Real Estate Blog

For real estate buyers right now it’s a crazy time. The fear of making the wrong decision can be paralyzing at times, so having access to information is critical.

I thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve been using in my own search.

What’s Happening on the Ground?

Trulia.com

Trulia generates its reports from its internal database of property listings (most of which are pulled from its relationships with real estate brokers). Inventory is admittedly incomplete, but it’ll give you a good sense of the trajectories of the local markets.

Cyberhomes.com

Cyberhomes, on the other hand, gets its data from its records on over
100 million US properties. Their neighborhood overviews are a little slow to load but can give you a overview of what a zip code is doing and see the overall direction of the market.

Get the Big Picture?

Altos Research

Altos reports are real time market intelligence that deep dive in to what’s really going on in your market, right now. As a buyer, you can also get a snapshot of the trends in any given market. Altos founder Mike Simonsen claims their reports lead the Case/Shiller Index by three months.

Foreclosures

Understanding the volume of foreclosures, bank owned properties and auctions that are hitting your is key to gauging where prices might be headed in your local market.

RealtyTrac

The 800lb gorilla in the foreclosure space. RealtyTrac has a fantastic amount of information despite a clunky web site. There is a monthly charge to have access to this data - but it’s well worth it, especially if you’re looking at these opportunities seriously.

ForeclosureRadar.com

California buyers may want to look at ForeclosureRadar, a “professional grade” search tool that tracks all foreclosure activity in the state. Designed mostly for Realtors and investors, it’s a fantastic tool that gives you unparalleled data and analysis. Too bad it’s not available outside of the Golden State, yet.

Bonus - Find Homes on Auction

Also, if you’re interested in getting homes at auction, check out Zetabid.com. Right now they are running auctions in California, Florida and Illinois.

Trulia, Cyberhomes, Altos, RealtyTrac, ForeclosureRadar

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5 Great Sites to Help You Better Understand This Crazy Market

photo by paulhitz

A weak dollar and fire sale prices have all led to strong interest in US real estate market by foreign buyers.

Whether it’s Russian oil billionaires in Manhattan, Asian buyers on the West Coast or Canadians seeking warmer climes in Phoenix, international investors are eying US properties these days and US Realtors are perking up to that demand.

Trulia, which has enjoys decent international traffic, is now making an active push to help those agents reach those potential buyers (see How Can I Reach out to International Home Buyers?).

In principal this is not terribly unique, since most ad platforms offer
some sort of geo-targeting capability. As an advertiser on Trulia you can now opt to display specific ads only to Trulia’s international visitors.

For example, a San Francisco based Realtor might want to run a Chinese language ad to Chinese visitors or, alternatively, a Phoenix based Realtor might want to run a Beer and Hockey themed ad to Canadian visitors. (Go ‘nucks!)

The real challenge is going to be get the right messaging and in many cases, get the advertisement and listing information translated into the appropriate. Immobel is one company that offers translation services for real estate.

I think it’s smart for Trulia to position themselves as US based alternative for Realtors looking to market overseas.

There are other international-based options out there (GlobalEdge maintains a great list and so does Simon Baker’s Property Portal Watch) but this is the first dedicated effort I’ve seen by a local portal to tap that need.

Ad: Reach over 4500 readers in FOREM’s feed. Place your ad here.

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Trulia Lets You Go Global

Google Insights for Search is a fantastic new tool that allows you to dig into Google’s search volume patterns to find trends.

While I think there are a lot of ways you can use this tool (see agentgenius.com), I think that for most marketers the geographic breakdowns will be one of the most interesting - mainly because it can help identify brand awareness in any particular location.

Let’s look at the national brand awareness of the big search portals:

Strong Nationwide (Near universal brand awareness)

Realtor.com

Yahoo! Real Estate

Regionally Strong (Strong in specific regions; east, west, south, north)

Zillow.com

Trulia.com

Confined Awareness (Searches confined to single States)

Cyberhomes

Frontdoor.com

Poor roost.com did not have enough search volume to show any results.

(h/t Sellsius blog)

View post:
Digging in to the National Real Estate Search Scene

Simmering resentment over Trulia’s SEO practices (see Trulia Caught Cloaking Red Handed) hasn’t stopped the search site from landing another $15 million in funding.

Deep Fork Capital LLC led the financing to top up Trulia’s reserves; Trulia’s other investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co. also participated.

In the statement, Trulia co-founder and CEO Pete Flint said… well, he didn’t say all that much really…

““This additional capital will help us take advantage of this opportunity and continue our accelerated growth. This market is also a unique time to help real estate brokers and agents transition their marketing efforts and services online. In the coming year, we plan to roll out world-class products that will continue to transform the online real estate experience.”

Also found in the release - Trulia claimed it has:

• Approximately 5 million unique users
• 100,000 real estate professionals as registered users
• More than 3 million real estate listings nationwide
• Over 70 million property records providing constantly-updated comparable sales

Trulia has now raised $33 million since it launched. That’s big money - so somebody definitely thinks there’s a payoff somewhere to be had. The only question is from where?

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Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Trulia’s Web Site Down?
• Too Busy To Blog? Pay Someone To Do It For You
• Trulia Now Live in the Pacific Northwest
• Welcome Trulia!
• Quick Hit: Trulia profile

Go here to see the original:
Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks

If you are looking for an affordable option for advertising to your local audience, Trulia can help. Yesterday, Trulia stepped up with yet another great feature to assist real estate agents and local businesses with the launch of Trulia Pro.

With Trulia Pro, you can target up to 20 locations with unlimited local spotlight ads. Participant listings will also get a boost to the top of relevant search results. And this self-service offering is available via a low fixed fee of $39 a month, or annually for $348 (just $29 a month).

Why advertise at Trulia you say?

“Trulia is the fastest growing online real estate site with approximately 5m unique monthly users and is a top 10 real estate site.” –Rudy Bachraty

Give your brand, your service, and your listings the online visibility they need to take your business to the next level. Advertise with links to your real estate blog and/or Trulia Voices Profile to grow your network of readers, clients, and colleagues.

Oh, and if you are already using another advertising program, Trulia wants to give you 3 months FREE with the purchase of a one year subscription.

Visit the Trulia Blog to learn more!

Other posts you may enjoy:

• Trulia First to Go Google Street View
• Sidebar “Bling” Cross Promotes Your Online Presence
• RealBird’s New Features and New Business Model
• 7 Ways to Syndicate Your Real Estate Listing
• Zipform Desktop Is Now Vista Compatible

Read the rest here:
Advertise to Your Local Niche via Trulia Pro

Trulia continues on its quest for revenue by adding Trulia Pro today - a new ad platform for agents looking to create a quick and easy ad for themselves on Trulia’s search pages.

The package (which runs $39 a month) gives you unlimited “Feature Listings” (meaning participants get their listings floated to the top of the search results) and unlimited Local Spotlight Ads - Trulia’s new take on self-service ad concept.

Trulia CEO Pete Flint gave me a demo of the system recently and it looked pretty straightforward. Ads are easy enough to create (in fact, if you have a profile on Trulia already it’ll prepopulate the ad with your photo). You can add a tagline and a URL to your web site or blog (no-follow’d, natch).

When buying your ads you can pick to have them run in zip codes, neighborhood or cities. You can choose up to 20 locations when checking out (and change them later on if you want to tweak the campaign). Ads show up on Trulia’s search results pages, mid way down the right column.

Nothing terribly new here; Zillow already has its EZ Ads pay-as-you-go platform and Realtor.com has long offered up geographic regions to own. Trulia’s twist is they are offering unlimited impressions - so you’re not paying for a set amount of views. They’re throwing all the pageviews into a bucket and divvying them up according to how many people are wanting to be there.

(It is proportional however, meaning those who have fewer locations overall get more impressions in the areas they have chosen to mark.)

Flint made a good point when I spoke with him that fortune will favor the early adopters - the more people piling into the mix later on means the fewer impressions go around. If you get in early, right now you can own a city - for a while at least. Portland Real Estate is up for grabs, for example.

And Trulia is definitely trying to goose this out of the gates and poach some ad dollars from from their competitors by offering a Trulia Pro promo for the first three months free for current EZ Ad or Realtor.com advertisers.

My biggest concern with the ads however, is the placement on the page is poor so I doubt it draw many eyeballs beyond the initial curiousity phase. Past that, I’m also not sure how many home buyers will actually click through on any of the ads, making the ROI questionable in the long run even with the low monthly costs.

It’ll be interesting to see and hear what people’s experiences are running Local Spotlight ads. And, for that matter, any of the other self-service ad platforms that exist out there already.

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Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Trulia’s Web Site Down?
• Trulia Now Live in the Pacific Northwest
• Welcome Trulia!
• Quick Hit: Trulia profile
• Web Publishers Can Now Clone Trulia

See the original post:
Trulia Goes Pro

Haven’t we heard this story before? (see Real Estate Search Stores - Coming Soon?)

Walmart has quietly launched a new classifieds portal on their web site Walmart.com (see Walmart Launches Classified Listings).

The service is powered by Oodle and has a dedicated real estate section.

I have to say it felt a little weird searching for houses on Walmart’s site - but I’m not a regular Walmart shopper. And I had quite a few problems accessing the site too which dampened the experience.

But I think the greater trend we’re seeing here is that map-based real estate search is fast becoming ubiquitous.

Oodle’s platform and competitors like Vast which power these initiatives are easily deployed on just about any site and I suspect we’ll start to see even more online retailers leap on this band wagon too.

The challenge here is how do the dedicated real estate search portals compete with these retail giants?

Pretty paltry traffic in comparison.

And I wonder do people really care where they start a real estate search online? Is searching at Walmart.com any different from Zillow.com? Do people know that they aren’t seeing all the listings? Do they care?

These are some of the questions I’m wrestling with.

One upside is that it’s almost impossible to find the classifieds link on Walmart’s home page. So they certainly aren’t doing all they can to drive traffic there - no need to hit the panic button yet.

But like I said, I think this is a growing trend. Perhaps Trulia has recognized this and realized that building a single destination is a long, expensive process. Perhaps why they’ve built the Trulia Publisher Platform to enable them to power these kinds of partnerships.

So how ultimately can the real estate destinations compete?

It’s no longer about just getting the listings - listings are everywhere. It’s going to come down to context and content and providing a great experience. Something these white-labeled retailer sites can’t deliver.

On the flip side - agents you just got a bunch more destinations to advertise your listings. And I guess that’s a good thing.

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Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• Advertise
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• Facebook Doesn’t Like Realtors

Originally posted here:
Advertise Your Listings at Wal Mart

When Trulia launched its new ad network (see Trulia Launches First Online Real Estate Ad Network) it was an attempt to leverage their network of advertisers while providing a way for third party publishers to showcase their advertising inventory to larger brand advertisers.

It’s a proven business model that works well across the Net, as evidenced by the success of networks like Glam Media and Federated Media and niche networks like the Deck.

And to give credit where credit is due, it’s also a concept in the real estate space that blogger (and occasional FOREM contributor) Erik Hersman first brought up in his post on Realty Thoughts over a year ago (see The Need for a Real Estate Specific Ad Network).

(BTW - Erik walks the walk too and just built a fantastic ad network for the automotive vertical for Piston Media Group.)

So while Trulia’s network may have been the first, surely it wouldn’t be the last…

Yup, sho nuff.

Competitor Cyberhomes just announced they’ve partnered with ad-network provider Adify to launch a competing ad platform that they are calling their Real Estate Vertical Advertising Network.

How many ad networks is too many? At the recent EconAds seminar the question was asked “Is it a good time to start an Ad Network?” The answer:

Now’s as good a time as any to start an ad network business, several panelists said. It’s like starting an Italian restaurant in New York. The good ones will thrive.

So whose business will last? Trulia or Cyberhomes? I suppose it depends on the depth of the advertising relationships both sites maintain and to what degree they are successful in getting publishers to sign up.

There’s no question there is a glut of unsold advertising inventory available these days with so many ad-supported web sites having been launched over the last couple of years. We’re also seeing dollars being shifted into web based advertising like never before So the one that’s able to marry those two needs might very well have a great business on their hands.

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Related Articles at Future of Real Estate Marketing:

• My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds
• Real Estate Marketing 201
• PropertyQube Comes out of the Box
• 3daybid Spams Social Networks
• New Inman.com Site Goes Live

Excerpted from:
Battle of the (Ad) Network Stars

Not since the acquisition of Rudy Bachraty, has the Trulia team unleashed such “coolness” in the real estate community!  As of today, Trulia is the first national real estate search Website to incorporate Google’s Street View technology. 

Google’s Street View mapping is a phenomenal tool for real estate agents.  With it, agents and consumers can view a property up close at street view level, walk or drive past the property and surrounding neighborhood, and even check out the yard and other attributes of the lot. For those agents specializing in relocation, this is obviously a powerful resource for learning about a new area.  Rudy, Trulia’s Social Media Guru, adds, “Besides zooming in on the minute details of the exterior of the house, now you can actually take a peek at the neighborhood too. It’s the next best thing to being there.”

Now buyers can arm themselves with “real living” information.

A concerned parent can map a child’s walk to the nearby school.

A commuter can find out more about road conditions and traffic patterns.

 An iced mocha addict (like myself) can locate all the nearest Starbucks to maximize her caffeine intake. 

Oh the possibilities! This new feature is available now in more than 30 U.S. cities and the images on Trulia are being updated real-time as more locations are added. To check out this great technology for yourself, visit Trulia.

Related: RealBird Integrates with Street View API

Other posts you may enjoy:

• RealBird’s New Features and New Business Model
• Sidebar “Bling” Cross Promotes Your Online Presence
• Mapping Done The Right Way in Your Next Single Property Site
• Google Offers Free “GPS-Like” Technology for Real Estate Agents

Credit:
Trulia First to Go Google Street View