Today we are pleased to announce some exciting updates to Trulia.com, including the launch of Agent Featured Listings, a service that enables agents to substantially increase traffic to their Web sites from serious home buyers and allows real estate professionals to attach custom contact information, including email and phone, to their listings on Trulia.com. In the beta test of Agent Featured Listings, agents received, on average, four times more traffic to featured property listings than to non-featured listings!
Agents will have access to a self-service tool to highlight up to 10 listings per month for a monthly subscription fee of $50. For less than the price of a typical newspaper classified ad, agents can now highlight their listings and connect directly to more than 2 million unique users per month — that includes a highly affluent group of home buyers, 81% of who are looking to purchase a home in the next 12 months.
Here is a little more information on the product:
- Ability to display your photo and contact information on the property detail page on Trulia
- Weekly reports emailed directly to you showing views, visits and inquiries from Trulia
- Online self-service tool to find and select listings you would like to feature
- Secure online monthly billing via credit card
- Ability to cancel at anytime
You can find more information in this online presentation and sign-up here.
This is our first self-service agent product and in the future, we’ll be adding more agent tools and features to help you gain additional exposure for your listings on Trulia. Specifically, we would like to allow agents to change the website that they link to on their property detail page, and also feature themselves within specific zipcodes, neighborhoods and cities. Keep checking our blog for more updates in the future.
If you would like to discuss other forms of advertising on Trulia.com with one of our sales representatives, please get in touch with us here.
Updated property pages
We’re also excited to announce that we’ve updated our property pages on Trulia to make them more useful and user-friendly. Key changes include:
- Improvements to user interface and layout
- The addition of open house information
- Improved comps, including similar homes for sale or recently-sold and price comparisons
- Easier sign-up for single-property alerts tool
Some updates to Trulia Voices
Finally, if that is not enough, we’ve also made a a minor enhancement to Trulia Voices. For Trulia addicts out there, the most obvious change is the addition of a location display next to your profile. You can still see user activity and “member since” information with a nifty roll-over feature.
We have spent a lot of time recently speaking to consumers and agents about how we can improve Trulia Voices. More changes are in store to help us achieve our vision for making Trulia Voices the best possible Q&A tool for consumers and real estate professionals. Pete shares what we heard and some upcoming changes that are in store. Thanks to Sylvia and everyone else for your questions, answers and support!
Our goal at Trulia is to deliver the best online real estate experience on the market. Please keep watching for a range of improvements - both big and small - in the coming months!
Popularity: 3% [?]
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November 8th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Hi,
If I didn’t read this, I am not sure how long it would have taken me to figure out that rolling over the picture (avatar?) provides additional info. I could see from the name underlined that one could click on a link, but wouldn’t roll over the picture unless someone told me.
I just read a post from a consumer that indicated she was not aware for a while that she could use TU and TD.
Maybe a FAQ section for consumers would be helpful.
BTW, thanks for using me as your example above,
Deborah
November 8th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Kevin Boer in da haus!
Your mug shot is going to be plastered across the http://WWW.
NICE!
November 8th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Howdy Trulians -
Just curious as to why you imposed an embargo until 6:00am pacific time on Nov 8 but posted this sometime in the evening of Nov 7? Was it really that important to get a 12 hour jump on a few bloggers?
November 8th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Jay,
I have no idea what your comment meant. Is this something you are saying Trulia did? Don’t understand, please explain. Thanks Deborah
November 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Deborah - Trulia “released” this news early to some people (I don’t know how many) with an “embargo” for 6:00am PST today. Basically, what that means is they told some folks (bloggers, the main stream media, etc) about this news and asked that we not publish it until 6:00am PST today.
Companies do this with their press releases / announcements all the time. It gives those people time to review and write a story. Understandably, companies set a time for release — any time after the embargo is “lifted”.
In my (albeit somewhat limited) experience, companies generally time their own releases to occur at, or shortly before the embargo time.
This blog post was made roughly 12 hours prior to embargo time.
There’s certainly no law against it, it’s Trulia’s news and they can release it whenever they want. It’s just that they trusted those they “tipped” to honor the embargo and for whatever reason chose not to honor it themselves. Kind of strange, and I was just curious as to why.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
This is a surprise to see and thanks for mentioning me in your Blog.
As you well know, the real effort is by all the Trulians (Deborah, Paul, Jim, Patrick, Ruth, Bridgett, Patti, Heather; just to name a few heavy contributors since I came on board) who have been on the forum and have been staying on through thick and thin - The questions and requests that are in my posts are only part of what they have contributed so far.
As a former IT professional, I know it will take time to make all the enhancements and more; and I am sure Trulia will continue to improve. One thing I really like about Trulia, other than the customers, and great real estate PROs, is that here is always a Trulia customer service rep on board (thanks Emily, Trulia Roger, and a few others) to answer questions and respond to concerns; and yes, Pete pops in also.
So, thanks!
Deborah - Good suggestion on FAQ. It would be nice to include the Community Guidelines http://www.trulia.com/guidelines/
and Agent Best Practices
http://www.trulia.com/voices/Using_Trulia/Trulua_Voices_Agent_Best_Practices_-7580–
Sylvia
November 8th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Thanks for your post, Jay. Yes, this info helped.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
As a Realtor I am tired of listening to the gloom and doom of the national media on housing issues. What is going on in Florida, California and other parts of the country does not represent the market in Washington and most of all Gig Harbor. I am pleased to give you the facts about our market.
The market here is stable and is a responsible marketplace for home buyers. The foreclosure rates today are the same today as they were 10 years ago. Fewer than 1% of mortgages end in default in Washington state. As of mid-June, sub-prime, adjustable-rate loans represented 20% of loans nationally, but just 6% of home loans in Washington.
Home appreciation in Washington continues to out-perform the rest of the nation with year-to-year price increases every quarter since spring of 1995. Home prices in Washington have increased an average of 8.1% since the same time last year, according to WSU Center for Real Estate Research (CRER).
Why is Washington different? The home market isn’t keeping pace with the growth of the state’s population, which is continuing to increase at 1.8% per year. According to the office of Washington State’s Financial Management, Washington state’s population will increase by nearly one million over the present decade.
According to the Northwest Multiple Listing Statistics the median price for active listings in the Gig Harbor area is up 4.1% over last year, the median price for pending listings are the same from last year, and the median price for closed sales is up .3%.
What does that mean to you as a homeowner? It means the real estate market is still
thriving. Sellers who are employing knowledgeable real estate agents to properly price their homes and provide state of the art marketing are selling their homes in the shortest amount of time for the most amount of money. If you want to know what your real estate would bring in today’s market, how long it will take to sell , and the type of marketing
it will take to produce buyers that will pay the market price call me at (253) 861-6805
or e-mail me at Realestate@darlenecherry.com you may be surprised at what you can
learn.
November 13th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Jay, you are right! Sorry about jumping the gun on the blog post as this was not the intent. In the excitement of launching our first-ever agent product, the blog team hit ‘publish’ several hours too quick!
January 17th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
these service tools make trulia a propertty professional website. People find trulia very easy to use and professional
January 25th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
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