AV Beat - Trulia

It seems like the world is at your fingertips when you start getting to know the World Wide Web. Between the mainstream sites, such as Google, Yahoo, and the rest, savvy users can find just about anything they are looking for, especially if you master the use of those "ands" and "ors".

One pet peeve of mine, however, has to do with real estate searches. It’s actually a two-part peeve. First, many real estate sites require registration to gain access their Multiple Listing Service, or MLS. If you’re like me, this is a show stopper. Secondly, many offices link to an MLS service that is limited to their service area. While this makes sense, it has obvious limitations, especially if you’re interested in multiple areas, rather than multiple listings.

A relatively new company, Trulia, appears to have sunk both peeves forever.

Trulia, headquartered in San Francisco, was founded in 2005 by Stanford classmates Peter Flint and Sami Inkinen. Their website, www.trulia.com, allows users to search real estate markets across the country, with no login required. But the search features, and how they are presented, is what makes Trulia something special.

For a basic Trulia search, the only required entry is a zip code or city. Additional optional entries include price range, desired square footage, and type, such as ranch, single family, or farm. Homes matching your search criteria are displayed, along with price, square footage, and, when available, a small photo. A map is also included, providing geographic perspective on each home returned by the query.

On the map, each house is represented by a tear drop. Users can mouse over the tear drop, automatically highlighting the home in the text display. The bottom line is, you can instantly tie all information for a particular home together – location, price, features, and geographic perspective, with one simple mouse over.

Another cool feature is the ability to expand your map, instantly including homes in surrounding areas.

Once you’ve identified a house of interest, you can click on the tear drop or the text listing to discover more detail about the home. Or, you can pan across the map, much like on Google’s map feature, and uncover more homes in surrounding areas.

Trulia has a slew of other useful features, such as Heat Maps and “For Sale” versus “Recently Sold” maps applied to homes near a given address.

The MLS searches provided by various agents certainly have their merits. But once you check out Trulia, and spend some time experimenting with their search application, we’re betting it will be you’re one and only stop for real estate research.