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Trulia.com launched 1-year ago almost exactly to the day. On this anniversary, we’ve turned on all 50 US states (up from 25 yesterday) and a whole new set of cool, exciting, and useful tools. Our goal at Trulia has always been to help consumers find properties for sale and to help them make smarter real estate decisions. With today’s new features we think we’re moving in the right direction and hope you agree.

Here’s a short video demo (”Screencast”) for you to check it out and see how to use Trulia.com in your house hunt (note: it may take a few minutes to load).

The new tools:

Interactive Heat Maps

Have you ever wondered how prices for homes in your neighborhood are holding up? In every major city across the US, you can now see (not just read) pricing and popularity trends at the hyper-local level. Features include:

• Multiiple heat map views – choose between listing price, sales prices, sales price/sqft and neighborhood search popularity.
• Sort the columns by the absolute or percentage change to see where the movers and shakers are!
• We’re constantly adding more cities, more data and more zoom levels, so be sure to check back again soon. Check out the heat in these cities — Los Angeles, CA; New York City, NY; Jacksonville, FL; Chicago, IL.

Home Comparison Tool

Want to make sure that you are getting a good deal? Now when you find a property that you like, Trulia.com searches similar “for sale” and “sold” properties for you to compare; check out the Trulia Comparison Tool for 2053 S Corona Street in Denver. Features include:

• Side by side comparison of similar homes for sale and recently sold homes. Sort the columns to see how a property stacks up against the comps.
• View the locations and details of nearby schools and explore different neighborhoods.
• Property comparison tool available on every property page where we have the data available. Certain “non-disclosure states” don’t publish this data, so we can’t offer this for everyone just yet…

Trulia Neighborhood Spotlight

Thinking about moving to the Silver Lake neighborhood in LA, Candler Park in Atlanta, or Georgetown in Washington, DC? In our neighborhood guides, you can now do a deeper dive to understand how pricing and popularity trends are changing. Features include:

• Snapshot indicator for every neighborhood showing “Hot,” Warm” or “Cooling” based on popularity (where our users are searching), # properties for sale and average listing price.
• For the data fiends - pick the neighborhoods that you want to compare across different pricing metrics, over a 5 year time period.
• City demographic data and school information.

At Trulia.com, our focus is to help you understand trends at the local level – by neighborhood or zip code – where it counts. We’ve added information on millions of properties (about 60m to be exact) and lots of new tools, but due to county recorder rules and the magnitude of the task we still have some way to go. Keep on coming back for more improvements.

If you have ideas that you’d like to see implemented, let us know. Your feedback and Trulia’s talented and dedicated engineers brought you the tools that you see today. In our view, we’ve only scratched the surface…

PS - check out some of last week’s blog news on our announcement: GigaOm, Venture Beat, Business 2.0, Jonathan Miller

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