September continues to be a very special month for us at Trulia. Three years ago we released the first beta version of Trulia.com in California as a five (yes, 5!) person start-up and two years ago we launched nationwide.
Wow – time has flown and a lot of things both internally and externally have changed in the last two years since we went nationwide in the middle of a housing boom. The real estate environment at that time is well characterized by the book that was published at the end of 2006: “Flipping Houses for Dummies”.
Since then we’ve enjoyed phenomenal growth thanks to our hard working team and loyal partners and clients, but who would have really thought that all this would happen in just two years since September 2006…
Externally..
• The most fundamental pillars of the U.S. mortgage market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go bankrupt and are eventually investigated by the FBI for potential fraud.
• All starting from the mortgage melt down, one of the most capitalistic government’s in the world would prepare for a $700 Billion dollar bail out of Wall Street.
• Something that we started in 2005, becomes common vocabulary for all real estate industry participants: “Listing syndication” is not anymore a “What” or “Should we”, but “How” and “Where” question for brokers, MLS’s and agents.
• Realtors would start acquiring real new clients using online social media when social networking was thought of as something kids used to do on Friendster and MySpace.
Internally..We would have:
• More than 80 Trulia team members on two coasts
• More than 5 Million monthly unique users on Trulia
• More than 100,000 real estate professionals on our Voices platform and several thousand paying local advertisers
• More than 100 happy large enterprise clients across the country
• More than 3 Million property listings, almost all directly from broker feeds
• Risen more than 50 positions on the Comscore list of real estate sites (see below Comscore for August 2008)
• No segways, private offices, aeron chairs or private chefs at the office – Yes, we are still very frugal and proud of it!
Thank you everyone for your great participation and contribution during the last 3 years!
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September 29th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Congratulations Sami and crew. You’ve come a long way, and innovated yourself the slew of listing site competitors that launched at the same time, by providing value to both the consumer and the broker.