Rent vs. Buy: More Affordable to Buy in 72% of America’s 50 Largest Cities

Trulia released the findings of its Q1 2011 Rent vs. Buy Index today. When we compared the median list price for a two-bedroom apartment, condo or townhouse with one year’s worth of rent for similar property, it’s actually more affordable to buy in 72% of America’s largest cities. To illustrate which cities are more affordable to buy or to rent, we created a cool interactive map to help people make smarter real estate decisions. Check it out!

Click on the slideshow below for the full Rent vs. Buy Index findings, including the top 10 cities where it’s more affordable to buy and to rent:

Local Ratings and Reviews Launch

Hi there!   I’m Brandon, and I’m a new product manager at Trulia.  I recently joined the team, and look forward to contributing to making the consumer experience great for home buyers, sellers, and renters.  As you may have heard, since we launched our new rental platform, we have been hard at work to address a feature that many Trulia users have asked for.  More local data!

For a long time Trulia has been providing school information, crime statistics, and market trends for local areas in an effort to help our buyers research neighborhoods they live in, or may want to live in.  Three weeks ago, we added local area ratings as yet another tool in this arsenal.  The response has been overwhelming, with over 140,000 ratings submitted since that time.  The cities with most ratings to date are:

• Chicago, IL : 2,052 ratings
• Philadelphia, PA:  1,754 ratings
• San Francisco, CA:  1,034 ratings
• Los Angeles, CA: 974 ratings
• Brooklyn, NY:  942 ratings

This week, I’m pleased to announce the launch of another great addition to our local area content:  Local area reviews.

To submit a local area review, click the rate and review button on the main property page, or on the maps and nearby tab.  From the there you can:

• Provide an overall rating
• Rate by category
• Recommend the area
• Specify how you know the area
• Review the area

Be sure to tell us about the surrounding area, be it the neighborhood, sub-neighborhood, or actual block.  The more local your knowledge, the more helpful it will be to another person!  Do you live on the coolest block in your city?  Tell us about it.  Does your neighborhood have the best restaurants and stores?  We want to know.  Over time we will be able to showcase the Trulia community’s aggregated local area ratings, and reviews for every neighborhood and every block!

As an added bonus, we’ve added reviews as an element of our VIP program.  And, for all you mobile users, be sure to try out local ratings on your mobile phone as well.  You can read more about our other newly launched mobile features in Rob’s blog post from last week.

Happy rating and reviewing everyone!

-Brandon

Local Ads testimonial – Chris Keller, agent in San Diego, CA

Last week, one of our Trulia team members received a great testimonial from Chris Keller, agent in San Diego, CA.

Here are some neat things Chris had to say about our NEW! Local Ads product:

“I started using [a competitor's advertisement] about 1 month ago. I thought the results were very good until I joined Trulia’s Local Ad program a couple weeks ago! Not only do I receive almost twice as many hits from Trulia, the ad is larger (which gives me more room for verbiage) and the cost is around 20% less.

The hits are verifiable using Google’s analytics program. Our Trulia ad lands the potential buyer on a web page within our website dedicated to the area they are searching.

I also noticed that on Trulia you can hit the “next” button and proceed to the next listing. On [a competitor's site] you have to return to the “search results” every time you want to view the next property in your search. It makes me wonder how many people are exiting out of their site due to awkwardness of their search program.”

Here’s his ad:

This is an awesome testimonial Chris. Thanks so much for sharing! If you have feedback to share, please email us at pr@trulia.com.

Lock up your local market! Introducing Trulia Local Ads

Today we’re excited to announce our new hyper-local advertising platform, Trulia Local Ads. Local Ads completely open up the ad market on Trulia, making it affordable for real estate professionals and businesses of all sizes to own a slice of their local market. What does a slice of your local market look like? It’s an easy way of directly targeting audiences at the city or even ZIP code level, reaching the local customers who matter to you most.

We understand that your local market may be a crowded space. Local Ads make it simple to outshine the competition by grabbing the attention of local buyers and sellers. In each city and ZIP code, there is a limited amount of advertising inventory, so when you lock up a large share of ad space, you lock out your competition. It’s a snap to activate your Local Ads campaigns. Just select a few locations and use sliders to purchase the slice of your local market that meets your budget. Ads targeted by ZIP code will show up on listings pages, while ads targeted by city show up in search results.

We’ve spent a lot of time making Trulia Local Ads campaigns fast and easy to create. When you build your Local Ads campaign, you can select from default ad templates that dynamically update using your Trulia listing data or profile information. These ads are generously larger than competing services and perform 5 times better than the industry average for banner ads. If you’ve previously built your own advertising creative for campaigns elsewhere online, Local Ads allows you to simply upload your own custom image.

For now, Trulia Local Ads is in limited release and only available to our Trulia Pro subscribers. Update:  Trulia Local Ads are now available to every Real Estate Professional!

Trulia’s New iPhone App and Mobile Website

We’ve just released an updated version of the Trulia iPhone App and a brand new mobile web site accessible on every mobile phone!  Now it’s even easier to find homes for sale and other real estate info on the go.  We’ve seen mobile usage continue to increase as more people transition from traditional mobile phones to smartphones and we’re looking forward to more great mobile announcements in the future.

Updated Trulia iPhone App:

Using our updated iPhone App, users can now scroll through big, color photos for all properties for sale and search for homes by zooming the iPhone map.  You can also find properties that have a reduction in price and see the most popular homes for sale in your local area.  And of course, you can still find Open Houses, email properties to a friend, get driving directions, save your favorite properties to your iPhone and more.

Nearly 300,000 users have downloaded the Trulia App so far and we’ve connected thousands of buyers looking for real estate information with local real estate agents.

Find out more about Trulia’s Real Estate iPhone App or download it directly from the Apple iTunes store.

Trulia Mobile Web Site:

The new Trulia Mobile Web Site provides access to users on the go, regardless of their mobile phone!  Find homes for sale, see big, color photos of every home, get advice from the Trulia Voices Community, and login to access your My Trulia Saved Searches and Favorite properties.  All you need is a mobile phone with a web browser and you’re in business.

Find out more about Trulia’s Real Estate Mobile Web Site or visit the mobile web site by typing m.trulia.com in your browser.

Trulia Mobile Web Site

Trulia Layar in Fast Company and Apple iTunes Store

Fast Company Magazine mentioned Trulia’s Layar augmented reality application as one of the Top 5 to watch.

According to Fast Company:

Trulia for Android

The real-estate search site uses Layar’s Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Scan a neighborhood’s available properties and even connect to the realtors.

For those of you with an iPhone 3GS, it’s available for you to download in the Apple Itunes store.

Trulia Pro – Now in new flavors!

One thing we’ve learned by talking to hundreds of real estate agents over the past few years is that agents have very different needs when it comes to real estate advertising.  Some want highly advanced, cool, techie features, but others simply want the basics.  While we’ve been happy to see Trulia Pro reach thousands of customers in its first year of service, today we are expanding the Trulia Pro product line into three new plans to better address the needs of more agents.

For those agents interested in the advanced, cool features, we’re launching Trulia Pro Deluxe.  There are several new features in Deluxe:

Trulia Virtual Tours

Build virtual tours to be seen on Trulia quickly and easily with listing photos and added captions.  The virtual tour opens on a new page with a player automatically cycling through all the images of the home.  A lead form makes it easy for an interested home buyer to contact the agent directly from this page.

Contact Info on Search Page

This feature allows agents to their name and contact info on the main search page to stand out from other agents.  It also makes it even easier for one of Trulia’s 5.5 million monthly visitors to contact them.

Client Email Tracking

Receive open rate info for Client Listing Reports.  Agents have sent well over 1,000,000 reports to their clients since we launched this functionality.  Now, Deluxe customers will be able to better understand which of their clients are most engaged by seeing who actually opens the email.

Dedicated Account Manager

Trulia Pro Deluxe customers will have a dedicated account manager to help them get the most from Trulia Pro.  This person will help the agent with account reviews and ongoing personalized support.

In addition, to Trulia Pro Deluxe, we’re also launching Trulia Pro Plus and Trulia Pro Starter.

Trulia Pro Plus is most similar to the original Trulia Pro offering, including unlimited featured listings and a Local Spotlight Ad in up to 20 locations.

Trulia Pro Starter allows for only one listing to be featured in addition to a Local Spotlight Ad.

So check out these new plans and choose the one that best fits your needs!  As always, please let us know what you think.

RIP boring banner ads – introducing the Online Billboard w/ live listing widget

Trulia has been an innovator, from Listing Syndication to our iPhone application to our partnerships – innovation is a core part of our company culture.  Last year, we really went after innovating and improving your experience when we introduced our new Online Billboard w/ live listing widget. This has revolutionized the “banner ad” you knew before.

Banner ads don’t generally work to drive traffic to your website. They also tend to offer little relevant content to the consumer. What does that mean?  The old banner ad is on life support because advertisers failed to ask one important question:

Why would a consumer interact with this ad?

Over a year ago we went in search of a solution. A few sites were dabbling with “live content” ads, however they were very expensive and the technologies were still not meeting the key criteria I believe a banner ad needs to meet for a consumer to click on it:

1)    Relevant to the site they are on, and that specific site’s experience
2)    Fresh, live data that won’t be overly duplicative
3)    Movement or implementation that attracts the consumer’s eye
4)    Deliver EXACTLY what the consumer expects when they click on it, thus making the experience positive.
5)    Seamless integration into the experience

We had to make it easy. So we made a turn-key system that did not give them another project to worry about. Other than limited creative guidance from the client, we took care of the rest. Thus was born the Online Billboard listing widget. It fulfills the criteria above and more when coupled with Trulia’s advanced targeting by ZIP, county, state, price points and more.

We have had several clients test this new display technology for over a year, and I am happy to share the results.

Our hypothesis was correct. Every Online Billboard unit that ran our live listing widget saw a 3-5X increase in click through rates when compared to standard banner ads. Some had a 10X increase.  It also did not matter where the widget was targeted – East, West, North, South, Regional or National – it worked!

Here are some Online Billboards with live listing widgets running now:

1) Rand Better Homes & Garden Online Billboard
2) Prudential California Online Billboard
3) Champion Real Estate Online Billboard

We have an early case study done with Prudential Real Estate, where they ran both ads in 30 day trials – increasing Click Through Rates by 5X. Post a comment below, or e-mail me (pierre@Trulia.com) for that report.

Learn More: Banner ads have evolved, have you? Join us on a Webinar (Sept 22nd) where we will share learning’s about online advertising. Click here to register. Space is limited!

Now a moment of silence for the banner ad…

Trulia Mobile – Real Estate Search On The Go

As Jamie reported on Monday, we’re very excited to launch our Trulia Mobile initiative. I’d like to tell you a little bit more about our mobile products and how they work.

Americans are on the go now more than ever, and almost everyone takes their mobile phone with them everywhere. Its always been frustrating to get detailed information on your mobile phone from the internet. But the iPhone is redefining what can be be done on a phone and Apple’s competitors will have to keep up. That’s great news for consumers and will spur innovation.

I’m a big believer in mobile real estate search. I’ve definitely wanted to see homes for sale nearby when I’ve walked around or drove through a neighborhood. And when you’re actively in the market, finding Open House information wherever you are is super helpful. By bringing Trulia to mobile devices, we can help buyers, sellers and real estate professionals find very useful information when they want it. All of our mobile products are free from Trulia, although standard service rates may apply from your carrier.

Trulia on your iPhone

With Trulia on your iPhone, you can find homes for sale, including Open Houses, in just one tap from the home page using iPhone’s location awareness technology. Or you can create a custom search for the exact home you’re looking for. The results can be viewed on a map and you can email a property to a friend, save it to your phone, get driving directions from Google and even contact the listing agent directly from the phone.

Check out this video demo for more information:

Trulia on your phone

The iPhone is great but its certainly not the only mobile phone out there. And we couldn’t leave everyone else out in the cold! Trulia on your phone brings Trulia listings to your BlackBerry, Blackjack, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and many other devices from all the leading carriers. You can find homes for sale and the Open Houses near you or in another area, see the results on an interactive map, see a photo, share or save properties to your phone and call the listing agent directly for more information. We worked with our friends at LightPole, a leading mobile content platform, to bring you Trulia on your phone. You can see a list of supported mobile devices here.

Trulia in your car

Most people drive through the cities and neighborhoods they’re thinking about moving to before buying a home. Now you can use Trulia in your car to find homes for sale and Open House information while you’re on the road. Just search near your current location or a specific destination and see the results nearby. You get the property highlights, Open House information and listing agent contact info. You even get driving directions to help you through unfamiliar areas. Trulia in your car is built for the Dash Express GPS device.

Check out this video from Dash to get a feel for the Trulia in your car experience:

As a special bonus, Dash is making its device available for sale to Trulia users for $50 off the retail price ($249.99 instead of $299.99). Just use this promo code – TRULIAGIVE08 – when you contact Dash at (888) 949-DASH. All new customers get three free months of Dash service. The code is valid through 9/30/08. For more information, please contact Dash at the number above or visit their website.

The reception for these products from our users has been really great. And we definitely want to hear your ideas and suggestions for new Trulia Mobile products. Feel free to leave a comment on my blog or contact me directly (rcross at trulia dot com) with any feedback. Thanks!

Apple iPhone 3G

With all the buzz of the Apple iPhone 3G launching today, we thought it would be neat to know what is the most popular cell phone/smartphone real estate agents are using or plan to use? So, we’re sending out this quick poll to all real estate bloggers to see if you are a crackberry addict (one who excessively uses their RIM blackberry), or are you already an iPhone user, or are you using something completely different? We selected some of the most popular cell phones/smartphones on the market and listed them below, let us know what you use?

…And out of curiosity, will you be buying the Apple iPhone 3G today?