As usual, the Trulia Trends report (PDF) gives us an interesting snapshot of what’s happening across the country in both consumer search behavior online and median list prices.

Homes on Trulia’s top 10 list of most searched homes ranged from a $245,000 Midtown coop in New York City to a Bel Air trophy estate priced at 163x that amount at $40,000,000. A snapshot of the 10 hottest homes:

• The priciest home on the list was a one of a kind, Bel Air, $40,000,000 estate is on 3.2 acres, has a sunken tennis court, 33 bedrooms, 41 full bathrooms, three living rooms and five main master suites.
• The second most expensive home on the list is a Manhattan Beach, 872 square foot fixer upper with 2 beds and 2 baths priced at $1,079,000.
• For $279,000, home shoppers can bid farewell to Manhattan, and cross the bridge over to Brooklyn into a historic studio coop in a Park Slope brownstone with pre-war detailing and charm!
• The five-bedroom, three-bathroom, Colonial style home in West Bloomfield, MI his the lowest price per bedroom ratio with each bedroom costing a mere $67,000. The average cost per bedroom for the top ten most searched homes is $400,556!!

Other findings include:

• After getting pushed out of the top spot last month by Manhattan, Chicago once again reigns supreme as the most searched city in the America for real estate.
• Taking a look at list price changes, Miami Beach, FL which was the biggest gainer in median price month-over-month with a 17% increase from May to June.
• Something must be in the water in Virginia, with Alexandria, Falls Church and Arlington all surging over 45% in month-over-month search queries on Trulia.com. Perhaps the upcoming presidential election has confident staffers scrambling to purchase before the real work gets started in 2008.

You can take a look at the full report here (PDF). Enjoy!

As Inman Connect descends upon San Francisco, the entire Trulia team is elated to not only attend, but also participate in the revelry. A number of our own - Pete Flint, Jamie Glenn, Alejandro Foung, and Pierre Calzadilla will be joining a list of prominent executives, innovators, and entrepreneurs from technology, real estate, and mortgage companies to speak on their various expertises.

We know that there are thousands of you who are traveling from the four corners to grace our beautiful city for the next few days, and will (we hope) enjoy the spectacular weather (which of course is always as picture perfect as this).

If you haven’t already, you soon will discover the enchantment of San Francisco - not only in the sights, culture, restaurants, and wine bars, but also the self-proclaimed hub of technological entrepreneurialism, let alone web 2.0.

Should you decide you simply can’t stay away any longer, and a possible relocation is in your sights, consider coming to work at Trulia. We’re hiring like crazy, and would love the opportunity to speak with you!

If the job of your dreams isn’t currently listed, well, contact me anyway – I’m (obviously) a huge fan and advocate of this amazing company…

You can reach me by email:
dmorris at trulia

…I eagerly look forward to talking about it!

The 52nd Carnival of Real Estate is hosted by Gena Riede of the Sacramento Real Estate Voice. Gena chose a board-game theme to present the winning entries this week and I’m sure you only need one guess to think of the game most relatable to real estate.

Monopoly of course!!

Teams of Mortgage Professionals, Inspectors, Vendors, and Realtors were all vying to be the big kids on the Boardwalk. Here’s a sneak peak of those who came out on top.

Stephanie Edwards of ActiveRain and her post, ‘Pack Your Bags For The Journey Ahead’

America’s Mortgage Broker, Brian Brady and his article ‘San Diego Mortgage Advice: Call to ARMs’

Patriot Funding’s Tim Abbott and his ‘Look into the Minds of Madmen’

and

Stan Humphries of Zillow with his post, ‘All Politics is Local: Blue States Beat Out Red States in Home Values’

Go take a look at these and other great posts and don’t forget to collect $200* when you pass Go.

*Not provided by Trulia.

Often I get my in-depth research on advertising trends from Borrell Associates, who reported that Internet real estate advertising spending will propel from $2B in 2006 past $3B by 2010, surpassing newspapers in ad market share (2006 Update: Online Real Estate Advertising).

There is a new report on the block and I was one of the lucky ones given an advanced copy. Launched today, Inman News put out an ambitious, new 51-page report, The State of Real Estate Marketing – 2007: Assessing Marketing Budgets, Trends and Opportunities for Real Estate Agents and Brokers.

Well, with exclusive access AND an opportunity to prep myself for super intelligent industry networking and banter at Inman’s Real Estate Connect SF conference next week, I couldn’t resist.

Statistical feedback is provided on responses to survey questions like:

• Will real estate ad/marketing spends increase or decrease over the coming year?
• What percent of real estate ad/marketing budgets will go towards online services?
• What are the most popular categories of online ad/marketing (keywords, lead gen, SEO, etc.) for agents/brokers?

The conclusions:

• 42% plan to spend more than half their advertising and marketing budget online.
• 48% plan to buy Featured Listings ads as part of their online buy.
• 68% plan to promote their properties on Web sites offering free listings, with Trulia being in the top 3 most often cited (whoo hoo!).
• SEO & social networking will play a notable role in ad spending.

The report reveals how new media is becoming more a part of real estate marketing in the midst of a shifting business climate (ahem, no secret that this is good news for us at Trulia, given our Featured Listing product, newly launched Trulia Voices Q&A community, and media revenue model).

I’ve given you a sampling of the data above, but it’s absolutely worth a read. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on how these findings compare with your own experience in the space!

A few weeks ago I was chatting with Roberta (personal blog), and she mentioned an interest in a Trulia Voices button that she could place on her blog or Web site. Well, we thought that was pretty clever and not too challenging to build so last week we quietly launched a button that you can put into your blogs, side rails or Web pages to show off your local expertise and drive people to your profile page on Trulia Voices.

Here is my Trulia Voices button, which takes you to my profile page:

How to get yours:

1. Login into your Trulia Voices profile page

2. On the left hand side of the page you’ll see a promotion for the buttons (I’ve circled it in red in the image to the left).

3. Click the blue “get it now link” and you’re good to go.

4. Select the button you want, and copy and paste the code onto your site.

The 51st Carnival of Real Estate is hosted this week at Rain City Guide and judged by Ardell DellaLoggia. Top entries include:

‘Selling Like a Catholic School Girl’ by Brian Brady over at Active Rain

‘Co-ops loosing clout with luxury buyers?’ by Peter Comitini of the Corcoran Group

‘The Combination Real Estate Agent / Lender: One-Stop Shopping, or Half-Assed Service?’ by Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

‘Top Ten Tidbits for Success’ by Brande Bradford of Active Rain

and ‘Expected Rate Of Decline Of Home Prices In The Next Year’ from The Digerati Life

Check out Ardell’s criteria for selecting these great reads and see how they stack up according to your own.

Happy Reading!

Launched in 1999, ZipRealty Inc. was founded on the belief that selling or buying a home could be faster, easier and more efficient. Utilizing the power of the Internet, ZipRealty has streamlined the real estate process and has passed along significant savings for consumers. We caught up with Richard Sommer (Former CEO of ZipRealty) at Real Estate Connect, to see what changes he sees on the horizon.

*Our apologies for the poor sound quality, but the event was so exciting that the crowd noise was bound to leak in. For a complete transcription, click HERE:

The 50th Carnival of Real Estate, hosted at Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio, is already garnering a lot of praise. Gregg Swann calls it ‘the most original presentation yet.’

On the heels of two PGA events shaking up the Ohio scene, Toby Boyce presents the Carnival with a golf theme. Despite being a golfer myself (not a good one I assure you) I was still tempted to make a joke about how being 50 and playing golf seem to go hand in hand - most of my younger golfing experiences occurred with my grandparents and others in their golden years.

But I must admit that golf is far from the senior citizen sport is used to be (yes, I’m very well acquainted with the talents of Tiger Woods) and Toby’s ‘match-play challenge’ is extremely entertaining.

I can’t do any justice to the play-by-play he offers and I don’t want to ruin the surprise and let you know who wins, so I’m just going to list a few of the challengers below and encourage all to go read and enjoy.

Broker Bryant presents ‘You Want My Seller to Do What?’

Jeff Kempe of BloodhoundBlog authors ‘The Imperative of Divorced Commissions, Part 2: The Inherent Value of Free’

Oliver Muoto of vFlyerBlog asks ‘Online Real Estate Advertising - Are You Doing Any?’

and

John Everat of ActiveRain provides ‘Sound Market Advice in an UnSound Market’

We’re blushing…

This morning it was announced that Trulia has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the AO 100 Top Private Companies for 2007. The idea behind the AO100 top private companies list is to identify the most promising entrepreneurial opportunities and investments in the global tech industry. There were more than 1,000 nominations from VCs, investment bankers and other industry experts.

We’re flattered to be in such great company.

This year’s winners include a diverse set, including Wikia, RGB Networks, 4INFO and Stardoll, while last year’s list included Facebook, Aruba Networks, YouTube and 2wire, among others. As a team, we work hard to deliver significant value for home buyers/sellers and real estate professionals…and we think we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what we can do.

The AO 100 Top Private Companies for 2007 will be honored at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit to be held July 31 – Aug 2, May 1-3, 2007, at Stanford University.

We are very excited to announce that we’re working with CNNMoney to provide home listings information to MONEY magazine’s annual Best Places to Live feature, launched today.

We’re told that it is the most popular feature on the CNNMoney site, presumably prompting millions of their readers to dream about where the grass might be just a bit greener. Readers can dive through local information about the best places to live around the country, as well as lists across a number of characteristics such as top cities with highest incomes, most affordable homes, most singles, skinniest people (Marin county is #1 and SF county is #6–wow), etc.

Across the thousands of pages in this feature, we are providing CNNMoney’s readers with the ability to view homes for sale, recent sales and “Million Dollar Homes” on a Trulia map interface on all 3,500+ cities featured. A Trulia search box on the city profile pages also allows readers to fully customize their home search. Check it out!

As some of you might not know, CNNMoney.com (FORTUNE, MONEY, Business 2.0) is a part of Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest media company - we’re looking forward to a great ongoing partnership with them!

Here’s our official press release.