Did we just pass the tipping point in online real estate?

When we started Trulia back in 2005, we had two big ideas that we thought could make Trulia into a successful business:

• The online real estate experience sucked and someone needed to fix it.
• Real estate advertisers wasted billions advertising offline that would be much better spent online.

For Trulia watchers, you know that we spend a lot of time and energy working to improve the online real estate experience and empower people with information and transparency. Over the last few years, the website experience has improved dramatically. However, we think that we’re  just at the very early stages of where we want the site to be and we will be adding in lots of improvements over the coming months and years. More great things to come.

When it comes to changes in advertising spend, there have been a couple of recent events that make me feel that we just passed the tipping point in moving a large portion of the advertising spend to more effective online media. Firstly, we’ve tracked dramatic changes in the real estate advertising shifts from offline classified ad spend to online. We all knew this was happening, as consumers went to sites like Trulia, but it is happening at a faster rate due to the recession. This past summer, the LA Times canceled its Sunday Real Estate section and now the prospect of the elimination of the offline edition of a major print newspaper like the Seattle PI announced two weeks ago, will accelerate and permanently change how real estate is marketed. There will certainly be less physical newspapers in a few years time to advertise in!

The second big event announced that was announced last week was that Century 21 was stopping their TV ads in favor of online ads. Beverly Thorne, senior VP-marketing, Century 21, said in years past the company has spent up to half of its advertising budget on creative for TV, but a majority of that money will be redirected to its online efforts in 2009. She said the ability to target a consumer interested in making a purchase in the near term using an assortment of tactics has a lot of appeal. While others (including Century 21) have moved budgets to online channels steadily over the last few years, the public change announcement of their shift in strategy surely marks a fundamental change in our Industry. During 2008 we have quickly scaled to more than 100 large corporate advertising clients, mostly prominent broker and franchisor organizations, many of whom were just learning the basics of listing syndication in 2007. More than 80% of consumers searching the web for real estate information and millions and millions of visitors to sites like Trulia.com every month. With a range of cost effective real estate marketing solutions we think that one of our big ideas is very quickly becoming true.

While there are not that many bright spots in the economy right now these fundamental changes in how the real estate industry manages and markets their services, will serve its franchisors, brokers, agents and their customers extremely well as the market starts to recover.