Pete Flint’s Blog

 

Last week Trulia launched a price reduction search tool allowing users to filter by price reductions and view history. We got a good amount of coverage across the mainstream press.  Below are some of the quotes and articles and the press release at the bottom of the post.

We’re constantly adding new features to improve the search experience and site functionality. Watch this space for more useful tools and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any new ideas for us.

 

“As the housing bust finally bites the Big Apple, more sellers are slashing prices in the U.S. financial and cultural capital than in any other big city in the country, according to data from real estate website Trulia.com.”-Reuters

"The financial crisis has hit the New York real estate market late in the cycle, but extremely hard," said Trulia chief executive Pete Flint."There's been a dramatic increase in the number of price reductions over the last six months."-Reuters

“Today Trulia.com, a real estate search site, reports, “27 percent of homes currently on the market across the United States have experienced at least one price cut.” The cuts range from $30,000 to $295,000. Trulia is now offering the ability for users to search listings that have undergone price cuts. Again, buyers only want the bargains.”-CNBC

“Trulia has recently added a tool that allows potential buyers to see price reductions for each property listing on their site. Buyers can also narrow their search to include only homes that have seen price cuts.”-Wall Street Journal

"If it's not on sale, I'm not buying it." “We've been hearing that from people shopping for everything from ball gowns to canned tuna, and evidently it's the motto of a lot of home-seekers as well. Today Trulia is launching a new search filter on its site to allow shoppers to look for only those homes that have had a price reduction. Folks at Trulia say 25 percent of the listings in the District have had at least one price reduction, by an average amount of $81,318.”- Washington Post 

 

 

MORE THAN ONE IN FOUR HOMES ON THE MARKET HAVE CUT THEIR PRICE

Trulia Announces New Price Reduction Tool to Help Consumers Find Best Value in their Home Search

 

SAN FRANCISCO, April 23, 2009 – Trulia, Inc. (www.trulia.com), the best place to start your real estate search, today announced the ability for users to search for listings that have undergone price cuts since first coming on the market. Trulia’s research has found that 27% of homes currently on the market across the United States have experienced at least one price cut. Across 15 major cities, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta, the average price reduction for homes ranged from $20,000 to $295,000. Specific data for major markets is included below. 

“It doesn’t matter if your price point is $200,000 or $2 million, in these difficult times people are searching for the best deals they can find on homes,” said Pete Flint, Trulia CEO and co-founder. “Our new price reduction functionality makes it easier for people to find the home of their dreams without laboring through unwanted results.”

Trulia is the first and only real estate site to provide consumers with the ability to use price reductions as a search filter in their quest to find a deal in today’s market. The new Price Reduction feature can be accessed from the Trulia homepage and is deeply integrated into the existing search experience on the search results page and via the advanced search tab.  Detailed information regarding multiple price reductions and prior sold data is now available on each property listing page.

As the spring buying season approaches and the real estate market continues to be increasingly competitive, price reductions are becoming more prevalent.  Providing home buyers with access to price reduction data will help them be better informed as they decide which home to purchase and will help ensure consumers get the most home for their dollar.  It will also help home sellers price their homes competitively as more homes come onto the market.

Rank	City	Listings with Price Reductions	Average Listing Price	Average Reduction	Average Reduction Off Original Price
1	New York City	39%	$          2,090,851	$              295,194	14%
2	Los Angeles	33%	$          1,012,041	$              143,307	13%
3	Phoenix	32%	$              367,308	$                43,829	12%
4	San Francisco	30%	$          1,253,618	$              174,516	13%
5	Las Vegas	28%	$              346,102	$                48,013	16%
6	Boston	28%	$              706,739	$                57,056	8%
7	Houston	27%	$              312,266	$                20,318	6%
8	Albuquerque	26%	$              293,967	$                22,559	7%
9	Chicago	25%	$              446,775	$                36,291	8%
10	San Diego	25%	$              647,910	$                65,388	9%
11	Miami	25%	$              403,074	$                58,579	15%
12	Philadelphia	22%	$              328,953	$                24,880	8%
13	Atlanta	21%	$              451,495	$                49,617	11%
14	Seattle	20%	$              636,564	$                49,605	8%
15	Denver	18%	$              436,791	$                30,205	7%

 

 Users can access the price reduction search tool from multiple areas on Trulia.com: 

• Trulia.com Homepage – with one click, users can see how any homes have been price reduced in their cities from the Trulia Homepage Local Newsfeed. 
• Search Results Page – users can select Price Reductions as an option in Refine Search located on the left side of the page, to only see homes that have undergone price reductions.  Users can also sort their search results by the size, percentage or date of the home price reduction. 
• Home Details Page - detailed information regarding all price reductions and prior sold data for each home is available on the property listing page.
• Advanced Search – Price Reductions can be selected as an additional search filter.
  
  

Charts are available for download at: http://www.trulia.com/info/pricereductions 

About Trulia, Inc.
Trulia, Inc., has revolutionized real estate search by offering a rich, intuitive user experience to help consumers find homes for sale, track local price trends, compare properties and neighborhood data all at the hyper-local level.  

Methodology:  All price change data is from live listings on Trulia.com, as of April 13, 2009 and tracks all price reductions from April 13, 2008 to April 13, 2009.  This data does not include foreclosure properties.  Trulia obtains its listing information from brokers, agents, third party aggregators and MLSs.  The percentage of listings with price reductions includes any non-foreclosure property on Trulia.com that has experienced at least one price reduction since it was first posted on the site.  The city level data is for listings within the city boundary, and not for metro areas

So, I've (finally) started using twitter. I'm @peteflint and my page here: http://twitter.com/peteflint .
I'll talk later on what I mean about "when private conversations turn public" and no it's not something in my personal life... but more what happens when conversations you used to have in private forums (offline) are now happening in public forums (online, e.g. twitter and www.trulia.com/voices and other places). Interesting things happen!

Feel free to follow me and if you are a fellow twitterer add a comment and I'll follow you too!

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.

I just got this email through this evening describing a customer issue and thought I'd share with you all. 

1:51pm PST: Rudy received a direct message from a fellow twitter user about wanting to sign up for Trulia Pro with her AmEx card (which we don't accept on the website)

2:01pm PST: Rudy forwarded the message to Cust Ops

2:20pm PST: Neil gave the agent a call, took her cc info over the phone, and enabled her account

~3:00pm PST: the agent posted a twitter message saying: '@trulia thank you for your quick attention to my problem with trulia pro. I did get a phone call. Hopefully I will be a pro on trulia soon!'

~4:00pm PST: the agent posted another twitter message saying: '@trulia super thank fastest customer service on the planet amazing how connected people solve problems and how unconnected ones create them'

Well done team Trulia on turning a request from a user into a new customer and public supporter! Trulia's small and dedicated customer operations team does a really phenomenal job. They are our front line working with our users and are a critical part of delighting our Industry partners, community members and consumers. I know there are dozens of examples like this all the time with super quick turn around times and delighted customers. We can't always solve every single request or problem as quickly as this one, but you can be confident that we're all working hard to do so.

I really love the comment about "how connected people solve problems and how unconnected people create then". How very true in so many ways. I'll write a follow up post on how customer services for Internet businesses has changed over the last few years. Now I'm heading off to work out how we can avoid the need to make the initial request to Rudy in the first place...!

If you have a problem with Trulia, here are the best steps to go through:
1) Check out our help pages to see if the answer is there.
2) Ask us a question to our customer operations team
3) Ask the community, be sure to tag the question under 'Using Trulia'

If that doesn't work, try Twitter or comment here, but you'll almost certainly get a faster response with the above. Also we love feedback, so please get in touch in the comments or here to pass on your requests for missing or additional features or tools to add.