Welcome to the first in a series of video blogs where Trulians conduct interviews with real estate industry leaders, commentators and other interesting folk. We’ll be experimenting with different video players and editing software (let us know if you have any suggestions), so be kind and please forgive any initial bugs. Thanks to Robert Scoble for the idea!

In the first installment, I interview Marque Joosten, CEO of Funda.nl, the leading residential real estate listings web site of the Netherlands. He gives his view on how the Internet killed real estate classifieds in Europe and provides some advice for brokers and agents looking to more effectively advertise to their customers.

Check out this week’s carnival at Real Estate Investing for Real. He put a new spin on the festivities, only selecting posts that spoke to “real people”, versus real estate beltway insiders. Interesting spin; and we’re all for being interesting!

Here’s a stand out quote from one carnival winner, on whether or not there is an agent bubble:

To put things in perspective, consider that in Silicon Valley, approximately 22,000 resale properties sold for the first 9 months of 2005, whereas a little over 16,000 did so during the same time period in 2006. With a reported 26,000 licensed real estate brokers in the county, with say half of them assumed to be actively in business, then that would suggest that an estimated one sale per broker was generated for the first 9 months of the year. With an average of $700,000 per property and a 3% commission, we’re talking about each agent grossing $21,000, but with their employing brokerages taking half as commission, particularly for newer agents, then the gross would only amount to a paltry $10,500 for 9 months work.

Fuzzy math? Inactive licenses? Read on at the Digerati Life.

I love Thanksgiving, not just for the turkey and cranberry sauce, but because someone’s got to pull for the underdog. I feel for Thanksgiving as every year it seems to get lost in the shadow of “Black Friday” and the crazy shopping mania in preparation for the looming Christmas holiday. In protest I refuse to set foot in any store the day after the Thanksgiving feast no matter how great the deals are.

And so, in the spirit of tomorrow’s holiday I’d like to say thank you to all Trulia-users who have taken the time to send us a question, comment, or suggestion. And as we will pass around the gravy boat tomorrow, I wanted to pass along some common customer service questions that we receive from our broker and agent partners.

How can I get my listings on Trulia?

There are two ways to get your listings on Trulia. The most reliable method is to prepare and submit a listings data feed of your own listings – your web host may be able to help you do this. Alternatively, if you can not prepare a data feed, you can submit your web site address for crawling by the Trulia search engine. We do not obtain listing data from the MLS. See this page to review your options.

What is a feed?

A feed is an XML document that is hosted on a web-server. If you don’t have knowledge of HTML code you will probably need to ask your web host to create and host the feed for you. On this page, you can see an example of what a feed looks like under ‘Trulia Feed Specifications’ and find the Listings Data Feed Submission Form.

How can I brand my listing with my logo or have my listing display as a featured listing?

This logo branding, as you can see for example on this results page, is one of the advertising products that helps us pay our bills. If you are interested in learning more about our existing products, or if you want us to contact you as we roll our new advertising products, complete the Advertising Opportunities for Broker and Other Businesses form found here.

What should I do if I notice a listing that displays incorrect information?

You can easily report a listing error to us. When you are looking at a listing on Trulia you will see a box titled ‘Next Steps’ in the middle of the page. Select the link within the box that says ‘Something wrong with this listing?’ Simply tell us what’s wrong with the listing and click ‘Send.’ This message will be sent directly to our engineers so they can troubleshoot the issue.

Your feedback is essential to help drive our development so keep it coming. Sending us your input is easy. Just complete our feedback form. Of course if you prefer to have a non-virtual conversation, you can always pick up the phone and call us at 866-7-TRULIA (866-787-8542). We want to be included among those delightfully smart things you’re thankful for, but we need your help to get there.

It’s Friday afternoon and I am getting ready to go out and start celebrating my birthday which this year conveniently falls on Saturday. People around the office have been making fun of my metrosexual party shirt so I had to put a sports jacket back on. Now I feel the need to express myself in a different way, so I am writing this blog post. I’ve been playing around with the overture inventory tool for a while and noticed some interesting things pertaining to real estate market search patterns across the Web. So, what do people search for?

Around 3 million people searched for the term “real estate” in October. But which cities are most popular? The table below gives the most popular geographic searches for “real estate” compared to the city population. The higher the ratio, the more popular the city is.

Lahaina, HI data looks very suspicious. Imagine over 200K people all moving into a city with less than 10K population. Hmm….it’s either a developer paradise, favorite web surfing location, or some kind of bug. Nevertheless, for everything else, the numbers are pretty interesting.

Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham are up-and-coming cities with quickly developing technology industries, seen as places for high-tech workers to find refuge from the exuberant housing prices of San Francisco and New York. Prices in Chicago and Phoenix have been growing steadily in the last few years. Could the current lack of interest be explained by the fact that the prices are topping out and it is not feasible to make a quick arbitrage buck? Can you help me explain the rest? As for me, its time to go and celebrate.

In my role as a developer here at Trulia, I find myself using our massive amounts of home information to answer random questions that interest me. I figured I would take the readers of the Trulia Blog along with me on one of my data journeys. This particular question came about because I am still a bit shocked by the crazy home prices out here in the SF Bay Area. I grew up in the Detroit, MI metro area, and the whole idea that you have to be semi-rich to own a home is quite a culture shock for those making the move I did. This led me to wonder: What exactly is “normal” for the price of a basic 2 bed, 2 bath home? And where exactly can you expect huge deviations from this norm? In other words, it’s one thing to have a city full of huge mansions that everyone knows are expensive, but where do even the homes that most would consider “basic” places carry significant price tags?

Let’s start with the median value of a 2 bed, 2 bath home. For everyone who hasn’t opened a stats book in a while, the median is the value that comes from lining up all values in order and picking the one that is exactly in the middle. Using the Trulia database, I can’t only say that the median value is $249,900, but I can also say that the property that represents the median in Trulia’s database is this condo in Sarasota, FL.

So let’s take this concept city by city - here are eight median 2 bed/2 bath properties on Trulia in cities far more expensive than my hometown. Because it’s the median, the actual homes in the Trulia database will change. But they (and their price tags) are interesting none-the-less.

1. Coronado, CA - 120 C Ave, $1,579,000
2. Laguna Beach, CA - 990 Meadowlark Dr, $1,350,876
3. New York, NY - 300 E 40th St, $1,295,000
4. Malibu, CA - 6435 Zumirez Dr, $1,130,000
5. Islamorada, FL - 101 Gulfview Dr, $910,000
6. Newport Beach, CA - 280 Cagney Ln, $829,000
7. San Francisco, CA - 1011 23rd St, $815,000
8. La Jolla, CA - 5366 La Jolla Blvd, $799,876

So what have we learned? Don’t live in California. Okay, just kidding, but I learned that you can literally sell your middle-of-the road Laguna Beach home and get the mansion of your dreams in 95% of the US (MTV reality show not included). As for me, I work in San Francisco and am anchored to the Bay Area for the foreseeable future. Luckily, all this doesn’t really matter to me because I plan on winning the lottery. If anyone has any pointers on how to do this or can put me in contact with this guy, please leave a comment.

We were honored a few weeks ago when Robert Scoble, the very cool tech evangelist, blogger and VP of media at Podtech.net, came by to interview Pete on the ScobleShow.

Robert also filmed a demo of Trulia and our tools - check it out here.

Scoble made waves over at Microsoft from 2003-2006 as part of the Channel9 video team, where he walked his camera into rooms with engineers, Bill himself and everyone in between. His book is a must read for brokers and agents considering using a blog to communicate with their customers.

NAR held their annual conference last week in New Orleans and I’m happy to report that Bourbon street is alive and well!

RIS Media hosted the “Power Broker Panel: Managing in the New Market” where high level real estate executives pondered how technology is changing/helping/hurting today’s brokers and agents - and what they should do about it.

Participants were (all bios are here):
Brian Buffini, Chairman & Founder, Buffini & Co.
Earl Lee, President, Prudential RE Affiliates
Alex Perriello, President & CEO, Realogy
Jim Sherry, President, Innovative Solutions
John Featherston, President & CEO, RISMedia Inc.
Dave Liniger, Chairman, Co-founder of RE/MAX International
Harley Rouda, CEO & Managing Partner, Real Living
Arthur Sterbcow, President, Latter & Blum

Thought I’d share a handful of their observations:

Sherry on print ads: I think we advertise so much print, because you can’t measure the effectiveness…so it’s an even worse deal than you think it is.

Lee on managing in the new market: We need to look at things on less of an emotional basis - and separate that data that gets distributed from the value that we bring to the table.

Sterbcow on agent value: The thing I learned about the market [through Hurricane Katrina] is the importance of a real estate agent as a human being or connection point to another human being. No website will ever replace that relationship - ever.

Rouda on internet ads: 34% of all media consumption is on the Internet, but only 6% of all ad spending. In our industry that number is even higher with 77% of consumers going online, but we spend far less than 6%. There is an opportunity to reach the consumer online with the right message that’s untapped.

Liniger on internet ads: 12 months ago we spent our money on traditional real estate advertising - properties, TV, print, radio — several thousands dollars for first time this year went to online marketing.

Rouda on the market: 2006 is going to be much worse than you thought. But we’ll rebound by the end of Q2 2007.

Perriello on the media & advice for agents: I hope Harley [Rouda] is right - but one thing that we can be sure of is that the media will be negative. The market is not bad - it will be 3rd/4th strongest year for real estate and consumers don’t know that houses are selling. Of the advertising that you do, make 20% sold listings.

Lee on a consolidated MLS: I’m a states rights guy. You cannot dictate from above. It will be a disservice to the industry if we do that.

Buffini on how to deal with change: Agents need to get out of the passive mode. When I was 25 I could eat pizza and oreos and lose weight. In my 40s, I walk by my kids eating oreos and I see the shadow of my backside increase. Agents need to break old habits of waiting for leads to call. They need to watch their diet.

Speaking of diets, the next time you head down to The Big Easy, I highly suggest Emeril’s Delmonico restaurant; an iconic New Orleans restaurant, now with a Lagasse twist!

This graph shows the percent of existing homes that were built in a given year in San Francisco (an old city), Houston (a new city) and Las Vegas (a very new city). It’s interesting to correlate the peaks and troughs with events like the San Francisco earthquake at the turn of the century, the Great Depression in the 30s, World War II and other significant events.

After the April 18, 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, there was a significant spike in home builds — the yellow line shows that 2.2% of San Francisco homes were built in 1906, 2.4% were built in 1907 and 2.65% were built in 1908 (these numbers might sound small, but SF hasn’t gone above 1% since 1951!).

Taking a look at Houston from the late 70s to early 80s, it looks like the Oil Embargo bolstered home building in the city, which abruptly ended when the embargo was lifted in 1986 (ah, oil and money bring back fond memories of Dallas…).

And Vegas baby? Roughly 45% of all homes on the market were built in the past 10 years. Maybe all those kids that played poker online have decided to take it up full time.

Any other interesting observations? We’d love to hear them!

Web 3.0 Predictions by a 1.0 Developer in a 2.0 World

Developers have migrated to the Web en masse. The browser is now the development platform, and the most interesting product and UI innovations are happening on the Web, often under the marketing name “Web 2.0“. Desktop office programs have browser versions, like Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets. Lots of folks are screaming that the desktop is dead.

Being a reformed desktop app developer myself, I beg to differ. My prediction is that the “Web 3.0″ wars will actually be waged on the desktop, with internet-enabled desktop applications harnessing the best of the Web’s dynamic data updates and the best of the desktop’s significant horsepower, while bypassing each platform’s inherent problems.

In spite of the Web’s clear advantages, the desktop still rules in certain domains. The most basic functions in Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Movie Maker take a tremendous amount of work to be replicated in a browser, and while some folks ooh and aah over the programming kung-fu of a Web-based, drag-and-drop, rich-text editor, it’s still a stupid text editor. My cat can write a better one for the desktop in 10 minutes and 100 lines of Delphi code.

It’s easy to notice the huge number of great Web apps coming out and miss the equally impressive desktop apps that have come out in recent years. There have been at least 13 desktop search programs; iTunes; dozens of P2P file-sharing programs; stardock, tons of desktop widgets (stock tickers, etc); scores of media players; and possibly the most-talked about non-Website program in recent years: Google Earth. A lot of these programs could run in your browser, but their developers made them desktop apps, usually for power and/or the ease of rich application development built into every modern OS, which browsers haven’t begun to catch up with.

The natural evolution, then, is not in turning your browser into a mini OS with a graphical shell–we’re already hitting serious roadblocks there. I’d bet real money the next step in the cycle is to turn stodgy desktop apps into connected powerhouses leveraging Web services and other APIs for up-to-the-minute data (and user data storage, why not?), and harnessing desktop OSes’ superior UI libraries and horsepower to display that data in creative, responsive, fast and exciting new ways the browser can’t replicate with acceptable browser (or programmer) performance.

How about a desktop Photoshop-style program with desktop-powered editing functions but seamless Web storage, integrated with Flickr tagging and A9 image search; or really, really fast and powerful news aggregation, search and processing? The sky is the limit.

Who’s with me?