Next Wave in Online Advertising

With our recent announcement of Sponsored Listing advertising, industry insiders are asking for more details on our business model–how are we going to make money? How is Trulia different from other online services? Are we simply going to take listings and charge real estate professionals back for them?

As a member of the team responsible for industry development, I’d like to provide additional insight and background on the Trulia model:

Consumers search online through a Web of information sources, and Trulia as a search engine helps consumers easily locate the property information that matches their home search queries. Then we point those consumers directly to richest source of property information: the property detail page on the listing broker and agent’s own Web sites. Trulia makes available these links to the listing broker and agent’s Web sites for free—a key feature of our business model.

How is Trulia unique? We are an independent, unbiased media company offering both free and paid opportunities to market your own property listings online. No matter whether a real estate professional decides to take advantage of our premium advertising, the basic links from Trulia.com to your property detail pages remain free. Of note: rather than attract consumers to Trulia as a destination site, we function as a “high-speed online interstate,” pointing traffic to the property information that resides on your own Web site. That’s why Trulia indexes only snippets of property information, and then we offer a multitude of ways for consumers to click from our search results to a listing professional’s own Web site.

To create a sustainable business that delivers value to real estate professionals over the long term, we are working hard to build premium ad products that create the most return for you – at the best value. We look forward to your feedback in the process. The good news for real estate professionals is that new entrants like Trulia into the online media arena means more competition to deliver brokers and agents good value online—and more opportunity for brokers and agents to increase traffic to their Web sites. The net result is that we’re entering a more market-driven media environment where the pressure is on to deliver good value to real estate professionals.