The real estate market is in serious turmoil and has likely thrown the entire economy into a recession, so you'd think a real estate search startup might not be a hot item. But you'd be wrong.
One such real estate search startup, Trulia, is not only doing fine, but usage of the site is accelerating as a result of the housing downturn, co-founder and chief executive Pete Flint tells us. Users are flocking to sites such as Trulia, because they are independent and give people more control to find exactly what they are looking for, at the right price, in troubled times.
Today, Trulia is launching a new feature to to make the service even more useful: Integration with Google Street View. The service, which you might have heard of because of the controversy that surrounds it amid privacy concerns, shows panoramic pictures of places on Google Maps that can be rotated 360 degrees. You can traverse within this view to give you the feeling as if you on the city's street itself.
This is useful for Trulia. Imagine you are looking for a new home. Sure, you read all of the descriptions and see a few static photos, but actually looking around the entire neighborhood as it looks on any given day -- from your computer -- is invaluable. "[It's] literally the next best thing to walking down the street yourself," Flint says.
Trulia worked closely with Google to implement the functionality, and both sides are pleased with the results. While there have been the aforementioned security concerns about Google Street View, this is a perfect example of why how such a feature can be practical.
Assume you are looking for a home in one of the 40 cities Google Street View currently covers. When you do a search through Trulia and find a result you like, you are taken to a page with all the detailed information you would expect to find, but also with the street view of the property embedded right in the page. It's not simply porting in the entire Google Map and having the big bubble pop up that you might be used to seeing if you've used Street View before, instead a street view picture focusing on the property is placed right in front of you in its own area on the page (see above picture).
Even though chief competitor Zillow has raised a lot more money (somewhere around $87 million), Trulia has been more than holding its own, growing its audience three fold in the last twelve months and seeing revenue almost double in the last quarter. Trulia raised $18 million in funding from investors including Sequoia and Accel.
A massive shift in advertising from periodical classifieds to sites such as Trulia has also helped the site, the company wrote about in a blog post recently.
Trulia currently has over 60 million real estate properties. The company plans to add this new street view feature to all of them as Google rolls it out to more cities.
We previously covered Trulia here, and have also covered another of its competitors, Roost, here.