Year in Review

Before we kick off the New Year, we think it’s important to take stock of the year that has passed–to review our progress as we press forward through 2007. It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, we were live in one state. Of course, it’s important to reflect on what could’ve been done better as well, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

It’s been quite a year…

January
We launch our New York service, our first state outside of California. Curbed called our NYC announcement a “huge one” and both Gothamist and Rain City Guide liked our “nice” interface. Not a bad way to start the year!

February
We receive a belated Valentine’s Day present from Business 2.0 who featured us as one of the NextNet 25; one of 25 start-ups reinventing the Web.

March
We get personal with the launch of My Trulia. Offering home buyers the ability to save searches, save properties and manage email subscriptions. Our first ever white paper: “The Truth About Real Estate Search” is released.

April
Florida and Texas launch. Still seems like a long road to national coverage…

May
More real estate brokers see the value of the Trulia search model and sign up with Trulia. At least 15 partnerships are announced.

June
Trulia launches TruliaBlog as a new way to communicate with our friends in the real estate community, announce new products, and share our deep thoughts.

July
A busy month for Trulia. Our Markermen make their first public appearance–out and about at the Inman Connect Real Estate conference. TruliaMap launches, enabling listings to be mapped on agent and broker sites.

We also were delighted to win the 2006 Inman Innovator Award for Best Web Service.

August
Another ten states launch.

September
Trulia goes national, launching in all 50 states. Major new product enhancements were reported on in the blogosphere: we launched Heat Maps, neighborhood guides and our property comparables.

Both BusinessWeek and Future of Real Estate Marketing readers vote us the 2006 Best of the Web for Real Estate and Best Real Estate search site, respectively.

October
We discover an important alternate use case for Heat Maps.

November
It’s a month of videos! We decide to launch vlogging on TruliaBlog. And, Silicon Valley legend Robert Scoble comes into the office for an interview.

December
Thought we’d close the year out with a bang–we take our mash-ups to another dimension by adding Google Earth integration. We get visits from 3 oceans and the Real Estate Economy. Hit a major milestone with 1m for-sale listings on Trulia. Finally, we add an all star Real Estate Advisory Board to provide us their wisdom as we innovate into 2007.

Wow–what a year it was…we started the year in one state, now we’re in 50; we’ve imposed quality control standards to keep our listings clean; and looking at our traffic statistics, we’ve been growing an average of over 25% each month over the last 6 months.

We know that there is still a lot of work to be done, but for now, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our users, our partners and our ever expanding and very talented team of Trulians for making it all happen.

THANK YOU for making 2006 an exciting and very memorable year. Here’s to 2007!

Interview with Mike Pappas, President Keyes Company

Sales of residential real estate plunged 30-40% in Florida this year. Mike Pappas, President of The Keyes Company, a $4.3B Miami brokerage with 2000 agents and 32 offices, tells us how his company is going to thrive in this difficult market.

Mike will spend 100 days in 2007 traveling the world as Chairman of the Young President’s Organization (YPO) to find out from CEO’s in various industries around the world how bring his company into the future. Meanwhile, he advises his agents to hunker down and go back to the basics of marketing homes and servicing clients.

On the first day of Christmas…

…my Trulia gave to me: a free plasma TV. Well, actually, Trulia didn’t give it to me. As an employee, I’m not eligible to win the bait that we’re dangling to get people to take our user survey; and even if I were eligible, the chances that my name would be drawn are only like 2 out of 3 (obviously I would rig the draw, but my code tends to be buggy). But the new TV is sitting here in our office in its unopened package, looming over me, haunting my dreams, reminding me every time I walk by just how crappy and low-definition my TV at home is.

Speaking of the days of Christmas: what happened to the other 11? Have we been shaving off days as part of a gradual trend of downsizing fun over the centuries? What’s next, Santa hires an efficiency consultant and lays off half of the reindeer? (Don’t worry about Rudolph getting canned — he’s got tenure.)

On second thought, Santa’s probably doing okay for himself these days. I bet he’s making a killing on his real estate holdings — apparently the North Pole is a “hot city” right now. We don’t yet have a heat map for this location, but I’m okay with that. I’m not sure how much sense it would make to have a heat map for a place where the average daytime high is about negative 5 million degrees.

Happy holidays! And for those of you who, like me, fail to win the TV, here’s your consolation prize: an animation of our co-founder dancing as an elf.

Carnival of Real Estate

This week’s carnival hosted by Seattle Real Estate Professionals and is sure to entertain and educate. In addition to finding our very own Jeff 2.0′s blog on viral growth, you’ll find Teresa Boardman’s post on blogging for leads at Real Estate Tomato, Joel Burslem giving alternatives to YouTube for the would be videoblogger/multimedia marketer (although we tried a few for our vblog and YouTube is the current front runner), and more.

Tapping Industry Expertise with Real Estate Advisory Board

We just announced the formation of our new ten-member real estate advisory board to help Trulia navigate the real estate industry nuances and deliver consumers the best neighborhood and home search experience online. Here’s the short list:

• Anthony Azar, CEO, Realty Executives Southern Arizona
• Sherry Chris, COO, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation
• Van Davis, Former CEO, Foxtons; Former President & CEO, Century 21 Real Estate
• Michael Koval, SVP & CIO, Long & Foster Real Estate, Inc.
• Jonathan Miller, President/CEO, Miller Samuel Inc.
• Robert Moles, Chairman, Intero Real Estate Services
• Steve Ozonian, Chairman of the Board & CEO, Realty Information Systems Inc./Help-U-Sell Real Estate
• Michael Pappas, President, The Keyes Company
• Bob Peltier, President, Edina Realty, Inc.
• Bill Plattos, COO and General Manager, First Team Real Estate
• Kaira Sturdivant Rouda, COO, Real Living, Inc.

Why build an industry advisory board? Well, we’ve focused on being ‘industry friendly’ since day one, and now we’re upping that mantra a notch. We brought together some fairly diverse perspectives and business models from markets across the country–leaders who have successfully ridden through a real estate cycle or two. As the market shifts again, who better to provide insight and constructive feedback on our model than your real estate colleagues who are embracing this change, understand the power of the Internet and intend to thrive in new times. We’re counting on this collective input to vocalize the important issues in real estate.

Why should consumers care? For buyers, this is about helping you more easily connect with the real estate professional who knows the most about a property listing for sale: the listing broker or agent. (The person or team most likely to have sat at the home seller’s kitchen table.) For sellers, this is about providing you and your agent with an independent search and marketing tool to cost-effectively market your property online and capture the interest of consumers who are serious about home search.

As we continue to innovate, your constructive feedback is an important part of this process. Onward!

Viral Growth- More Than a Buzzword

Like many other companies, we think a lot about “viral growth” – how it comes about and what we can do to get more of it.

The idea behind the term viral growth dates back to 1976 with Richard Dawkins’ publication of The Selfish Gene. This book proposes evolution as a cultural phenomenon, the units composing this evolution being “memes” rather than genes. The major difference between biological and cultural evolution, besides the anatomical one, is that a meme can spread much more quickly than a gene. This is true now more than ever, as the Internet blasts through ever more communication barriers.

What is a meme? It’s a framework for thinking about things– fairly analogous to a thought, or an idea– but it really could be anything. Examples of memes: wearing clothes, wearing white after labor day, wearing a suit to work, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the phrase “Is that your final answer,” cotton, the story you have about the biggest fish you ever caught, an agent’s reputation. A meme is anything that can be passed on from person to person and whose rate of acceptance varies directly with its ability to entertain, help, or in some way be useful.

Viral growth is when a meme spreads very fast, without the aid of marketing dollars. But how is this growth achieved? Why is one meme selected over another? There are 2 concepts to keep in mind:

1. It’s the audience, stupid. The success of a meme depends largely on its environment. Imagine a genetic disorder that turns blood cells into hard, sickly crescents that clog vessels and deprive your body of oxygen. You’d think it’s a horrible disease that no human would want, but this disorder is a veritable BMOC in one particular setting. It is sickle-cell anemia and is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, where it counteracts malaria by killing off infected cells before they spread. The point is, almost no gene or meme is completely and utterly bad (or good), but the audience needs to be right. On the other hand, electricity seems like a pretty useful thing to [almost] everyone who encounters it in its non-lighting form, but it doesn’t sell in Lancaster, PA.

2. But what does the audience want? The problem is, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what your audience wants. This is partly because your audience doesn’t know; witness the roughly 80% percent of home sellers that hire an agent after trying to sell their house themselves because they “knew” they didn’t want to pay a commission. But mostly it’s because you’re just one entity with a particular view on the world, which may or may not be in concert with the audience’s desires. The only way to check this ignorance is to innovate continuously, keeping things that work and dropping things that don’t. Instincts and experience can launch a product, but in the absence of exceptional luck, measuring and testing are required to really make it work.

Good luck!

Interview with Help-U-Sell Chairman Ozonian

I had a chance to sit down with Steve Ozonian, former President of Realtor.com and current Chairman of brokerage firm Help-U-Sell. His view: the future of real estate brokerage is all about transparency to the consumer. Sorry about the background noise, but it mellows out the second half of the interview.

We’re in good company…

We were surprised and honored at the recent inclusion of Trulia co-founders, Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, in REALTOR Magazine’s “15 Who’ve Had an Impact,” complimenting the pub’s 2006 announcement of “Real Estate’s 25 Most Influential Thought Leaders.” Wow–what a lineup. Our Trulian duo is in good company with none other than Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Brad Inman, CEO of TurnHere and Founder of Inman News, and even the (drumroll…..) “Participatory Consumer,” described as “embracing the Internet as a source of real estate knowledge, sparking a sea of change in business models.”

A special congratulations to all 25 of the “Most Influential,” including several of our marketing partners: Steve Ozonian of Realty Information Systems/Help-U-Sell, Wesley Foster, Jr. of Long & Foster, Rich Rector of Real Executives International, Harley Rouda of Real Living and Jim Weichert of Weichert Lead Network, to name just a few.

Trulia…meet Google Earth

Fly baby fly – we’ve launched a new Google Earth tool for the uber-techie, hyper-visual among you. Check out your future neighbors’ homes and discover which neighbors have been lying when they tell you that no, for the last time, they do not have a helipad on their roof. Oh yeah, and there’s a practical use to this too; you can use Google Earth with Trulia to make your real estate search 3D! Plus, you’ll receive a daily update of homes that match your search criteria directly to Google Earth.

How does it work? First, you need you have Google Earth installed on your computer. If you don’t have it, download it here. Now you can just go to the RSS pull down menu on the top right of any Trulia search results screen and select “Google Earth” to view your search results. When your results load to Google Earth, you’ll find it in the “Places” section; click on the results to zoom on in. Google Earth will automatically update (much like an RSS feed) with the newest listings that match your search criteria once a day.

If you’re new to all this 3D mapping stuff, be sure to check out the Google Earth blog. Happy Flying!