MRED Announces Direct Syndication to Trulia

Chicago is Trulia’s Kind of Town

Today, Trulia is pleased to announce a partnership with Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) to directly syndicate more than 100,000 listings to Trulia. This partnership enables Trulia to provide consumers with the most accurate information on homes for sale in the Chicago area, which includes northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and northwest Indiana.

Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) is the largest multiple listing service (MLS) in the country (based on listing volume) serving nearly 8,000 real estate offices and 40,000 real estate professionals.  Their listings will now be seen by the more than 20 million* serious home buyers and sellers coming to Trulia each month to get the inside scoop on real estate they can’t find anywhere else.

MRED’s CEO, Russ Bergeron, said one of the reasons MRED was drawn to this partnership was to eliminate inaccurate data. “We chose to partner with Trulia first because of their industry friendly Trulia Data Pledge. We are confident that Trulia is going to protect our data and fairly represent our listings,” he said.

Trulia Hires New VP of Consumer Product and Launches Trulia Local

Today, we are thrilled to welcome Lee Clancy to the Trulia family as our new Vice-President of Consumer Products. He brings more than 10 years of product management experience in social gaming, online community and user-generated content and is focused on helping Trulia bring the inside scoop to millions of consumers every month.

In the past, Lee has spent time most recently at IMVU and Yahoo! Adding his experience to our organization continues our theme from 2011 of attracting top-notch talent to help us deliver the best user experience to our rapidly expanding consumer and professional audience.

To kick off Lee’s tenure, we’re unveiling Trulia Local – a brand new product that’s designed to help people (whether they are buying a home or renting) answer the burning question that crosses everyone’s mind when they’re looking for a new home: “What’s it like to live here?”

Trulia Local allows users to analyzes and visually displays real estate values, crime, school ratings and local amenities on layered maps. It also visually blends together geodata and user-generated content to give people the local scoop on where they live.

Key features include:

• Real Estate Values: Check out homes that are currently for sale or were recently sold nearby.

• Crime: Avoid crime by identifying the most dangerous blocks in your city with a heat map overlay that aggregates all the reported criminal activity during the past year. Toggle between violent and non-violent crimes to see what was most recently reported.

• Schools: Find out which school district your home is in and screen for schools with the highest parent ratings with an easy-to-use slider filter.

• Neighborhood Amenities: Know where the closest restaurants, grocery stores, banks and gas stations are located and what the locals think.

To get the local scoop on where you live, visit: http://www.trulia.com/local

How do you love Trulia? Tell us, and you could win $500

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and we’ve been looking for just the right way to show you how much you mean to us. Rather than buying you candy or flowers, we figured that you would know what you’d want, especially if we gave you $500 to play with.

We’re giving away $500 for you to spend however you want at Best Buy, Crate & Barrel, Macy’s, Target or Whole Foods. (We figured there wasn’t much you couldn’t get between all those stores.)

But we’re not going to just give it away. It’ll take 5 seconds of you whispering sweet nothings in our contest form.

Here’s how enter our contest:

1. Like Trulia on Facebook
2. Enter your name and email address (we have to let you know you won somehow!)
3. And if you’re feeling generous, complete the sentence, “I love Trulia because…”

What usually works on us is something like

• how our site has helped you find the perfect home
• how you like using our mobile apps to house hunt on the go
• how we helped introduce you to a professional and helpful agent

Don’t forget to share the contest with your special someone to double your chances of getting lucky this Valentines Day. Share the love and submit your entry before midnight on February 14!