Trulia Sponsors and Speaks at the 2008 Carolina One Marketing and Technology Trade Show
Last Tuesday, I represented Trulia at the 2008 Carolina One Real Estate Marketing and Technology Trade Show in Charleston, South Carolina. Having attended many real estate industry conferences nationwide, this is the largest individual company event I’ve participated in to date. It was very well attended with approximately 900 real estate agents. Kudos to Carolina One’s Philip Cheves, Marketing Director, Les Sease, IT Director, and their team for putting it all together. A first class event for sure.
The night before the trade show, I searched for local Carolina One real estate agents online and on Trulia Voices. I made some notes about some of these agents and when I saw them at the show or walking up to the booth, I already felt like I knew them. I told some of them that I knew who they were and they were shocked, pleasantly of course. I was hoping they would have this feeling as I wanted to demonstrate to them how it would feel when an educated online consumer contacted them.
The first person I recognized walking in the aisle was Seth Siegler. I told him that I knew him. He looked at me like I was nuts 
Seth has a great understanding of how to make social media and blogging work for him. In fact, he also gave a presentation on social media at the conference. Nice meeting you Seth.
Then I met Foster Smith. He has a good online presence in the Charleston and Summerville area. We had some wonderful conversations about blogging, social media and Trulia Voices. I look forward to seeing him get more active on Voices.
One of the highlights of the trade show was meeting Millie Martin. She told me a very cool Trulia story. Once upon a time she wanted to post a piece of land she had for sale on Trulia but she couldn’t. I asked why? She said that her piece of property was priced at $9,000 and that the minimum price we allowed at the time was $10,000. She contacted customer service about her unique situation and we fixed it. So thanks to Millie, you can post real estate listed for under $10,000. A perfect example of how your feedback can help shape what we do at Trulia.
As the only Trulian at the event, I had a busy non-stop day. Besides manning the Trulia booth, I gave two presentations – Three Ways to Generate Business Online to a group of 40-50 agents. I received lots of great feedback afterwords about Trulia and have since followed up with many of them. The second presentation was called Agent 2.0 which I presented to about 900 agents. Easily, the single largest audience I have ever spoken in front of. An amazing experience that resulted in many great follow up conversations about Trulia, blogging and social media.
On behalf of Trulia, I want to thank everyone at Carolina One Real Estate and all the attendees for a memorable experience.
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Announcing Two New Widgets For Your Web Site
I’m excited to let everyone know that we have two new free real estate widgets for your blog or web site!
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This one has been in the works for a while now. You’ve probably heard of Trulia Snapshot, the project where you can see local homes for sale using an ultra-cool mapping feature. You can even set the site to “auto-play” and the results will scroll for you.
We heard from tons of people who want to have Trulia Snapshot directly on their web site or blog. Well now you can. The TruliaShapshot widget allows you to build your own customized version of Trulia Snapshot and easily include it on your own site for your visitors.
Check out the example for Chicago above. We even included the auto-play feature so people can sit back and watch the results scroll on your blog.
One of the most popular sections of Trulia is the amount of local real estate statistics, trend and school information. Our users can easily find out what’s going on in their cities or neighborhoods and compare it to other areas. We even have charts that you can embed on your own sites and a great TruliaStats widget that shows an interactive chart of local home prices over the past year.
Our users have been asking us for a small and simple statistics widget, one that just shows the median price change for a particular city. Our new TruliaMinistats widget is just that – a small and simple widget that shows the median price change, in both absolute dollars and in percentage, for any city in the US. It’s a great local real estate tool that anyone can easily drop into their blog or website.
We’re super excited to add these widgets to the list of Trulia’s real estate tools for your website. These tools are free, easily embeddable on any web page and add great real estate content for website owners.
We can’t wait to see our users embedding these free widgets on their pages! If you’ve done so, please let us know the page on your site in the comments below.
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Weathering the Current Economic Storm
I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time we had a “normal” week. If it’s not the “worst week ever”, it’s the government pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy or companies going bankrupt or being bought. Last week was no exception. We saw the global stock markets tumble and in our neck of the woods foreclosures are down a little month-over-month but up 21% year-over-year. Foreclosures continue to be a huge part of the housing market as the number of existing home sales grows, but prices plummet. While many of us in the real estate industry have been used to negative news for some time, the recent volume and intensity is unprecedented. For some companies and agents in the real estate industry, this no doubt will be a perfect storm , and they will move on and out of the industry
I see the combined impact of:
- The deflating housing market, with double digit price declines in many regions
- Credit markets dried up, making financing for new homes much more difficult
- Reduced consumer confidence from the falling value of their investments leads to economic uncertainty
We’re responding to the market — both internally and over at Trulia’s housing crisis center and are confident we will weather the storm. But we do not underestimate the ferocity ahead.
On a day-to-day basis, one of the most challenging aspects of running Trulia in today’s market is forecasting our business. We have lots of plans, products and initiatives and it is hard to predict what is going to happen next week. Historically, we have been pretty good at hitting our milestones and forecasts for visitors to the site, community participation and revenues, but over the last 3 months, it’s been much harder to forecast.
For a company that is driven by data, it is maddening. I guess I should feel lucky that I’m not in the stock market, where daily 5% up or down swings seem to have become commonplace! That being said, all news is not bad news—we are seeing record days in terms of traffic and revenue and other real estate companies are seeing bounces as well. So, while I enjoy a good rollercoaster now and again, I’ll be very happy when things return back to normal.
4 commentsHome Buyer Foreclosure Question – What Do I Offer?
This weeks Trulia Voices most viewed question comes from Randy, a home buyer in Miami, Florida where he asks, “How Low Can I go?“. He found a foreclosure property that he loves but doesn’t know what to offer and is having a hard time getting in contact with the real estate agent. What should he do?
Thoughts from our Trulia Voices Real Estate Community
Tony Croft, a full service mortgage banker from Edgewater, New Jersey said, “Find an agent you can trust that will help you write an offer on the property.”
Ed Fitch, a real estate Broker/Owner in San Jose, California, says, “The bank or their Asset Manager is looking at numbers only. You can usually expect a 10% leway depending on the institution, location of the property, and the listing strategy.”
Joe Jackson, a real estate agent in Worthington, Ohio, said, “1. Hire an agent to represent you! An agent who doesn’t show up in this market is not worth keeping! 2. How will you know the market has bottomed out? When the prices start to go up! 3. Make an infomred offer 10% +- below list and see what haapens. 4. Have a home inspection contingency and make sure the house is checked out top to bottom. Hire a professional inspectort that is either NASI or ASHI certified. Good luck it’s a GREAT time to buy!”
J. Douglas Montgomery, a real estate agent from Douglaston, New York said, “Randy, the most important concept for you to understand is that there are buyers agents and sellers agents. I would strongly suggest that you hire a buyers agent to represent you. There is a fee involved but a portion of that can be paid as part of the cooperating broker commission in the transaction, especially if the property is listed in MLS. The CBR representation is national, you can go to their website and look for someone who has taken the training. Also ask for references. A buyers agent has a fiduciary responsibility to you as the buyer and therefore will tend to be much more thorough finding out information on any house or neighborhood for you and your family.”
David Kim, a real estate agent from Edgewater, New Jersey said, ‘Here’s one techique to know what is a good price (where’s the bottom). For my home, comparable homes built in 2001 were sold for around $350k. This was a year or two before the market started to explode. I feel comfortable that homes will not dip below that amount. You should see what your home would’ve sold for in 2001/2002 and if it’s almost down that low, you will be safe. 2003-2004 prices would be cutting it close and 2005-2006 prices would be unrealistic to consider buying.
Now, as for how low you can go… It’s more important to say how HIGH can YOU afford to go. When purchasing out home, we decided on what rental values were, what we needed in a house and what we were willing to pay per month regardless of market value. The following should help you make this decision.”
My Thoughts:
Simple – Use a real estate professional to help guide you through the intricacies of the foreclosure home buying process.
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New and improved search tools
| Searching for homes just got even easier on Trulia. Check out our top three cool features that are designed to help home owners, buyers and sellers get exactly what they want. | ||||||
| Worried about your home value? You can find out how much properties like yours are selling for in your city. Or, if you’re looking to buy, pick a location and see every home within 10 miles of your city. Find your favorites, and then get driving directions directly from Google Maps. Read on to find out how. | ||||||
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| 1) Double your options with radius search | ||||||
| In today’s housing market, it pays to be open-minded about different neighborhoods. Enter any city or zip code on Trulia and see listings up to TEN miles from that location. It’s like a whole new world of homes. Enter your city to try it now. | ||||||
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| Tip: Prefer to visualize your search? Underneath the map, select “Search within map” and see a whole new list of homes near your location. | ||||||
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| Celebrity Home Sightings Ι Get your superficial fix here. | ||||||
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| Advice & Opinions Ι Get insightful, fast, FREE advice on home buying & selling | ||||||
| Blog of the week | ||||||
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| Happy House Hunting | ||||||
| The best place to start your real estate search Trulia Inc. 208 Utah Street #310 San Francisco CA 94103 |
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Trulia Application Live on Facebook
You may have not noticed, but over the past month we rolled out a new Facebook application from Trulia. House Wars, the game where you earn cash to build your real estate portfolio by doing stuff to your friends houses, is a fun way to battle your Facebook friends and compete for global real estate dominance.
House Wars is the product of two talented student interns, Alan and Anand, who spent the summer working at Trulia. [NOTE: You may remember Alan and Anand (pictured above) as the co-stars of this video welcoming everyone to San Francisco for Inman Connect.] While they were working on some internal projects for our engineering team, we asked them to build something fun to help spread the word about Trulia among their peers. They were given guidance and help from full-time Trulians but had a lot of freedom to experiment and build out the game to their vision. House Wars is the direct result of their hard work – designed, built and deployed by our great interns within a couple of weeks!
If you’re on Facebook, you can join the game here – http://apps.facebook.com/housewars/. Playing is easy: you’re given a house to start and some money to attack or upgrade houses. The more stuff you do, the more money you make, and the more you can upgrade your houses or build new houses to grow your portfolio. You can create your own neighborhood and invite your friends to join or join an existing neighborhood. The goal is to earn the most money and become the richest real estate tycoon.
House Wars is another example of the great work environment for our engineering team. Engineers are encouraged to come up with their own ideas and to innovate, experiment and iterate on them. Roger talked about the engineering environment at Trulia before and this is another item to add to the list. If you’re interested in hearing more, check out the list of positions available at Trulia.
Thanks so much to Alan and Anand for all of their hard work and a great summer. We miss you guys!
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Take the Trulia Halloween Challenge: Submit Your Favorite Halloween House Photo
The jack-o’-lantern on the door stoop is the standard to lure trick-or-treaters to the door, but thankfully there are many who like to get really ghoulish and go that extra mile. If you don’t have the time or the inclination, surely you know that house on your block that is transformed into a haunted mansion when the 31st rolls around, or that amazing neighbor who decorates on a level that Martha Stewart herself would be proud of.
We want to share in that spooky Halloween spirit and we’re enlisting your help to make Trulia terribly terrifying come All Hallows Eve. So whip out your digital cameras, snap some photos of those bloodcurdling brownstones and creepy colonials, and post them on Trulia Blogs.
Trulia’s own will vote for their favorite eerie entries and the top three photos will be featured in our Trulia Newsletter. Photographers will also receive some tasty Trulia treats – no tricks though, sorry.
How to enter:
Step 1: Take a photo of the best dressed Halloween House in your Neighborhood.
Step 2: Post that photo in a Trulia Blog. Feel free to include a description or your favorite Halloween story though no writing is required.
Step 3: Choose the ‘In My Neighborhood’ category for your post.
Step 4: Publish your post and admire your mad photography skills.
Step 5: Repeat! You can enter as many posts as you like to increase your chances of winning.
Contest ends 5:00 pm Wednesday, October 29, so get going!!!!
Please see our Trulia Halloween Challenge Contest Rules page for the complete contest rules and details. If you have any questions, just leave a comment on this blog post.
Thanks and Happy Blogging and Happy Halloween!
1 commentVCs, start-ups, Trulia and the financial crisis
Silicon Valley is a unique part of the world–full of optimism, ambition, ideas and capital. While the seemingly eternal optimism has been quietly deflating for many months as the stock market declined, Silicon Valley was truly spooked by the now public advice of Trulia investors Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway and others.
Recaps of the doomsday scenario and subsequent advice they gave us at the Sequoia all hands event have been written and rewritten, and “that presentation” has seen more email rounds than a featured video on YouTube. It has been the talk of the start-up community and has frankly brought the Bay Area back to earth with a sudden jolt.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot more time with our investors, senior management and the rest of the team at Trulia as we get a sense of what the financial crisis means for us and what we are going to do about it. I’m sure every business around the globe is doing just this and many companies have been forced to make tough decisions to prolong their survival.
Am I concerned about America’s economic strength and the global financial markets? Absolutely. Am I concerned about Trulia’s direction? Absolutely not; what we do today is more relevant than ever. Fewer people are buying homes than in 2005, but the wealth of information and invaluable advice from the community makes what we do more useful than ever before. If one thing is for certain, people need housing today, just as much as they did last month and last year and they’ll need it just as much in one year and ten years time. Given today’s environment, it’s both Trulia’s challenge and opportunity to serve the consumer’s evolving needs.
As a start-up we are fortunate to have surrounded ourselves with smart minds and smart capital. While we are well-financed, we have always run a tight ship. We started out as a class project at Stanford and have not forgotten our frugal beginnings. So what does that mean for us in today’s environment?
We are:
- Limiting the use of external agencies and contractors where we can
- Re-focusing the team on our core products to fit today’s marketplace
- Over communicating internally and externally on how things are going
- Rewarding our teams and individuals with bonuses and credit when they exceed their goals
- Focused on profitability
We are not:
- Laying off staff
- Changing our core strategy
- Compromising our user or advertiser experience
We truly believe that this will be a long journey for Trulia. We are fortunate to have patient and forward-thinking investors, who are joining us for the journey. We all believe in Trulia’s mission and opportunity, today more than ever!
3 commentsHarlem Real Estate Market – Trulia Talks to Halstead about Social Media Strategies
Harlem U.S.A. - On Thursday, I had the privilege of speaking to a wonderful group of Halstead real estate agents at their Harlem office at 175 Lenox Avenue. The topic – How to Proactively use Trulia and Social Media to grow your real estate business and sphere of influence. I talked about how your proactive participation on Trulia Voices Q&A and Trulia Blogs can help you better connect with active home buyers and home sellers and other real estate agents for referrals. The consumers are out there asking for help, you just have to engage them.
Before I spoke, Diane Ramirez, the President of Halstead Property, addressed the office. She is an amazing speaker that knows how connect with her audience. Her agents are lucky to have such a great leader to follow. Anthony DeVivio, the Director of Sales, did a fantastic job as well talking real world strategies for adapting to this current market.
Diane Ramirez of Halstead and Rudy Bachraty of Trulia
I got a first look sneak peek at the new Halstead Property S3 Luxury campaign. They will have special digital signage atop New York City taxi cabs for the next few months highlighting the benefits of using Halstead for your luxury home buying and selling needs. It’s a special campaign targeted for the $5 million and up market. Clients in this tier will have a customized marketing plan for each individual property where they can see the results of the campaign in real time. No more paper checklists – this is real time information that will help them better understand what Halstead and their agents are doing to sell their home. I guess it’s a new level of transparency that Halstead should be commended for. As Diane said in her presentation, “It’s all about accountability.”
All in all, a very good day.
Trulia Introduces our New Partner Program for Trulia Pro
As the fastest growing real estate agent marketing tool, Trulia Pro allows agents the ability to cost effectively feature all their listings and create unlimited local ads that you can track with our performance stats package. Our new Trulia Partner Program enables trainers, small and mid-sized brokers, MLSs, associations and publishers to promote the Trulia Pro marketing solution to their members and visitors, while generating additional revenue.
“Trulia Pro has proven to be a cost effective and targeted way for real estate agents to market their listings and their personal brand, in the local areas that matter most to them,” said Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia. “Dozens of partners have already joined the Trulia Partner Program in order to provide their agent communities with smart, ROI driven marketing tools in today’s uncertain market.”
Do you have a large following, sphere of influence or member base? If so, our new program offers you the ability to earn a little extra income just in time for the holidays. With each monthly sign up you can earn between $34-$40. For each annual Trulia Pro subscription you can earn between $95-$100. There is no cap on the amount you can earn. You’ll be able to market Trulia Pro via banner ads on your website or company intranet and via text links that you can email. Whenever someone signs up through your link or banner you will receive payment.
“Trulia’s Partner Program has allowed us to further monetize our site and has been a success,” said Asher Matsuda, Co-founder of Postlets.com. “In this market, Trulia Pro has been a huge win.”
4 commentsGet social with us.
