With a new iPhone application and support for other mobile devices, Trulia.com is pushing the Realty.bot race into the cloud, but its new free weblogging platform may put ActiveRain under a cloud

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Who’s winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? There is a constant flurry of new press releases from the two companies, but their boastful claims often sound like a pair of garrulous amputees agreeing with each other that the two-legged world is off its rocker: “Five million visitors! Ha-ha!” “A hundred thousand new listings! So there!”

Does any of this mean anything? There are wonderfully useful metrics for judging net.behavior. Unique visitors, for example. Pageviews per visit. Time on site. Even better: ROI per visit. But these measures are not independently verifiable, and the guides we do have available to us are inherently suspect.

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia or Zillow? Neither company has gone IPO. Neither company has gone belly-up. Beyond that, your guess is as good as anyone’s.

But: Tonight marks a decisive change in the game: Truila.com is releasing a fairly robust iPhone application as a part of a site-wide upgrade.

What’s new?

1. Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of Lightpole-enabled smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.
2. Trulia is adding a higher degree of user participation in the form of a new, free weblogging platform. Any registered user of the site will be able to start a blog.
3. Finally, Trulia is offering greater personalization of the user experience in the form of a self-customizing home page. Your home page will reflect “new property listings, home prices changes, upcoming open houses, median sales price trends, recently sold properties,” all of these based on your past search history, along with “relevant blogs and Q&As from our Trulia Voices Community.”

In truth, personalization might turn out to mean more to ordinary consumers than to real estate professionals. My searches on Trulia or Zillow put me all over the map of Phoenix, and I can’t foresee that the software is going to be able to predict much about me.

The addition of free weblogging, on the other hand, is inspired. I told Zillow, when they installed their forum software, that what they really wanted were blogs. The reason is simple: Blogging creates a community of users with a shared interest in each other and therefore in the success of the weblog. The “owner” is there to tamp down bad behavior — an uncompensated de facto middle management layer — and each one of those owners has a long-term pecuniary interest in producing interesting content. Forums are beset by bad behavior, and the content is inherently evanescent. The differences in incentives between the two conversation models could not be more stark.

But either way, forums or weblogs, social-media tools are a very useful way to induce more users to visit more pages over more time-on-site, all of which serves to expose those users to more advertising. For selling ads, getting people to talk to each other is probably more profitable than getting them to look at listings of homes for sale.

This is Brian Brady’s bailiwick, but it’s easy to see how this can and should play out: The weblogs will connect to your user profile, but they will also link out every which way. For a real estate professional, your goal, without being obvious, should be to get interested consumers to click out to your home weblog or web site, where you can sell to them without the cacophony of nearby competitors. But to make that work, you’re going to have to add true value to Trulia’s site. This is a Brian Brady social-media marketing play to a fault.

What else is it? My bet is that this is a stake in the heart of ActiveRain.com. There has never been a good commercial reason for forty-bazillion Realtors to chatter to each other. Trulia is giving them an extremely EZ-2-Use weblogging platform with access to a claimed five million users a month. AR’s Localism would have been too little, too late anyway, but Trulia is already the hammer-of-the-gods on hyper-local long-tail search keywords. Points are points, but dollars are dollars. I’m thinking the Realtors who know the difference between points and dollars will migrate their blogging efforts to Trulia.

Incidentally, Trulia’s Heather Mirjahangir Fernandez tells me that links within blog posts — but not comments — will be followed by search engines. In other words, linking from your Trulia blog to your home weblog will pass SEO juice.

The big win of this release, of course, is the expansion of the Realty.bot game into the world of mobile computing. There are other mobile real estate applications out there already, but Trulia’s initial foray into this market seems inspired: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database, showing them what’s available near where they are and giving them details and driving directions so they can take a closer look.

I first heard about Trulia’s iPhone application on Thursday, when a BuinessWeek reporter called me for a reaction. I think maybe I was supposed to express fear and loathing, but I think this is a wonderful idea. I use Where to show me where the nearest Starbucks is when I’m out on the road. Why wouldn’t home-buyers want to use Trulia to find out which homes are for sale — for example — in neighborhoods closer to their jobs — or just in the neighborhood they happen to be driving through?

I personally would wish that the details page linked to the home’s web site — this since we build very elaborate single-property web sites. And the ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency deals, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.

But here’s the immediate bonus that popped out at me when the reporter called: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. Anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients, I like.

Here are some screen shots from the iPhone application, which was released, running off of a demo server, on Friday:

This is the initial search screen. The app is built around the iPhone’s on-board GPS system, but you can use the Custom search to look at listings somewhere other than where you happen to be.

This is a location-based list of homes for sale. If you tap on a listing, you’ll go to the details screen.

Like this. This is one of our listings. You get baseball card details, the text description plus open house information and the listing agent’s contact information.

If you tap the outbound icon in the upper right corner of the details screen, you get these options — with “Contact Agent” being my particular favorite. This will launch the iPhone’s telephone software and dial the call. When you hang up, you’ll be right back on the details screen.

The user experience on Dash GPS systems and the other supported smartphones is going to be somewhat different. And since the smartphone application requires Lightpole, Palm OS phones like the Treo line of smartphones are not supported.

The software revolution being occasioned by the iPhone is fun to watch. In many ways it is reminiscent of the advent of the Apple II or the original IBM-PC: A vast glut of mostly useless toys — recipe files and DVD catalogs — thankfully mostly free. What’s going on is that programmers are teaching themselves a new software design paradigm, and they’re releasing everything they manage to finish, even though much of it is pretty stoopid.

That evaluation, at least, does not apply to Trulia’s push into mobile computing. The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus MLS listings apply, along with concerns about decay among voluntarily-maintained listings. But, all that notwithstanding: Trulia’s mobile-computing initiative is cool.

 
Elsewhere: Mashable, My Tech Opinion, TruliaBlog, VentureBeat, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch.

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