articles about “Real Estate Industry”
Trulia is pleased to announce a new marketing partnership with Carpenter Realtors®, a leading Indiana real estate brokerage.
“The goal of Carpenter’s Home Marketing System is to expose our sellers’ homes to more potential buyers on top sites where they are searching,” said David Caveness, Senior Vice President and General Sales Manager of Carpenter Realtors®. “Trulia is and continues to be our top lead-generator. Within the first few weeks of this new partnership, we saw a huge spike in the amount of exposure that our listings got to prospective homebuyers, which more than doubled our incoming lead traffic. These initial results have exceeded our expectations.”
As part of this agreement, Trulia’s premium listing placement is now part of Carpenter’s Home Marketing System. This means that Carpenter agents will receive prominent placement and brand exposure for their property listings on Trulia.
With 30 offices throughout central Indiana and nearly 600 real estate professionals, Carpenter Realtors® has been helping Indiana families with their real estate needs since 1970. Carpenter Realtors® is a member of the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World network.
We are happy to see the initial program results and look forward to helping Carpenter’s agents close more transactions.
0 commentsLast week, we had the privilege of speaking with Ed Krafchow, Chairman and CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Mason-McDuffie Real Estate and an influential member of the real estate industry.
Ed was in our offices to celebrate his firm’s partnership with Trulia. He sees many commonalities between our two firms, as do we. “In our work with Trulia, we are building a consortium of agents, brokers and consumers to come together in the best interest of the consumers,” Ed said. “We believe helping consumers get the information they want is the right thing to do for consumers. With its reach, Trulia will provide our listings with extensive exposure. For these reasons, I am excited about working with Trulia.”
As part of the agreement, Better Homes and Gardens Mason-McDuffie Real Estate will receive prominent placement and brand exposure for its property listings on Trulia.
Krafchow says the industry is entering a third phase in the real estate business. In the first phase brokers owned the business, in the second the agent owned the business, and “in this third phase, I believe consumers will come to own part of the business,” he says.
Watch the video to see Krafchow’s complete remarks.
0 commentsTrulia is pleased to announce its partnership with Alain Pinel Realtors, the largest privately owned and independent real estate company in California.
Through this partnership, all Alain Pinel listings will get premium placement on Trulia. Alain Pinel Realtors is confident that this will give them greater exposure among luxury consumers and further enhance their brand awareness throughout the Bay Area and nationwide.
Rainy Hake, Executive Vice President with Alain Pinel Realtors, said they are focusing their online strategy on reaching buyers where they are looking online, and Trulia’s user-friendly site and mobile presence will help them deliver on that strategy. “The sellers we represent expect the very best from us, and our Trulia partnership enables us to continue delivering that high level of value,” she said.
Alain Pinel Realtors is the largest privately owned, independent residential real estate company in California. The firm was ranked the sixth-largest residential real estate firm in the United States based on its sales volume in 2010, and has been consistently ranked in the top 10 firms in the country.
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One theme that we commonly hear from real estate professionals is a request to improve the varying quality of leads they receive from online sources. As a response to this agent need, today Trulia is proud to announce Trulia Insight, our newest product that helps agents get access to the highest quality leads on Trulia.
Trulia Insight gives real estate professionals access to valuable lead prequalification information as well as consumer home search preference data, helping them identify and convert the best leads from Trulia into transaction-ready clients. Enhanced features in the Trulia My Leads inbox enable easy lead management, such as the ability to mark leads as ‘hot’ and automatically store a lead’s information in your My Contacts address book. Additionally, one-click listing search alerts and open/click tracking help agents to follow up with clients and understand the home search preferences of their clients.
So far the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Thousands of beta testers have been using Trulia Insight and 97% percent of agents have found the additional Insight information helpful when qualifying leads and working with clients. Additionally, Insight leads from consumers are very high quality—72 percent are transaction-ready and planning to buy a home in the next six months. Benefits that agents receive from Trulia Insight include:
Identify quality leads
Trulia Insight allows agents to discover serious buyers with lead qualification data such as the consumer’s loan pre-approval status, her move timeframe, and whether or not she is currently working with an agent. This information is displayed in Trulia’s My Leads inbox where agents can prioritize and manage their most important leads by marking them as hot.
Connect with transaction-ready buyers
Trulia Insight gives agents understanding about the activity and search behavior of their leads and contacts. Agents can see how many homes the consumer is following and how many saved searches they have created on Trulia.
Share listings and view client activity
When agents stay in touch with their leads and clients using Trulia Insight, they gain a deeper understand of the homes that their clients prefer. It takes only one click to create trackable listing alerts for your clients. When your clients receive these emails, you will be able to see the homes they opened and clicked.
Currently, we are giving agents who subscribe to Trulia Pro and Trulia Local Ads free access to high quality Trulia Insight leads for a limited time. You can learn more and subscribe to Trulia Insight by visiting http://www.trulia.com/insight.
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Today we’re very excited to announce the newest addition to Trulia’s lineup of mobile applications, the Trulia for Agents iPhone app. Trulia for Agents is the first national mobile application designed specifically for the residential Real Estate Industry. The free app integrates mobile, social and location-based technologies to help agents meet new clients, showcase their local expertise and access their business from anywhere.
The Trulia for Agents app lets agents broadcast their local expertise with listing check ins. Agents can check in to the listings they tour and display check ins on their Trulia.com profile so that prospective clients can contact them for more details and get the first-hand inside scoop on properties. The agents who check in to the most listings will rise to the top of their local leaderboard.
Trulia for Agents also pushes immediate lead notifications to the iPhone, helping agents respond quickly to consumer inquiries. Agents can also access all of their leads, store their client list and add new contacts while hosting an open house.
Also included in the app is a quick property lookup that lets agents find nearby listings and instantly share homes that fit clients’ needs. They can also share other neighborhood details including open home times, driving directions, nearby restaurants, grocery stores and more.
Real estate agents with iPhones can download the Trulia for Agents app in for free the iTunes store beginning today.
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2011 has been a year of tremendous growth for Trulia. We held a steady focus on creating a superior service for consumers and agents, while also aiming to build a strong, experienced management team to ensure that our growth as a company continues into 2012 and beyond. I am excited today to introduce you to two guys that are going to play crucial roles in our next phase of growth.
First, I’d like to introduce you to our new Chief Financial Officer, Sean Aggarwal. Sean was formerly VP of finance at PayPal and CFO, US category of eBay. As our new CFO, Sean will oversee the accounting and finance teams across Trulia’s three offices. Sean brings more than 20 years of investment banking and finance experience, along with a proven track record of scaling finance teams at PayPal, eBay and Amazon.
Next, I’d like to introduce you to Trulia’s new General Counsel, Scott Darling. Scott was formerly VP and General Counsel of Imperva and he has more than 15 years of business and legal experience working within companies such as Microsoft and Danger.
As a company, we have ambitious goals in 2012. I expect Sean and Scott’s impact, experience and insights to immediately help us navigate an exciting path at rapid speed. We have already seen tremendous impact from the additions of Paul Levine as COO earlier this year and Dr. Jed Kolko as Chief Economist and Head of Analytics . I believe the addition of Sean and Scott have us perfectly positioned for a big year ahead.
Throughout 2011, Trulia has seen explosive growth in mobile. Towards the end of Q1, Trulia expanded its mobile offerings by introducing both iPad and Android apps. During Q3, Trulia released a native app for Android tablets and a dedicated Android “For Rent” app for rentals and in Q4 we released our Kindle Fire app. Mobile traffic now accounts for between 20 and 30% of overall traffic. I am extremely proud that Trulia has the top-rated real estate mobile apps in their respective app stores and we are committed to delivering an exceptional user experience in all 50 states and innovative tools for consumers.
We have also taken many steps to become the number one source of transaction-ready clients for real estate professionals. We have doubled leads to agents in Q3 compared to the same quarter in 2010 and in Q3 2011, consumers on Trulia were viewing an average of more than 3.1 million homes per day. Three main drivers of the increase in quality leads to agents are the innovative new services such as Instant Leads, the introduction of Social Search and Recommendations and the expansion of Quick Connect to all mobile apps.
Some of the other highlights of 2011 include opening a new office in Denver, moving into a bigger office space in New York City, and the opening of the roof top penthouse at Trulia’s SF office, where Trulians now hold company meetings, meetups, parties and use the great space as an everyday fun and creative collaboration place for our employees. Our quarterly surveys have shown us time and time again that happy employees do great work, and I am happy that we are able to provide great spaces for our employees to thrive!
Want to join a great team changing the face of real estate? We’re hiring in all areas at Trulia in San Francisco, New York and Denver. To check out the open positions, check out our jobs pages: www.trulia.com/jobs
3 commentsThere 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.
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Trulia has been tracking consumer sentiment surrounding the American Dream of homeownership for the past four years, asking people across the country if homeownership is still part of their personal American Dream.When we asked this question again in August, 70% of Americans said “yes, it is.” This remained unchanged since January despite record-low home sales and ongoing instability in today’s financial markets. In fact, 80% of current homeowners said they plan to buy again while 59% of renters said they aspire to be homeowners. Given this strong intent to buy a home in the future, we are optimistic about long-term housing demand.
But before this can happen, prospective buyers must overcome many barriers to homeownership – from saving enough for a down payment to qualifying for a mortgage and fixing a poor credit history. At the same time, the American Dream of homeownership is in flux, shifting away from the “bigger is better” mentality that made McMansions and suburban living so popular during the boom.
To check out all the key findings from the survey, here’s the press release. Also, be sure to flip through the slideshow below as well as the fuller analysis and infographic we made on Trulia Insights.
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Today, we’re thrilled to announce the appointment of Dr. Jed Kolko (@JedKolko) as our new chief economist. Leading the company’s housing research, he will translate economic trends, real estate data and public policies to help us provide even more vital insights to homebuyers, sellers and renters. Behind the scenes, he will also advise the development of Trulia Estimates and create new derivatives of Trulia’s data to help people make smarter decisions about where they want to live.
“Being a housing expert with a keen understanding of what matters most to consumers when it comes to buying a home, Jed brings a unique perspective of where the market is today and where it is headed tomorrow. At Trulia, he will analyze our proprietary search and listing data in order to help us shed light on how the future of real estate will evolve – from where people want to live to the type of homes that they want to live in, all the way down to the neighborhood amenities that are most important to them and their families,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. “Today, there are more than enough economists looking at the housing market with a short-term lens and I think we can all agree that most have not been able to predict when a recovery will happen, nor have they been successful in creating policies to will foster a long-term recovery. Moving away from this way of thinking, we believe Jed’s long-term point of view on housing issues is exactly what consumers need to help them understand the health of the economy in the long run rather than another short-term crystal ball prediction about the real estate market.”
Given the current state of the housing market, Jed aims to help people understand which trends really matter for where they live now and where they want to live in the future. To learn more about Jed’s take on why we need to think locally and take the long view on housing, check out his first blog post on Trulia Insights (where he’ll be a regular contributor). To learn more about Jed’s expertise and experience, check out the full press release announcing his hire.
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We recently launched the beta of Trulia Estimates, a new tool that provides an estimate of a home’s worth and helps inform decisions, whether you’re buying, selling, renovating or refinancing. Trulia Estimates, built by an in-house team of experts, is another way we can provide useful information about homes and places across the country. Plus, it’s something our users have requested for some time. It’s no surprise in today’s market conditions that consumers are hungry for more information about home values and for local expert advice.
Trulia Estimates is launching in beta to a test market – the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area is an early adopting, tech savvy group, making it a perfect launching ground for our beta product. And it’s right in our own backyard. The beta launch only includes off market homes in five Bay Area counties (Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Mateo), and is an opportunity for us to get feedback, watch user interaction and refine the estimates and experience.
Trulia Estimates starts with a number built from local real estate info, including prices of recently sold similar homes, and collects inputs from locals – agents, buyers and owners – to ultimately improve the estimates in those local areas. Over time, we’ll incorporate more feedback from local experts and develop additional, hyper-local user information.
While we hope that Trulia Estimates gives our users more useful information about their homes, we know that these estimates don’t replace the need for a professional appraisal. Trulia Estimates is just a starting point. On every page with an estimate, we make it very easy for consumers to provide feedback on the estimate and connect with a nearby agent to get a professional estimate.
Not in the Bay Area?
Before we span from coast to coast, we want to take the feedback from our Bay Area beta testers, refine our Estimates product and make the necessary tweaks to ensure the product is primed for a national rollout. While we aren’t announcing a timeline for a full rollout, we plan to offer Trulia Estimates nationwide, and to expand valuations to homes that are actively for sale. Stay tuned for more details in advance of the national launch!
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