Trulia Delivers More Rental Options With Apartments.com Listings

The rentals market is on fire lately, and Trulia is making an exciting improvement to keep up with rental demands.  We have fullyintegratedApartments.com listings on Trulia and that means 40% more community listings for our consumers. As you know, we recently launched a dedicated “For Rent” app for those with Android mobile phones and while we are making all these great improvements, we’re watching the rentals activity on Trulia skyrocket. Rental visits are up 200% year-over-year and leads for rentals are growing more than 300% in that same timeframe.

Since we love giving you the inside scoop, the partnership with apartments.com allows Trulia users to see bigger, more beautiful photos – and much more of them. User will now see 75% more photos per listing on average. Lastly, users will have access to video tours of apartments.com buildings to let users see the building. Imagine touring your next rental while in front of your computer!

For those of you that are part of the Renter Nation, we got you covered!

Edina Syndication Decision: Bad for Agents, Bad for Consumers

There are a few facts and figures in Edina’s official statement about removing listings from Trulia that we’d like to clear up.

While Trulia respects Edina’s decision to remove their listings from our site, we don’t believe this decision helps agents working for Edina, sellers who are listing their homes with Edina or buyers searching for homes in the Minnesota, Wisconsin and the North Dakota area.  Here are some of the facts:

• Edina is costing their agents future business opportunities. By removing listings from Trulia, Edina will shut their agents off from millions of potential buyers searching Trulia each month. Edina agents will receive fewer leads from Trulia once their listings are removed.
• Trulia does not charge listing agents for leads generated by their listings and by default selects the listing agent to receive a copy of those leads, for free. If a listing agent wants to be the only agent displayed on the lead form, all they need to do is create a free account with Trulia.

More important than how Edina’s decision impacts their agents is how negatively it impacts their clients. By removing listings from the top three sites – Trulia, Realtor and Zillow – Edina has chosen to dramatically decrease Internet exposure for their sellers.  This will result in fewer inquiries about Edina’s listings and more days on the market for the seller.  In the modern real estate market where most buyers start their home search online, brokerages that do not attempt to reach the largest online audience possible are not helping their sellers reach the most buyers possible.  Without broad online exposure, sellers may choose to work with other brokerages who provide complete syndication to leading sites.

Lastly, one of Trulia’s top priorities is to provide highly accurate listing information to consumers. In our recent study on listing data quality, we found that 69% of inaccurate data on major sites comes third-party syndicators.  While Trulia does receive data from these sources, our algorithms select the highest quality source of listing data to display on our site. When available, we always display higher quality listing data sent directly from MLSs or Brokerages, like Edina, instead of poorer quality data from third party syndicators.

Although we think that Edina is making the wrong choice by removing their listings from the top real estate sites, we hope they’ll reconsider the benefits they’re losing as part of this decision. We’ve had brokerages do this before and we’ve seen them come back within a matter of weeks. Feel free to reach out to us if you have questions.

Like us on Facebook and win a Kindle Fire!

The Kindle Fire is such an impressive piece of tech, that we didn’t even wait until its launch day before getting started on building a sexy new app for it. The Trulia Real Estate HD app is just as impressive, incredibly useful, well reviewed, (did we say sexy?) but what good is all that, if you don’t have a Kindle Fire of your own to use it on?

Well, we’re doing something about that. We’re giving away a brand new Kindle Fire for free to the winner of our Facebook sweepstakes contest!

To enter our Kindle Fire Giveaway contest, all you have to do is go to our Facebook page, like us and tell us your name, email address and birthday, thats it! And make sure you share this contest with your friends, especially that one thats been harping on about the Kindle Fire for ages. (you know the one we’re talking about). The contest begins today, ends on December 1st and we’ll announce the winner on December 5th.

While you’re  on our Facebook page, check out the latest in celebrity real estate sightings, learn about our other contests, gawk at the weird and wonderful from the worlds of real estate and home design, and catch up all on shenanigans that happen behind the scenes here at Trulia.

If you really need further convincing that you want a Kindle Fire, don’t listen to me. Listen to Steven Yarger, our Mobile Product Manager;  ”Kindle Fire brings a tablet to market that marries rich content and industry-leading features with an affordable price point – a combination that is sure to be a hit with consumers. As Amazon continues to focus on delighting its customers, we are focused on doing the same by creating an innovative app that will enthrall our audience searching for homes on their brand new tablet.”

So what are you waiting for, enter now!

Trulia Brings the Heat With A Brand New App for Kindle Fire

We couldn’t be more excited about the launch of one of the most buzzed about new products of the year – the Amazon Kindle Fire. When we first heard about the Kindle Fire, we knew we had to bring Trulia onto the Amazon platform. After weeks of hard work by our talented mobile engineering team, Trulia is excited to announce our new addition – a brand new app for the Kindle Fire called Trulia Real Estate HD.

Trulia’s new tablet app comes alive on the Kindle Fire’s vibrant color touchscreen and extra-wide viewing angle to give users an incredible search experience.

When you launch the Trulia Real Estate HD app on Kindle Fire, you’ll see a bold and beautiful home screen where you can begin your home search. The full-color tablet experience utilizes the entire screen to display helpful search filters and beautiful property photos, making searching for properties easy and efficient.

Here’s the rundown on the Trulia Real Estate HD App’s features:

• Search Filter: Personalize your search from step one by setting filters and search parameters, guaranteeing that you only sort through properties that fit your needs.
• Full-Screen Slideshows: Unique to the Kindle Fire, use photos gallery search to view big, beautiful property slideshows on the tablet’s entire screen.
• Save Your Searches: Save your favorite properties and searches to your MyTrulia account, synced to www.trulia.com and across all of your Trulia devices automatically.
• More Information Instantly: Contact the listing agent to get more details or schedule a showing; Share good finds with friends and family.

Start your search on the big, beautiful home screen

See property details on the fullscreen view

See search results in a stunning list view

Filters help you find your best place to live

Trulia Real Estate HD is available now at the Amazon Appstore for Android here

See Trulia’s entire mobile app roster here

The Best of Our Blogs (11/7-11/2011)

Best of our Blogs: Oct 31-Nov 4

It’s starting to get chilly outside, well at least it is here in San Francisco. No doubt the rest of the nation has already ransacked the winter clothes box stashed in the attic. With many of us spending more time sitting by the fireplace (hopefully), it’s a great time to catch up on the Best of our Blogs from this week.