even an option to have the map automatically animate through your listings. Once you’re happy with the look, copy and paste the provided HTML anywhere on your site and you are done!

Each day, Trulia will automatically update your listings to display the newest 50 properties we know about so that your TruliaMap always appears fresh to your site visitors.

TruliaMap is still in beta, so we encourage you to try it out and send us feedback on what you like and what may need improvement. Also to reward those earlier adopters, we are giving away Trulia t-shirts to the first 10 brokers or agents who integrate TruliaMap on their websites or blogs. Just send an email to info@trulia.com with a link to the page where you integrated TruliaMap.

Here is an example for Pacific Union in San Francisco, CA.

Pacific Union Distinctive Properties

Get your own TruliaMap

Today was the opening day of the Inman Real Estate Connect conference held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It was a busy day of panels, speakers, meetings, awards and even an appearance by the Trulia Markermen. Did you see them?

The Markermen were handing out trivia cards and promoting the Innovation Master Class on Vertical Search from 3-5pm on Thursday in the Telegraph Hill Room on Level 2. Stop by to find out how to generate more money and dollars online. Learn from the superstars how to transform your broker website into a consumer destination. There will be a work shop at the end of the panel where you can interact with the Trulia team.

I will write more on the conference in a separate post, but here are a few links to some that have already posted on the conference:
Greg Sterling writes about the panel he moderated and that I was on.
The Inman Blog talks about the Zillow API announcement.
Joel Burslem is aggregating some posts on the conference, as well as photos, presentations, etc.
Realty Thoughts talks about the long tail of search panel.
Zillow Blog has a good summary post on the first day.

One last note, a big congrats to all of the winners of the Inman Innovator Awards: RE/Max, Urban Digs, Cellsigns, MyNewPlace and to the Trulia team for winning the Inman Innovator Award for the Most Innovative Web Service.

One of Trulia’s goals is to provide the user with the best search experience possible. An important aspect of this search experience is the information that supplements our listings, such as data on school districts as well as local real estate market indicators. Our recently released advanced search functionality allows the user to search for properties within specific school districts or neighborhoods, and our California real estate guides link users to market trends and school information for every city in the state (available for all of our live states). The following analysis of school district value is just one example of the many types of stories that our data can tell you. As our coverage continues to grow, our helpful home-finding information will grow with it.

Finding a home within a good school district is a priority for home-buyers with school-aged children (see HouseValues article). In an anaylsis of greater Los Angeles area schools, we found that to get one of the best educations for your child, you don’t necessarily have to spend the most money on a house. Within the top school districts in the LA area, average housing prices vary by more than $800,000 and $600/square foot. Take a look at the 5 most expensive and 5 cheapest places to get a great education in the Los Angeles area.

The Most Expensive

The Best Values

*API = Academic Performance Index. 2005 Average for Unified districts in CA = 694

The annual Real Estate Connect SF Conference is being held this week at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This is one of the conferences, if you are in the online real estate industry, that you can not miss as it has a good agenda covering many of the current events and topics that face the industry.

Trulia is fortunate enough to have been nominated for an Inman Innovator Award in the category of Most Innovative Web Service; we are up against some tough competition. There are 8 other categories for awards including: Most Innovative Brokerage, Most Innovative New Business Model and Most Innovative Real Estate Data Site. The winners will be announced on Wednesday, July 26th at 5:15pm.

A few of us at Trulia will also be speaking at the conference; here is our schedule in case you want to stop by:

Jamie Glenn - Wednesday, 8:30am - 9:45am - Panel on Top of the Funnel: Search Engine and Portal Marketing (Pacific Heights Room)

Sami Inkinen - Thursday, 9:00am - 9:30 - The Internet Real Estate Ecosystem: Where Do You Fit In? (Grand Ballroom)

Pete Flint & Sami Inkinen - Thursday, 2:00pm - 3:00pm - Meet The Leaders (Ralston Room)

Pete Flint - Thursday, 3:00pm - 5:00pm - Innovation Master Class: Vertical Search (Telegraph Hill)

We will be floating around the conference as well, so feel free to drop us a line if you are coming and want to meet.

For a while I’ve been mildly obsessed with this house. It’s a gorgeous little old Victorian near San Francisco with original details, a fabulous color scheme, and so much of that old style charm you just want to hug it.

Isn’t this just glorious?

One unfortunate side effect of Trulia’s meteoric, dare I say Hasselhoffian rise in traffic as of late has been the concomitant increase in complaints. One of the most common inquiries is, “Why is my listing not found on Trulia? ” Several agents have let us know that while they can see some of their listings on Trulia, other properties of theirs are nowhere to be found. (Sticking to my interstellar/Baywatch analogy) Our task therefore is to retrieve the listings from a black hole and put them into syndication.

Sometimes we can resolve the issue with little difficulty, but other times, the task is not quite so trivial as overcoming interstellar gravitational fields of unfathomable strength. Consider the following two listings in Trulia’s internal database:

These are in fact unique properties, but how can Trulia tell? Property 1 does not include an address, so for all we know, the address is 6903 NW 91st Ter. Property 2 does not include information on sqft or MLS#, so for all we know, those values are 1572 and F279936, respectively. Unlike Baywatch, we don’t display twins, so to be safe we only show one, favoring the one that supplies an address.

The avoidance of falling victim to false-duplicate status is but one advantage of submitting full and complete information to Trulia. More information about properties also allows us to build search and filter systems of increasing sophistication, helping us reach our goal of being the best real estate search experience on the Web.

For many months now, barber shops, grocery store checkout lines and internet blogs have been abuzz with animated discussions of real estate prices. Bears have been warning about an impending crash, while bulls keep crowing about how every day that passes piles on their equity.

Being somewhat of a bear myself (and no economics expert), I find the run-up in real estate prices a little alarming, especially in light of ongoing interest rate hikes and rising inventories, and I fear a serious market correction is going to happen between now and mid-2007 in most markets. Consider the following:

• Condos that sold for $150K in 2000 are now listing at over $450K, i.e. a 200% price increase (in California).
• In the same period, 1 lb of ground coffee went down about 10%, a dozen large eggs went up about 50%, 1 lb of bananas can be had for just about the same price, and even gasoline only went up 78%.

• Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, Jan 2000 to Jan 2006.

I realize real estate markets are not measured by the same yardstick as consumer goods, but given the outcry over a 78% increase in gasoline prices, one might think a 200% increase over 6 years would qualify as outrageous, speculatory and non-sustainable. And while current owners might bask in their equity-rich glory, bears like to point out that home equity ain’t money in the bank-it’s only imaginary money until you sell your house. As a reader posted on the housing bubble blog, “Debt is a fact. Equity is an opinion.”
Other facts also point to the non-sustainable nature of the current market:

• California’s housing affordability index stood at 16% in June, 2005

• Source: California Assn of Realtors

• Source and explanation: National Assn of Realtors

• Source: RealEstateJournal

• Source: San Jose Mercury News

An obvious silver lining is that the nation’s obsession with real estate has given rise to a lot of innovation from real estate agents and brokers and technology folks: trulia.com, of course, but also housingmaps, zillow, propsmart, redfin, homethinking, RENotebook, johnlscott, sundaydash, and dozens of other services that make real estate searching and valuation easier and more accessible to everyone. So whether it’s a seller’s or a buyer’s market, it’s certainly a great time to be dealing in real estate on the internet.

I’d love to hear what Trulia users think about the current housing market. Is there a bubble? Is it bursting? Is your market immune? Am I completely off-base? Let us know.

Alternatively titled: How could something seemingly so simple be so complicated?

In the first of what will be many entries on the subject of design and user interface, I thought it would be fitting to pay respects to the Trulia logo and discuss the burgeoning world of map markers.

An engaging, distinctive, and functional marker design is fundamental to differentiating any product in the mapping/mashup space. Obviously, the Trulia marker takes its cues from Google Maps location marker, the beauty of which lies in its ability to precisely indicate a location on the map whilst also providing a large target for users to click. Other outfits take a relatively literal approach—Zillow, Propsmart, use markers in the likeness of a house. Housingmaps, powered by Google Maps and Craigslist, is a mashup of the purest kind—no visual rebranding here. Redfin use a more generic red circle (which pulses with an animated yellow circle when clicked). Yahoo’s new beta flash based map features vividly colors speech bubbles that are by turns labeled with either a letter or number which correspond to a legend to the left (example).

Overall it seems as though the trend is to use fairly generic markers, though in a clearly defined space (such as real estate) that trend is less apparent. Common to all (except Zillow) is the drop shadow—the png compression format allowing for true transparency and helping to give the map a 3-D quality that would make Edward Tufte proud.

At times thought of affectionately as an alien antennae or giant green table-tennis paddle, the Trulia marker is the most prominent and important visual element on our site. It needs to be striking and bold, yet not be overwhelming when displayed 50 times on the page. It features a subtle dark green stroke to help offset it from the map, a white circle as a clickable target, and also a slight graduation of color to enhance the 3-D effect. It also features a bright orange rollover and highlight state. In principle, we’ve though of the marker as indicating “a thing on the map” rather than specifying a type of landmark. Descriptively symbolic markers (such as markers shaped like a house), while immediately intuitive, lead to a narrowly defined usage. Designing different markers for different landmarks (be they homes, gas stations, ATMs, schools, or restaurants) can be both tedious and create a chaotic patchwork on the map.

Google recently introduced a “you are here” green arrow, to create strong visual contrast between the surrounding landmarks. This approach, though not necessarily the greatest looking, is extremely intuitive. To see it in action, here’s a guide to the closest taquerias to the Trulia offices.

Expect to see a lot more innovation in this area, as the increasing number of mashups and map-based products fuel the need for differentiation among competitors. Balanced against this is the need for some interaction standards so that users don’t have to re-learn map interaction a hundred times over.