Trulia Going National with New Tools

Heat maps, hyper-local market data and neighborhood search capabilities help consumers with buying decisions
Heat maps, hyper-local market data and neighborhood search capabilities help consumers with buying decisions

By Anna Marinelli

RISMEDIA, September 26, 2006?Trulia has announced they will be going national with new tools to help consumers make smarter real estate decisions. These new tools were created to help home buyers understand trends at the local level.

Trulia is an intuitive real estate search engine that helps connect home buyers with local real estate information. Trulia offers a great user experience and many ways to search for and view properties. The new features offer more robust ?for sale? home listings, relevant local market trends (represented in “Heat Maps”) and popularity data by neighborhood and zip code.

?At a time when home sales growth is slowing and listing inventory is on the rise, Trulia is offering real estate professionals cost-effective advertising opportunities to market property listings for their clients, ultimately saving time and cost in the process,? explained Sami Inkinen, COO and co-founder of Trulia.

For the residential real estate professional, Trulia launched these new tools to make their Web sites more accessible and user friendly. Brokers and agents can now showcase their listings through mapping, which automatically maps up to 50 of the listing agent or broker’s property listings on their Web site.

The new tools include:

The Comparison Tool

The Neighborhood Spotlight Tool

The Interactive Heat Map

The nature of these tools has been extremely effective in promoting homes for sale online by making it faster and easier for home buyers to search through listings and find the home that’s right for them. Thus far, the tool has spoken for itself, with a 50% growth in viewers, the company states.

The Comparison Tool helps the consumer find a home he/she likes and allows them to compare the prices, compared to similar homes. It outlines a neighborhood and shows similar sold homes to help a person understand what to look for to make their decision easier.

The Neighborhood Spotlight Tool helps consumers see which neighborhoods are popular and how the average prices in a certain area compare to the city. Additionally, you can search the quality of schools and crime rates to help make a better decision.

The Interactive Heat Map Tool allows the consumer to search every major city and neighborhood across the country and find out the average sales price, the average median price and average listing. This also introduced new features including neighborhood spotlights that show school ratings and crime statistics, tools to compare any listed property to recently sold homes by neighborhood, and color-coded Google maps that show which neighborhoods are hot and which are not

“Trulia.com provides users with advanced, user-friendly tools available for real estate search,? explained Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. We process more than 60 million home records and combine that data with user-search activity, making Trulia.com an important resource for understanding how individual neighborhoods compare across every major city in the U.S.?

These products were created to give consumers a better understanding of the pricing on a local level. With additional features, such as color coordinating each map, home buyers will be able to differentiate areas of a certain neighborhood and help them make the right choice.

Colors, animation and feature of the map are made specially for specific Web sites and is updated frequently.

For more information about Trulia, visit www.trulia.com.

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