Trulia Blogger Hits Home Run at ‘U.S. News and World Report’ With First Blog Post

Realtor Mark Chesnick of Evans, GA, wrote his debut blog entry on Trulia blogs this week. Within hours the full text of his article appeared on U.S. News and World Report’s blog The Home Front. It also appeared prominently on Trulia’s Surviving the Housing Crisis page.

When we tell real estate professionals that they can establish themselves as local experts, we’re not kidding!

Are you blogging on Trulia? Are you answering consumer questions on Trulia Voices? It’s a great place to get started … engage … and make a name in your local market as the “go to” real estate professional.

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.

Trulia at the 2008 MLSLI Real Estate Tech Fair

See fellow Trulia Voices Community members Gail Gladstone, David Kasner and Lois Hansen in our new video.

As a sponsor of the 2008 MLSLI Tech Fair, we had a great day meeting with hundreds of local Long Island real estate agents and brokers. We provided demos to everyone who stopped by our table on how to best use Trulia. The feedback was very positive. Both Pierre and I had the privilege of speaking directly to an engaged audience on the main stage. Pierre spoke on a panel that discussed How Companies are Delivering Info to Consumers. I spoke on a panel with Linda Davis titled – Social Networking: Realtors Building their Online Community. The feedback after each panel was wonderful. Thanks to everyone for coming.

Many thanks to both Beth OConner and Jenny Natale of LIBOR for being such gracious hosts.

Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen Named to Inman’s List of 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders

Congrats to Pete and Sami for being named to Inman’s List of 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders! The entire team is proud of you. Thanks Inman. Go team Go!

According to Inman, “Inman News has compiled a list of the 100 most influential people in real estate. This list reflects the industry’s best and brightest and also includes those individuals from outside of the real estate industry whose actions influence the business of buying and selling homes. The people on this list embody leadership, innovation, ingenuity, power and persistence.”

Having spent the entire week working in our San Francisco office,  I had the luxury of spending some quality face time with both Pete and Sami. The drive, passion and creativity of each is very addictive and as a team, we all thrive off of it. I guess that’s one of the reasons they have been named to this fantastic group of industry leaders and one of the reasons I wanted to work side by side with them. Thanks for creating such a fantastic culture to work in and for recruiting such a rock star team. Onward!

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader – John Quincy Adams

Trulia Success Story – Elizabeth Weintraub

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Elizabeth Weintraub, a super agent in Sacramento, CA. Elizabeth is everywhere when it comes to online marketing – her own home buying/selling column at About.com, Trulia Voices, a blog,– and she’s now increasing her online exposure to buyers and sellers with Trulia Pro! Elizabeth estimates that she gets more than 70% of her business through online marketing, and her business is thriving in this challenging market.

If her business is doing so well, why did she want to increase her exposure with Trulia Pro? According to Elizabeth, “I get about one phone call or email each day from people who found me on Trulia – either through commenting on Trulia Voices or through Trulia Pro advertising. With great exposure like that, why wouldn’t someone use Trulia Pro?”

Elizabeth has gotten nearly 10,000 impressions from her Local Spotlight Ad, which she’s targeted in 5 specific ZIP codes. Plus her listings are rotating in the top spots of relevant search results. No wonder she’s getting contacted by so many people from Trulia, two of whom she’s closing deals with in the next week!

If you have a great testimonial to share, contact me at Katie [at] Trulia [dot] com.

Trulia Pro Spotlight – The Uncommon Agent – Mike Lefebvre

Last week I chatted w/ Mike Lefebvre, known as The Uncommon Agent, on Twitter. Within minutes of adding him to my list of Twitter friends, he pinged me and said, “As a video-minded guy, you’ll dig what I did. Search for homes in Medfield, Ma on Trulia and click my ad…..feedback appreciated!”

So, I did. And there he was, with a pretty unique Trulia Pro Spotlight Ad.

… continue reading

Trulia Pro Success Story – Rob McQuade

So far early adopters are really taking advantage of Trulia Pro. Rob McQuade has shared some early stats with us on Trulia Pro. To date, his ad on Trulia has received over 150,000 views! Through advertising with Trulia Pro and other marketing such as blogging, Rob now generates more than 50% of his business through online activity.

Check out his Trulia Pro stats below:

One of the tools Rob uses to measure these results is Google Analytics. Rob is able to see his Trulia page views turn into visitors to his website and then convert the visitors into actual clients. Pretty neat! Not to spill the beans, but on another topic as part of Trulia’s mission to share tips with the Real Estate community about how best to promote themselves online, keep on the look-out for a Google/Trulia sponsored video coming out in the near future on Google Analytics!

Check out Trulia Pro here!

Trulia Pro – Christoph Schweiger Shares His Stats for Week 1

It’s been one week since we launched Trulia Pro – our local self service advertising platform for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, local businesses and service providers. Thus far, Trulia Pro customers have already had – in sum – over 1 million impressions to their Spotlight ads. Not bad for the first week.  Additionally, Local Spotlight ads have been placed in over 1,800 geographic locations on Trulia.  Is yours one of them? If so, please let us know how it’s going. 

Today, I was contacted by Christoph Schweiger, a real estate agent from Scottsdale, Arizona who signed up for Trulia Pro last week. We connected on Facebook via the chat feature, which I love, and proceeded with some small talk. Then, Chris sent me his Trulia Pro stats for the week…..

Note: Since Chris sent me the stats during our Facebook conversation, the impressions went up to 16,749

Christoph’s ads, as of our Facebook conversation,  have had 13,413 impressions and 37 click throughs,  for a CTR of 0.28% – not bad for $39 a month. [To make it easier for you, we'll be adding click throughs as a stat within your dashboard soon.] He had an average page visit of 1.81 – again, not too bad. Now here is the interesting part. Those that clicked his ad, spent an average of 6 minutes on his blog. That’s what I call engagement, especially for a new visitor. We only have a short window to make a good first impression.

For a new visitor to take the time to search through his site, it tells me a couple of things:

1. They are hungry to learn more about you and your business.
2. Chris has done a good job of creating useful and informative content on his blog for consumers.

Your Spotlight ad on Trulia is a virtual billboard for you and your business. Use the ad space wisely. Get creative with the image and copy. Pick a variety of geographic locations to test – you have 20 of them. Then study the impressions withing your dashboard to see which geography is working best. Mix and match locations. Use a high level geographic location like New York, New York at first. This will give you the greatest number of impressions. Then try a hyper-local geo or neighborhood like Gramercy Park. This may result in less impressions but the consumers will be more targeted.

If you’d like to give it a try, please click here to learn more about Trulia Pro. Who knows, you may be the first one in your area to do it. That’s a good thing.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”