Trulia is one of the leading marketplaces for real estate online. Five million homes are listed on the site and potential buyers can search, visualize, and track properties as well as access information about nearby schools and crime. The site attracts 31 million monhtly unique visitors. Trulia filed for a $75 million IPO in August 2012 to keep pace with its primary competitor Zillow, which went public in 2011.

Trulia’s former strategy was to “build first” and avoid acquisitions. According to the company’s vice president of communications Ken Shuman “most acquisitions fail and tend to be a distraction for senior management.” However, in March 2013, Trulia announced that it intended to raise $150 million to move quickly on acquisitions.

“The capital is to really to strengthen the cash reserves for new product lines and acquisitions,” Shuman said in an interview with VentureBeat. “There has to be a really compelling reason to acquire, as we’re often better off building.”

The corporate development team looked for potential buys amongst companies that provide tools and services for real estate agents, online rentals, mortgage-focused startups, and small companies that could support international expansion.

Market Leader provides a suite of software solutions that real estate professionals use to manage their business online. Products include a website-builder, tools for lead generation tools and marketing, and contact management. The combined marketplace will have 46,000 premium subscribers, which the company said is more than any other online real estate marketplace. This deal means Trulia can provide an “end-to-end solution” for these professionals.

In a statement issued the morning, Trulia’s CEO Pete Flint said that acquiring Market Leader will “create unprecedented value for our customer base” and the combined platform will “enhance the productivity of their agents.” Trulia will also benefit from Market Leader’s partnerships with franchisors and brokerages

Trulia’s foray into the realm of enterprise software could be a step towards profitability. The company has a “history of losses” and Market Leader’s revenue stream grew by more than 30% in 2012, marking its second year of consecutive growth. Rather than relying on accurate listings to attract subscribers, Trulia will be able to offer additional value to agents so they have a one-stop shop for their operations.

Trulia’s stock closed at $34.34 yesterday and Market Leader’s shareholders will receive $6 and .1553 shares of Trulia’s common stock for each share of Market Leader common stock. Trulia is headquartered in San Francisco and Market Leader will continue to work out of its offices in Kirkland, Washington as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trulia.

Placester announced $2.5 million in funding today for its suite of software solutions that help real estate agents, brokers, and home owners more effectively advertise their properties online.

The startup graduated out of TechStars Boston in 2011 with the mission of modernizing the real estate industry. Using the platform, professionals can quickly and easily set up and conduct business online. There are tools and templates for easy website creation, as well as to widely distribute listings, market and advertise the properties more efficiently, find leads, manage clients, and receive data analytics. Placester is also integrated with Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listing data and claims to cover 85 percent of listings in the U.S..

Real estate is a vast and fragmented market and many startups like Zillow, Trulia, and IDX Broker are working on making the process of buying and selling (and renting) real estate less painful. Placester is not only focused on marketing or consumer discovery, but lets agents create their own online presence rather than operating through a third party or having no presence at all.

Placester was founded in 2008 by Matthew Barba and Frederick Townes, the founding CTO of Mashable. The company has raised a total of $2.5 million in seed funding, led by Romulus Capital, along with financing from David Anderson, David Cohen, Angel Street Capital, and other angels. The funding came in multiple tranches, with $1 million in new funding closing today. The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo Credit: Placester/Facebook

Now’s a pretty good time to be in the real estate business —  or at least the real estate listing business.

Zillow reported its fourth quarter 2012 earnings today, crushing analyst estimates and perhaps silencing the critics who say its business model is baloney.

Revenue on the quarter was $34.3 million, a 73 percent increase over the same period in 2011 year. Much of that cashflow came from Zillow’s Marketplace, which pulled in $26.8 million — nearly double its Q4 2011 numbers.

Zillow traffic growth continues to be driven by mobile readers, who currently make up over half of its traffic. Zillow’s overall monthly uniquess increased 47 percent to 34.5 millon during the quarter.

Going forward, Zillow says it will focus on increasing the number of people who use it, growing its Premier Agent service, and expanding its rental, mortgage, and home improvement business — the latter of which the company launched earlier this month.

Zillow’s shares are up 11 percent to $43.50 in after hours trading.

Photo:Shutterstock

So does the team at 42floors and their investors, who have put $12.3 million into this search engine for office rentals.

42floors seeks to be the missing link between companies without office space and office space without tenants. The database currently contains listings in San Francisco, New York, and Brooklyn, and this funding will fuel entrance into new markets. Users input their desired location and can narrow the results by cost, square-footage, and neighborhood. The listings are accompanied by professional photographs and there is a map view to display all available units.

The marketplace does not circumvent landlords and brokers. Rather, it helps customers see a range of options before trekking all over town or shelling out for professional help. The service is free for brokers, landlords, and consumers, but 42floors takes a commission on the sales. Companies like Zillow and Trulia tackle the home rental market, and 42floors takes a similar approach, of focusing on user experience to take some of the pain out of the process.

The founding team participated in prestigious accelerator Y Combinator’s winter 2012 class and raised $5 million in September of 2012 including Thrive Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Chris Dixon, and Dave McClure. New Enterprise Associates led this round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Thrive Capital, as reported this morning by TechCrunch.   

In addition to expanding its geographical reach, 42floors will also build out its e-commerce offerings, where companies with related products can market or sell through the site.

Read our interview with cofounder Jason Freedman. 

RoomHunt is launching today to not only simplify finding a place to live, but also finding people to live with. It is a website that aggregates rental listings from various sources and connects them with social networks. Those looking for a home select the neighborhood and number of bedrooms they desire, and the listings are automatically filtered by lowest to highest by bedroom price. From a listing, there is a “Find Roommate” button that notifies their social network that they are looking.

“We are creating the Airbnb for long term rentals,” said CEO David Weisburg. “Moving into a new city is very difficult both economically and psychologically.  RoomHunt’s mission is to make that process frictionless, affordable, and fun.”

Weisburg was inspired to start RoomHunt after moving to San Francisco and facing the frustrating and seemingly impossible task of renting an apartment. Rental sites like Craigslist, Zillow, Zumper, Padmapper, Trulia, and Rent.com can be overwhelming. By aggregating all the listings into one marketplace, RoomHunt attempts to offer a meta-solution (like Kayak), that puts all the relevant information in one place.

When I first started searching for a rental in San Francisco, I could not afford a one or two bedroom apartment. Unfortunately, I only had one friend to look with (sad, I know), and we were hesitant to check out three or four bedrooms without knowing who would be living in the other rooms. The roommate finder feature makes it easier to form a cabal to embark upon the hunt together.

This is also appealing to landlords and property managers that want qualified, responsible tenants.

As of today, RoomHunt is only active in San Francisco’s 37 neighborhoods, but has plans for national expansion. At the time of publishing, the site was down. However, in a statement, Weisburd describes it as “a visually-pleasing site featuring photos of hundreds of beautiful properties in every price range.”

So far, the two founders have raised $85,000 and said $25,000 is “hard committed.” Angel investors include Alex Roasti, Errik Anderson and Randy Brunson. RoomHunt is based in the SoMA area of San Francisco.

VivaReal, an online real estate marketplace for Latin America, announced a $15 million round of funding to significantly deepen its footprint on the continent. Although its major presence is in Brazil, the platform operates six separate marketplaces and listings in 20 countries.

The site is comparable to other real estate sites like Zillow, Trulia, and Craigslist. The real distinguishing feature is its focus on Brazil which has a booming real estate scene at the moment. Events like the World Cup and the Olympics have established Brazil has an international hot spot, not to mention emerging tech hub.

Competitors may be interested in entering Latin America, but it is not as easy as integrating with an existing property database. Unlike the US, Brazil does not have a centralized listings service. VivaReal has amassed its own repository of hundreds of thousands of properties and thus has a distinct advantage in this massive market.

VivaReal was founded in 2007 in the US and received its first investment, of an undisclosed amount, last year. The financing came from Valiant Capital Partners, as well as Kaszek Ventures and Monashees Capital.

Zillow is a real estate marketplace that lists “practically every home in the U.S.” It can be used to find homes for sale, apartment rentals, market records, mortgage rates, statistics, and even advice. Like any enterprising real estate mogul, Zillow has been on a buying spree, snatching up startups to expand and improve its offerings. The HotPads purchase marks Zillow’s sixth acquisition in less than two years.

HotPads’ map-based real estate search engine is known for its split screen search interface that lets visitors view multiple listings side-by-side to make comparisons. Of the millions of visitors to HotPads, almost 70% were looking for rentals. This fits into Zillow’s recent launch of Zillow Rentals, which offers a suite of tools for rental professionals.

“This acquisition represents a significant step-change for Zillow Rentals, allowing us to dramatically increase the number of leads we send to landlords,” said Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow. “HotPads has a younger, complementary and rental-focused audience. Now Zillow will become even more relevant to consumers at the beginning of their real estate life cycle.”

This is Zillow’s first acquisition of a primarily consumer-facing company. Earlier acquisitions include Mortech, Inc; Buyfolio; RentJuice, Diverse Solutions, and Postlets.

There are mixed sentiments about Zillow’s future within the technology community. While the company had a strong third quarter with $27.8 million in revenue and saw 36 million unique visitors in October, a recent report from research firm Citron undermined investor, share-holder, and consumer confidence.

HotPads will not only supplement Zillow’s rental offering but will also help build out its mobile presence. Zillow recently launched the Rentals for iPhone app and saw record mobile usage in Quarter 3. HotPads’ five mobile applications will “complement Zillow’s growing rental marketplace.” HotPads will also serve to bolster Zillow in its competition with Trulia, another real estate listing company.

HotPads has 19 employees and is based in San Francisco, where it will remain even though Zillow is based in Seattle. Read the press release. 

Google Ventures’ latest portfolio company to launch is HomeLight, a startup that’s all about buying and selling real estate.

More specifically, it helps you find the real estate agent — the best one for your price point and neighborhood and experience level — and agents only pay for the service if they end up with a new client out of the process.

“My wife and I bought our first home a couple years ago. [We learned] it’s really easy to find a real estate agent, but it’s really hard to find a good one ,” said Drew Uher, HomeLight co-founder and CEO, in a recent phone chat with VentureBeat.

After finding a “great” agent through a friend’s recommendation, the Uhers found the agent only worked in two San Francisco neighborhoods, and not the ones the couple was looking for.

“I felt like there was always a disconnect … like she was working against us rather than for us,” he said.

HomeLight was created to solve that kind of problem, programmatically sorting out the best realtors and agents for specific tasks.

As Uher put it, “The skills it takes to sell a short sale are completely different … Same thing if you’re working with an investor who’s looking to buy several homes. It takes a very different type of agent than someone who works with first-time homebuyers.”

This is one situation where asking friends for advice might not help. As Uher told us, each of your friends will typically know one or two real estate agents, and while your friends do have your best interests at heart, “They don’t have a great data set or perspective on the market.”

Searching the web is about as useful. Most of the time, said Uher, The top search results you’re going to see will be a local 21st Century or Vanguard office. You’ll be unable to determine which agents are just getting started, which are more established, which ones do short sales, etc.

Here’s a sneak peek at the service:

Currently, HomeLight is live in 34 markets in the U.S., including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and Boston.

The startup has raised a total of $1.5 million, all announced today, from Google Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Innovation Endeavors, and a handful of unnamed angel investors. HomeLight was founded in 2012 and is based in San Francisco.

Top image courtesy of dotshock, Shutterstock

More than a few of these investors seemed to have read this report from research firm Citron, which took Zillow apart, piece by piece.

The report’s conclusion? Zillow’s basic business model stinks

“The unvarnished truth is that the willowy story Zillow has been telling Wall Street is a completely inconsistent with company’s underlying business metrics,” the report says.

A part of the problem, Citron concludes, is that Zillow is a Web 1.0 company pretending to be a Web 2.0 company. In plain English, this means that Zillow is essentially a sales company that just happens to be online.

“Let us not forget what Zillow is — an aggregator web site of syndicated MLS listings that sells leads to real estate agents. It is not doing anything either disruptive or new, and certainly not better than the others,” the report says.

Zillow, for its part, is just coming off of a $27.8 million revenue quarter, so the income is certainly there despite Citron’s accusations. The company also just completed a secondary offering potentially worth $135 million.

The Citron report comes a week after Zillow competitor Trulia went public. Trulia’s stock  closed the day down by less than a percent at $22.25.

The most ironic part about the Citron report? “This purpose of this article is not to cause a sudden drop in stock price.” Whoops.

VentureBeat asked Zillow for a response to the report, but the company declined comment.

Real estate site Trulia‘s stock has popped about 40 percent in early trading on its first day as a public company, with the stock trading about $7 over its $17-per-share IPO price.

Trulia filed for a $75 million IPO on Monday, despite consistent losses. The site competes with Zillow in up-to-date real estate listings and helpful tools for prospective renters and buyers.

The company has more than 4.5 million homes listed for sale and rent and a database of more than 110 million properties. Its listings include info about nearby schools and crime, but mostly Trulia is helpful for buyers and renters with its ability to easily search, visualize, and track homes and apartments. The map above shows a search I performed today for properties for sale in Brooklyn.

Subscriptions make up the majority of Trulia’s revenues, with more than 21,000 current subscribers. The company’s revenues for the first six months of 2012 amount to $29 million versus $16 million for the same period a year ago. Net losses are also growing for Trulia — its net loss in the first six months of the year are $7.6 million versus $6.2 million a year ago.

Prior the IPO, San Francisco-based Trulia raised about $33 million in funding from Sarofim Fayez, Accell Partners, Sequoia Capital, and other investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Real estate listings company Zillow says most of its users are going mobile. So the company is responding appropriately with the launch its latest app: Rentals for iPhone.

The app, which joins its existing Android counterpart, offers iPhone users easy access to rental listings and data, making the process of rental shopping a tad easier. Zillow Rentals will even ping users when it spots rentals that match their selected criteria.

Other features include the ability to check out local establishments, search by voice, and directly contact landlords and property managers.

“We believe that real estate is inherently mobile, and the mobile experience will continue to grow and be a bigger part of our business,” Zillow consumer marketing vice president Jeremy Wacksman told Venturebeat.

That increasingly-mobile userbase is what helped Zillow report a record $27.8 million in revenue last quarter.

It’s the latest company to ride the wave of enthusiasm around crowd-sourced funding, a trend sparked in part by the recent JOBS Act legislation.

However, the JOBS Act hasn’t been promulgated yet by the SEC, and the company is actually taking advantage of  a different regulation, the little-used Regulation A, which lets you do public offerings under $5 million.

Fundrise launched last week, with the goal of raising $325,000 for its first offering, a property at 1351 H Street, in Washington DC. It has already raised $127,600 from more than 60 investors, co-founder Ben Miller told me.

Another part of the company’s vision is to let community residents partake in neighborhood development projects they care about, he said.

It’s Simple

The beauty of this Fundrise is how it cuts through oodles of red tape to get such deals done. Indeed, Miller says the reason he launched the company is because of the hassles he and his brother, Daniel Miller, had with  their existing real restate business. They were forced to raise money from private equity investors, often complex deals. Moreover, these investors had few ties with the communities they were investing in, and their interests were often unaligned.

Another elegance to Fundrise is that there are no middlemen, and that all investors are treated equally. If you invest $100 in a property, you have the same economic stake in the investment as the general managers of the deal themselves, i.e, folks like Miller. There are no “preferred share” versus “common share” differences, where one class of investors gets a slightly better deal than another. There are no liquidation rights. No first-out clauses. No broker-dealers. It really looks like the real deal. The only difference is that so-called “Class A” shares are owned by the managers of the deal, who have a few more governance and voting rights, as you might expect. Class B shares have the same economic rights, but no governance rights.

How is this possible?

Ben Miller, Fundrise co-founder

Miller tells me the company had to work really hard to qualify the offering with the SEC and register it with the securities regulators in Virginia and the District of Columbia. The idea for company actually started two years ago. It took his team eight months to get through the regulations. They even hired the guy who wrote the original Regulation A documentation in the 1990s. Surprisingly, when Miller was researching deals that were filed under Regulation A last year, he found only 22 filings, only three of which ended up being registered. In other words, the opportunity had been sitting there, vastly under-utilized.

But it’s not like anyone can do this. Here’s how it works: Miller and his team at Fundrise had to first use their own money — made in from prior real estate business — to buy the 1351 H Street property outright. That took up-front cash. They then turned around and used another site they’d built, called Popularize, to gather public opinion and input about the property. The found that there was local interest in high-end food market. So they leased the property out to the creators of  fashion company DURKL and Asian food Toki Underground to combine the fashion and food concepts. The space is now being renovated for a hybrid food and fashion market called Maketto. The money raised will be used to pay for the renovation and the interior infrastructure for Maketto.

According to the company, each share purchased entitles individual investors to a percentage of the Maketto holding company, which owns:

• Shares of ownership in real estate property (1351 H Street NE)
• 30% share of potential profits of Maketto
• Rights of ownership (Investor Benefits exclusive access to events, discounts, gear)

There are other perks, too. A $100 share gets you access to things like shareholder events and cocktail receptions. If you buy $1,000 in shares, you get extras like a 10 percent discount on all food at the new market, and some Limited Edition DURKL Maketto gear. And for $10,000, you get an annual food and wine dinner prepared by the food company’s chef.

On the face of it, Fundrise looks to be doing everything right. The only thing limiting it is the ability to scale. It is only available for now in Washington DC, and Virginia, and it’s got a ton of work ahead of it to expand into other markets (it has to fight through local regulation red-tape), and it also needs to raise money fast to afford to buy other properties that it can put on the platform. And of course, there’s still the large, established REIT industry, where investors who aren’t hung up on making specific investments in their community, can already make real-estate investments. Two questions remain: How compelling will community real estate investing really be for people? And will others beat Fundrise to a larger play nationally?

Real estate site Trulia publicly filed for a $75 million IPO this morning, setting its sights on its competitor Zillow, which went public last year.

Trulia offered up some impressive new growth stats in its S-1 filing: in the six months leading up to June 2012, the company had 22 million unique monthly visitors (4.3 million of which were on mobile, up 176 percent from the same time last year). But amidst those big figures, Trulia also reported consistent losses.

If you haven’t hunted for an apartment lately, Trulia’s offerings can be a lifesaver: The company has more than 4.5 million homes listed for sale and rent, out of a database of more than 110 million properties. Its listings include helpful information about nearby schools and crime, but mostly Trulia is helpful for buyers and renters with its ability to easily search, visualize, and track properties. It’s helpful for sellers and brokers too, since people interested in their listings can get in touch with them directly.

Trulia says it has more than 360,000 active real estate workers, 21,544 are paying subscribers (up from 2,398 two years ago). Subscribers make up most of Trulia’s revenues, but the company also boasts that its audience is also ripe for brand audiences, since most of its users have incomes above $75,000 a year.

The company’s revenue for 2011 was $38.5 million, and in the first six months of 2012 it’s already reached $29 million. But losses plague Trulia, last year it reported a net loss of $6.2 million and as of June this year it’s seen a $7.6 million loss. Not surprisingly, Trulia lists its losses as one of its major risks in its S-1 filing, which notes that it might not reach or maintain profitability soon.

Other risks include: a limited operating history, the possibility that real estate professionals won’t continue to subscribe, and the possibility that it won’t be able to get and maintain accurate real estate listing information. For investors, perhaps the scariest risk is, “We may not be able to continue to innovate and provide useful products.”

A lot of these risks are relatively standard for tech startups. Clearly, Trulia is hoping that investors will pay more attention to its impressive growth numbers than to its losses or risks.

Trulia is based in San Francisco and raised around $33 million in funding from Sarofim Fayez, Accell Partners, Sequoia Capital, and others.

Billed as “Shazam for Homes,” HomeSnap uses image-recognition technology to identify a property. Users snap a photo and the app draws from a pool of real estate listings, tax records, census data, attendance zones, and geolocation data to provide relevant information, such as appraised value, number of bathrooms, and school zone.

Whether you are curious how much that suburban split level costs and whether it can accomodate a family of four or dying to discern how much a celebrity spent on a fourth home, HomeSnap can tell you what you want to know.

HomeSnap launched in March at SXSW, and since then it’s been downloaded more than 200,000 times.

Even for people not actively in the market for a house, interest in property values and a voyeuristic curiosity about other peoples’ homes are rampant, as testified by the dozens of reality television shows dedicated to real estate.

Home may be where the heart is, but it takes persistence, dedication, and time to find the perfect abode. House hunters traditionally have to hire brokers, troll through pages and pages of real estate listings, and scour the streets for promising “For Sale” signs.

HomeSnap was created by Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate brokerage site, to make the house-hunting process simpler. It can also help aspiring home owners gauge home values and what options are available to them.

Currently, the app is only available on the iPhone, and this recent funding is for Android and iPad versions as well as to build a web presence and expand the functionality to other areas, like condos, co-ops, and rentals.

The funding round was led by Revolution Ventures, a Washington, D.C.-based venture firm founded by AOL cofounder Steve Case. Sawbuck is also based in Washington D.C.

It’s no secret that the Bay Area is a mecca for startups. Hundreds of ideas have been born, funded, and launched from the Silicon Valley all the way up to San Francisco, and quite a few have found success in the process. But where do all these founders, designers, and developers spend their early days?

While renting a “real” office is out of the question for even those who land funding thanks to high price of real estate in the area, many startups set up shop in much cheaper cafés or co-working spaces. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of our favorite spaces to work in the Bay Area that don’t require a costly lease.

Public Spaces (lowest cost and commitment)

San Francisco Public Library

Need a quiet place to work or a free meeting room without all the bells and whistles offered in an office? The SFPL offers free Wi-Fi and meeting rooms for groups so you can get right to work. With dozens of locations, you don’t even need to spend much time trekking across town for a place to work, either.

What it’ll cost you: Nothing!

Cafes (low cost and commitment)

The Creamery

Located in San Francisco, this café offers not only a great cup of coffee with Wi-Fi, but also the chance to overhear great conversations such as entrepreneurs pitching VCs. Whether you’re keeping an eye on the competition – or just love to hear the juicy gossip before it hits our front page –  there’s nowhere better to “work” than The Creamery.

What it’ll cost you: About $5 for a cup of coffee (just don’t forget to tip!)

University Cafe

This café in Palo Alto is another one of our favorite places to work in the Bay Area. Like the Creamery, you can always find interesting (chatty) characters, and the café features a large open space to work, as well as a nice outdoor area. There’s Wi-Fi indoors and out. Whether you want to collaborate with others or just keep an ear out for interesting ideas, the University Cafe is a great choice.

What it’ll cost you: Also about $5 for a cup of coffee.

Co-working Spaces (medium cost and commitment)

Hub Bay Area

This co-working space offers some of the most enjoyable spots to co-work in the Bay Area, with two locations to choose from. In San Francisco, you will find two floors totaling 20,000 square feet of collaborative workspace. It also features an art gallery curated by Intersection for the Arts along with several meeting rooms, large event spaces, two full kitchens and cafés, and more than 125 work stations. Another location in Berkeley offers 2,000 square feet of LEED certified space that uses only natural light during the day and features Plyboo bamboo surfaces, Icestone countertops, Interface carpet, and Steelcase furniture. It also has a full kitchen/café, meeting rooms with writeable glass surfaces, and more than 30 work spaces for members. For those who enjoy the environment in which they work just as much as the work they do, working at Hub Bay Area is ideal.

What it’ll cost you: $30 day

Citizen Space

One of the first co-working spaces in San Francisco, Citizen Space has been recognized worldwide for its innovation. The space features dim lights and chandeliers, as well as other necessary resources such a Wi-Fi, a printer and copier, coffee and snacks, a projector, whiteboards, and flip charts. The space is notably small, however, and is best suited for the solo entrepreneur or contractor.

What it’ll cost you: $8/hour to drop in

The Hatchery

Be a social entrepreneur and mingle with other startups at The Hatchery. This shared space offers unlimited and secure 24/7 access to your own desk, located in a well-designed, furnished office space in the heart of SOMA. The Hatchery has a co-working space for both individuals and teams, including over a dozen shared conference rooms with Polycom phones and whiteboards which can accommodate four to 20+ people. The Hatchery provides WiFi, on-site management, mail-handing service, and a voicemail system. There’s on-call administrative and IT support, billed at affordable rate, as well as two shared kitchens with daily free coffee, tea, and water, and paid catering services for member functions. Alumni include ActiveMind, BeFunky, FanMinder and Tribal Crossing.

What it’ll cost you: $550-$650/mo (with a minimum 3 month commitment) for a dedicated desk.

RocketSpace

RocketSpace is another great shared space located in San Francisco that offers desk and offices to startups, though membership is much more selective. RocketSpace has amenities most startups dream of, starting with the basics: a fully stocked kitchen with beer on Fridays. There’s also access to HR, legal and accounting services, and VCs and corporate investors. Alumni of RocketSpace include Zappos, PocketGems, Uber, Zaarly, Spotify, and Beatport, so those who work at RocketSpace will find no lack of inspiration or motivation.

What it’ll cost you: $500 to $800 per desk/mo.

Allison purchased his first home at the young age of 17 and found out quickly how much paperwork can complicate the process. I had a similar experience helping my mom buy a house a few years ago — paperwork was emailed, printed, signed, scanned, and emailed or faxed between at least three people. Trying to follow the paper trail would make anyone dizzy.

DotLoop tries to cut down on all physical paperwork by creating one space, called a loop, where people can collaborate on documents. Especially in the negotiation process, this cuts down on the time spent sending documents back and forth.

“A loop is a virtual workspace in real-time, [it's like] Google Docs but with more permissions and versioning,” said Allison in an interview with VentureBeat.

Real estate agents, loan officers, and home buyers can all access a document together to hammer out the details of the deal. Once everyone approves a contract or loan document, it can be printed, signed, and processed.

Document sharing is a popular feature seen in Google Docs and Zoho Writer, services used a lot in small businesses. DotLoop only serves the real estate industry and offers a secure place for sensitive document sharing. It plans to expand into other industries in the future.

“Our vision is bigger than real estate, [we want to] eliminate paperwork in all fields,” Allison noted.

With the funding, led by Trinity Ventures, DotLoop is launching a free version of its service for individual real estate agents. It’s been serving entire real estate firms until now. It is also moving west from its headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio to open an office in San Francisco.

Raining paperwork image via Shutterstock

The two months prior to the IPO announcement saw only 840 sales in the region. In dramatic contrast, sales in the last two months have almost doubled to 1,531, according to Guy Wolcott, the co-founder and chief executive of the company behind real estate app HomeSnap.

It’s not just sales. The median sales price is up 15 percent in the same time period, and the number of million-dollar-plus prices is up a staggering 159 percent since the Facebook IPO announcement.

These bargains won’t last

Source: Sawbuck.com

$5.5 million. Only 18,000 Facebook shares!

While that’s not a conclusive cause-and-effect connection (there’s a lot more wealth in Silicon Valley besides Facebook stock), the rising real estate prices do indicate that something big is happening. Once the IPO happens and employees’ lock-up periods expire, prices will go even higher.

Housing prices in desirable areas of California’s tech hotbeds have always been high, especially in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Facebook’s hometown, Menlo Park.

But in the last two months Silly Valley is just getting plain ridiculous. Think $5.5 million for this fairly large but hardly palatial family home (right). Or $4 million for a six year old home in central Menlo Park. The built-in wine cellar will help you recover from the inevitable sticker shock.

Fortunately, Facebook employees have a lot of cash coming. As of last year, Facebook employees owned around 30 percent of the company, worth perhaps $25-$30 billion when the company goes public.

Until the company does go public, selling those shares is difficult, but not impossible, and many have been selling privately on secondary markets like Sharespost for years.

Once the IPO happens, the biggest winners will be the earliest employees, investors, and top executives. According to Who Owns Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg will cash in to the tune of $1.8 billion, former employees Chris Hughes and Matt Cohler will take home $850 and $680 million, respectively, and current employee Jeff Rothschild will also pocket $680 million.

But even employees who joined later should do fine: According to this Quora thread, the average Facebook employee will realize about $2 million in the IPO.

“Staggering” market conditions

According to Wolcott, the current doubling of home sales is “staggering,” and the prices are continuing to rise rapidly.  “All indicators are saying this is a hot market,” Wolcott said today, “and it’s hotter the higher you go up the price scale.”

Wolcott knows these numbers because he’s the cofounder of Sawbuck, an online real estate service that competes with the likes of Trulia, Zillow, and Redfin. Eight weeks ago Sawbuck released HomeSnap: a mobile real estate app that Wolcott calls “Shazam for homes,” referencing the popular music identification service. With HomeSnap, you take a picture of a home, and get huge amounts of data: if it’s for sale, price, lot boundaries, school district, tax information.

In eight weeks, HomeSnap has been installed 115,000 times and been used to snap 175,000 homes. And Silicon Valley is one of the hottest locations. Tony Palo Alto is number one. Nearby Redwood City is number two, and Facebook hometown Menlo Park is not far behind at number 4. Could all those Facebook millionaires-in-waiting be scoping the goodies?

See below for an infographic from Sawbuck illustrating the rapid changes in the Silicon Valley real estate market.

Are you an employee of Facebook or any other startup who has used stock options to buy a house or some other splurge? Congratulations! Also, we’d love to hear from you.

Image credits: Sawbuck, AMagill

42Floors emerged from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class back in March as an office space search and discovery service with the mission of helping companies find their dream office.

The company launched with some strong rhetoric about technologically upending the commercial real estate industry and liberating data from fragmented listing sources; all goals that are still actively pursued.

But after gathering lots of feedback from their users and fellow startupers, it realized that finding a dream office is more than just a real estate transaction: it’s also all the work that goes in after the deal closes.

That’s why 42Floors is today announcing an extension to their office search site that puts the focus back on companies seeking their dream office: a one-stop, nationwide marketplace called Showroom where companies can get inspired and shop for office products and services from space planning to furniture to catering.

The site is currently limited to a simple showcase of wares and services that can’t actually be bought, but the next iteration will allow streamlined purchasing so that a dream office can be ordered and delivered with the same fluidity as buying and downloading an app from the App Store.

I had a chance to talk about the new development with co-founder and chief executive Jason Freedman, a provocative figure in startupland these days—one need look no further than his very public hiring stunts or his unabashed condemnation of “non-technical” startup founders.

But despite all the showboating, Freedman and his company display a keen understanding of what startups in Silicon Valley want and will pay for.

Says Freedman, “We know on a tactical level that we can make an office manager’s job a lot easier, but we also know that right now, if you’re a CEO, the chief reason to invest in your office is hiring.”

Hiring indeed. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is experiencing a fiercly competitive talent crunch that’s forced companies to pursue every available avenue to successfully market themselves to potential hires. This includes the physical office space they inhabit, where each piece of furniture or catered meal plays a vital role in communicating the culture of that particular startup. Once compensation levels reach a certain point, factors like culture tend to sway employment decisions.

In terms of market positioning, however, Showroom is an oddity. There’s no denying that with all the money chasing deals in the Valley these days, there are a lot more companies that are willing to part with their freshly infused cash for offices with “personality.” At the same time, several of 42Floor’s own Y Combinator cohorts were acculturated on the “ramen-profitable” philosophy: running a lean operation that looks down upon anything other than shipping and iterating product. Odds are that most of those startups will be fine with their local IKEA offerings.

The current market for Showroom is thus limited to high-growth seed-stage and first-or-second round venture-backed companies. These firms are not bargain hunting: they can afford to allocate toward aggressively marketing their startup to new hires through swanky office space.

The company is aware of the need to be flexible, however. Version 2 is set to debut with an option to view Showroom offerings depending on what company one might be shopping for (ranging from a small two-person startup to, for example, a large financial services company).

No matter the size of the market, Showroom opens a new revenue stream for 42Floors as well. It plans to take a percentage of all transactions that go through the marketplace, adding to the company’s existing stream of referral fees from brokers closing deals procured through the main office search site.

42Floors has ambitious plans for the future. Freedman tells me that both iPhone and iPad apps are to be released “soon,” with interesting features like crowd-sourced photography of spaces.

The company is also set to announce a large funding round soon, which Freedman says will go toward further refining the product, strengthening ties with brokerages, and expanding to other cities (New York being first on the list).

When I last covered 42Floors, my parting note was that the company had a unique opportunity to use the showcasing of office spaces to drive community-based growth as a startup-for-startups, like what AngelList is for the startup funding process. Showroom is a good starting point that seems to take at least some of this commentary to heart.

42Floors is breaking into the commercial real estate world, helping new tenants find office spaces in an otherwise broker-run industry.

“This process is really broken,” said 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman. “We have the determination and the talent … we’re going to go out and build a big company.”

The company, which presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Tuesday, wants to be the missing link between office-less companies and company-less office spaces. Similar to Airbnb, 42Floors has a professional photographer take photos of the office spaces to be used in listings on its website.

The website is fairly easy to maneuver. When you first arrive, a map will show you a number of available units — marked by dropped pins on the various locations. A scrolling bar on the side gives you a listing of all the available units with the cost per square foot and more.

Check out an interview we recently had with Freedman about 42Floors.

You can narrow down the selections with specific criteria, and once you’ve found a place you’re interested in, you can contact the broker. Yes, brokers are not made irrelevant with 42Floors. Instead, the site takes some of the responsibility off the broker’s hands and allows potential customers to choose the places they’d like to see. The trade-off is losing the expertise that comes with an industry expert giving you a city-wide tour.

42Floors does not yet deal in bigger, commercial buys, such as full office-complexes, but hopes to move in that direction soon. It also has plans to cover what’s in the office.

“If you’ve ever searched for an office, one you find it your problems have just begun…we want to help sell desks, chairs, interior designers.”

42Floors takes a 20 percent commission on its sales and targets $24,000 in revenue per purchase. The team is starting with the 80 percent of the spaces that are priced at under $5,000 a square foot. SV Angel is a current investor.

42Floors is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.

Starting today, 42Floors is finally the answer to that question. It’s a web service aimed squarely at helping companies find office space easily—and also those listing leasable space.

But could it really have taken five to seven years for office space search to finally be optimized by the Internet?

Yes, says 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman, who blames the commercial real estate industry’s lack of a consumer focus and reliance on hapless brokers for keeping the opportunity at bay for so long. It’s hard to believe, but in an era when software is eating the world, it hasn’t yet taken a bite out of this $11 trillion industry, which has a poorly executed presence on the web.

In classic Silicon Valley—and Y Combinator—fashion, Freedman insists that 42Floors is strictly a technology company saving an industry that’s anything but. Industry data providers still rely on thousands of cold-callers to gather information; brokers base their livelihoods on faxes, paper fliers, and hastily assembled spreadsheets. “It’s the single most inefficient process you can dream of, and it’s going to all be replaced by software,” he proudly exclaims.

It all started when Freedman and his team (formerly of Y Combinator-backed startup FlightCaster; acquired in 2010), were looking for office space for their next startup, but became aggravated by the outmoded process that was office space search. Lacking a broker’s license to sift through listings, they were at the mercy of other brokers who were operating as if the Internet didn’t exist. Craigslist was a letdown as well, with most listings severely out of date and brokers on there engaging in bait-and-switch tactics.

The only companies that had relevant online listings were giants left over from the last dot-com boom, namely LoopNet and CoStar, many of their listings lack quality photos and data. The interface is a bit cluttered as well, lacking the minimalism and modernity of 42Floors. While browsing LoopNet is free, being able to use the site professionally (for brokers) requires an expensive subscription. Surprisingly, brokers had become complacent with that subscription and overall model.

This is also why, according to Freedman, the residential search startups took off earlier, since the data in that market was spread out over several competing listing systems that weren’t as locked-in and monopolized.

The co-founder became so enamored by the prospect of shattering the old system and conveniently finding his dream office that he took the requisite courses to get himself licensed as a full broker. Within months, he and his team had dissected the industry and built a website that would make finding office space transparent and direct for tenants.

While making the marketplace more efficient may be synonymous with killing the middlemen (in this case brokers), that’s not necessarily true. The company has been working with several large brokerages to replace their internal systems so they can feed data into 42Floors much more fluidly. “Brokers don’t need to go away, but the data needs to be liberated,” says Freedman, who sees the role of brokers evolving to be more of a consultant and negotiator.

To be clear, 42Floors is not serving the market for buying commercial properties. This is strictly about direct-to-tenant office space leases, although it will grow at some point to all types of commercial leases.

42Floors takes many design cues from the more established residential search sites, with a few enhancements. For one, their own professional photographers take all listing photos. Once on the site, the photos are joined by beautifully displayed data. The interface is extremely minimal and uncluttered. This really is one of the better listing sites you’ve seen. The site relies heavily on the Ken Burns effect, where still-photos are gradually panned and zoomed through a steadily paced slideshow. Freedman insists this is much better than 360-degree views for showcasing office space, and I’d have to agree.

A videography feature will debut later this year, but photography is the more sensible option for a majority of spaces, Freedman says. In fact, 42Floors is currently working on a mobile application (set to debut within the next quarter) that will allow brokers and landlords to take photos with their smartphones and upload them to the service directly. This is an interesting angle for the company and it will be worth observing how the trend plays out.

While all these innovations enhance the browsing and discovery of office space, the company will not be touching the transaction process at all. Once a company finds a space they like, 42Floors will refer a broker and then collect a 20 percent commission if the deal goes through.

In fact, this referral fee will be the primary business model once several quarters of growth have gotten the startup on steady footing. However, it will always be free to both browse and list space. The goal is for 42Floors to generate value by lubricating the market, reducing friction by making it free to list and view beautiful office spaces.

The company also plans to open a marketplace of services to help round out the creation of a dream office, with design and furnishing vendors on the list of eventual offerings.

The service is currently limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, where a panoply of office-hungry startups serve as a great testing ground for beta testing.

This will be the second time this team of entrepreneurs goes through the Y Combinator program, which they say was a “no-brainer,” citing loyalty to the program as the main motivator. In addition to all the important business insights gleaned from the startup boot camp, Freedman and co. insist that the real value is in the community, the people and the attitude. They could have raised more money from larger institutional names but were drawn to Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who Freedman likens to a hard-charging college coach that “you just want to perform for.” Their own peers from the current batch of startups have voted them #1 in their group.

The company has so far raised $400,000 from Y Combinator, Start Fund, and a follow-on from SV Angel.

My parting thought on 42Floors is that it truly is astonishing how a direct-to-tenant modern web service for finding office space wasn’t done yet, and that launching as a startup for startups is a great play here. Just as AngelList has become the go-to social network for startups looking to fundraise, helping entrepreneurs make connections and fall back on the community during that difficult process, 42Floors can be the go-to social hub for startups looking to do the same around the office-space dynamic.

It’s also a great content-marketing angle for 42Floors to play: showcase hot startup office spaces, galvanize the community, promote their own service, and build an audience with authentic engagement. It may seem cliché, but we just haven’t seen this paradigm around physical startup spaces yet.

Front photo via Kelly Smith/Flickr

If you’ve ever moved to a new city and known you were going to spend some time (forever?) car-less, you know why WalkScore is important. WalkScore looks at most city addresses in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and gives each city a “walkability” score from 0-100. This score is based on a few metrics that the company believes makes a good neighborhood for walking. These include having a neighborhood center, high enough populations for businesses to crop up, mixed incomes, and more.

The company has city ranking on its website, as well as an option to explore cities on a map. It also has an Apartment Search feature for those who want a WalkScore for their search. Companies are integrating WalkScore into their offerings as well and they’re not all real estate-oriented. Hipmunk, a travel search website, allows you to see WalkScores on its hotels application, so you know whether or not your stay will be around accessible shops and restaurants.

According to GeekWire, the money will be used to build out its apartment search, as well as its technology on the “walkability” side. It will also look further into the commuting process and what can be done to save that broken part of people’s daily lives.

Investors include Rudy Gadre, previously Facebook’s general counsel, Shel Kaphan, former chief technology officer of Amazon, and a number of angels, as well as companies.

Greg Waldorf, an investor and board member of real estate portal Trulia, participated in the round and will sit on VivaReal’s board. Simon Baker, former CEO of REA Group, Australia’s leading real estate portal with a market capitalization of over $1B also invested and is an advisor.

Whereas, in the US, real estate agents and portals can make use of a centralized property database called the Multiple Listings Service (MLS), other countries lack such a repository. In those regions, providing access to such a database can attract substantial advertising spend.

In the US, Internet real estate plays such as Zillow and Move, Inc. are valued at $828 million and $277 million respectively, while Trulia is still private with plans for an IPO. In contrast, in the UK, a country lacking a comprehensive, centralized MLS database, a portal such as Right Move is valued at well over $1B. This is could be an example of what Glenn Solomon, partner at GGV Capital, recently wrote about concerning Internet companies outside the US having potential to realize strong profit margins and valuations.

VivaReal, a company founded in 2007, has amassed a database of 260k properties in Brazil and uniquely offers a fixed price for unlimited listings. Its main competitors ZAP and ImovelWeb have approximately 250k and 100k properties respectively. These players are vying for a real estate advertising market estimated to be worth over $2B.

The Globo and Estado São Paulo newspaper groups founded ZAP in 2006, while Archote Publicidade founded Imovel Web in 1999. Though only a fraction of Brazil’s 57k real estate agents advertise on any portal, ZAP and Imovel Web have managed to grow revenues substantially by building direct sales forces to target these customers.

VivaReal’s approach includes direct sales, unique offerings (packages with unlimited listings) as well as leveraging investments in its technology platform for improved user experience and better integration with other sites. This is important because while the US boasts real estate portal integration standards such as RETS, countries such as Brazil have as many as 50 different such standards to support.

With both the soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games coming to Brazil in the coming years, the country should continue to have a dynamic economy and real estate market. According to VivaReal CEO, Brian Requarth, the current funding will provide the resources required to step up sales efforts and better leverage the company’s platform investments.

Other investors participating in the deal include, Shaun Di Gergorio, CEO of iProperty, Asia’s fastest growing property portal network, Wences Casares and Micky Malka of venture fund, Meck, Jeff Fluhr of Angel Hub, Dave McClure of 500 Startups and Chamath Palihapitiya of the Social+Capital Partnership.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Real estate listings site Zillow on Thursday launched a new version of its iPhone app that incorporates its Mortgage Marketplace and new financial tools to help people manage and finance home purchases.

Zillow has caught the attention of tech watchers and investors because it is one of the few tech IPOs from this year that still has a higher stock price than it had when it opened. When Zillow debuted on the NASDAQ in mid-July, the price greatly fluctuated, but ended up settling above its $20 opening price. As of Wednesday, Zillow was trading around $25 a share.

Zillow’s push to polish its popular iPhone application stems from incredibly wide usage. The company said that people shopping for homes view more than 2.5 million homes each day on Zillow from smartphones and tablets. Zillow also has apps for iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

“Real estate is inherently mobile, and our goal is to provide people with information about homes – and home financing – whenever and wherever they need it,” said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in a statement.

Zillow already offered a separate iPhone application for its Mortgage Marketplace — a place for borrowers to connect with lenders to find loans — and the tools associated with the Marketplace. But now Zillow has incorporated all of those tools inside the primary Zillow app for easy access (and probably so people actually know about them). The company also updated the app with faster map performance and made it easier to save searches and favorites.

Zillow lists the following tools as new additions to the primary app:

• The Payment Calculator helps consumers estimate what their monthly payment will look like for a particular home that interests them.
• The Affordability Calculator helps shoppers narrow their home search to those within a specific price range.
• The mortgage shopping experience enables users to request and receive personalized loan quotes, read lender reviews, and connect with a lender to start the pre-approval process with one tap of their finger.

Are you a Zillow user? Do you think the company can continue to find an audience in a stagnant housing market?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Online real estate finder Trulia is launching a big play on Android this morning with two new apps: an Android tablet app, and an app made specifically for renters.

Both apps show the increasing importance of mobile for Trulia, which the company says accounts for 25 percent of its overall traffic. It’s also a sign that companies are finally beginning to take Android tablets seriously, after they failed to get much traction last year.

Trulia touts its tablet app as the first of its kind for Android. The app includes all of the features you’d expect. You can search for properties to buy or rent, view large photos of properties, and contact a real estate agent from within the app. In my brief hands-on test, it appears to be well-designed and, most importantly, fast. The tablet app requires Google’s tablet-optimized Android 3.0.

The Trulia “For Rent” app is, not surprisingly, built specifically for rental hunters. In addition to helping you find rental properties, it’s packed with features to make your search easier. You can organize and customize rental searches and keep track of your notes and photos about a rental property from within the app. You can also easily share your notes and photos with family members, roommates, or friends.

The company tells us it’s also excited about Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, which was unveiled yesterday. It’s currently working on an app for the Fire’s marketplace, and Trulia expects it to be available when the Kindle ships on November 15.

Trulia is based in San Francisco and has raised $33 million so far from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Zillow follows other tech websites to go public this year, such as LinkedIn, Pandora and HomeAway. All three of those also saw a strong first day price jump followed by quick drops, indicating short-term interest from many buyers. LinkedIn’s price has been trading over $100 per share the past few days but today it is sitting under $98.

A spokesperson from Florida-based IPO Boutique said Zillow’s strong open simply piggybacked on other Internet-based stocks. “IPOs from the likes of LinkedIn and HomeAway buoyed Zillow’s price today,” the spokesperson said.

IPO Boutique said only 50 of out of 300 potential institutions were given access to the initial $20 shares. With the price dropping dramatically from the $60 per share open, it’s easy to assume many institutions sold off those shares immediately.

Zillow originally set its IPO share price between $12 and $14 and then last week upped that to between $16 and $18. Interest must have been even stronger than anticipated with its $20 opening share price.

One major driver likely keeping Zillow’s price per share from staying high is that the company is still not profitable. It incurred a loss of $12.8 million in 2009 and a loss of $6.7 million in 2010. In the first three months of 2011, the company lost just $826,000, which suggests that Zillow is getting closer to generating profits. But since its not quite there yet, it’s no surprise investor interest is wildly fluctuating.

What do you think of Zillow? Do you have any interest in investing?

This is a hot year for tech startups going public, so Zillow likely wants to take advantage of the favorable financial climate. Both LinkedIn and Pandora went public in the past few months, while notable tech companies such as Zynga and Groupon have recently filed to go public.

Seattle-based Zillow launched in 2006 and now lists pricing related to more than 100 million homes in the U.S. The service also helps connect lenders, borrowers, and renters with its marketplace.

Zillow’s financials account for the the company’s somewhat small $378 million valuation for a tech startup. During the course of its three years, the company hasn’t made any profit. It incurred a loss of $12.8 million against $17.5 million in revenues in 2009 and a loss of $6.7 million against $30.5 million in revenues in 2010. In the first three months of 2011, the company lost $826,000, which at least indicates Zillow is on its way to generating income soon.

Have you used Zillow? Are you a fan of the service?

The move, which will happen in the next four to eight weeks, follows the quick growth the company has seen since it launched in 2005. Box.net raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding. At the time, Levie said Box.net would use the funding to double its sales and engineering teams. The current, cramped office in Palo Alto is located next to electronics retailer Fry’s.

“We were basically sitting on top of each other,” one Box.net employee said.

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February.

The company provides businesses with a way to store and share files securely over the web. The files are uploaded to remote servers where anyone with permission can access them. Employees can also edit the files through Box.net’s web-based interface and leave comments and notes.

Box.net has also been pushing its cloud-storage application to mobile devices — particularly the iPhone operating system and Google’s mobile operating system, Android. As of January, the Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. The company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter of 2010 and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Trulia not only gives you a list of properties in a neighborhood, it also lets you plot them on a map, search by keywords, and narrow your results based on distance from a specific location.

It also lets you rate each property based on the area’s schools, night life, safety and more. Users can then share that data with others on a building, block or neighborhood level.

Although initially launched as a buying-only site, Trulia quickly followed the leader in the space, Zillow, into rental listings last April, and is now eyeing ListGlobally’s presence in 17 countries as it reaches out to buyers looking for homes overseas.

Trulia says that 5 percent of its overall traffic is currently from international buyers, with as much as 10 percent of its traffic in large cities such as Miami, New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles coming from interested buyers abroad.

Zillow, which already leads the pack of housing search startups, added support for rentals six months prior, in December 2009. It does not currently offer a global component but did announce today it has added a feature to let home buyers and sellers search for and find local real estate agents based on ratings and reviews from former clients.

Trulia saw impressive growth in 2010: Consumer inquiries to real estate agents were up 54 percent; visits to the website and via mobile have grown by 66 percent; property views have grown by more than 50 percent and mobile traffic spiked more than 400 percent year-over-year.

On average, Trulia consumers view more than 2.2 million properties per day, or around 90,000 properties views per hour.

Whether those stats and this new strategic partnership will be enough to help Trulia catch Zillow — which logged more than 13 million unique users in December, a year-over-year traffic growth of 77 percent — remains to be seen.

“Bringing international home listings to our current audience is a natural extension of our services. This is a global market place and we are excited to offer homes for sale across the globe,” Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia, told me today. “Not only are investors looking for properties overseas, but we know lots of retirees and professionals are moving around the globe.”

Zynga is making a seven-year commitment to lease 270,000 square feet in the Townsend Center building in the city’s warehouse-laden South of Market district, historically a hotbed of startups. Newsom made the announcement of the deal at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, in an exhibition hall across the street from Zynga’s future office.

The location is symbolic. It has been home in the past to Sega of America, the U.S. division of the Japanese video game company. That’s a sign of how things have changed in the game industry, which is more heavily concentrated in the San Francisco area than any other region. Where console game companies once ruled, now the hottest companies are those that are making social games for social networks such as Facebook. The lease is the biggest in San Francisco in the past five years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Now is the time to invest in this city,” Newsom said, as his speech veered into something like a circus barker’s spiel. “The rents have never been better.” It bears mentioning that Newsom is running for lieutenant governor of California. A business-friendly image could boost his prospects in the race.

Zynga will complete the move in 2011. Thanks to the popularity of games such as FarmVille on Facebook, Zynga has expanded from 398 employees in September of last year to 1,200 employees today.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

The romance may have gone out of the housing market. But HomingCloud is nevertheless launching a social network for real estate that aims to play matchmaker between home sellers and potential home buyers — and, in the process, turning the middleman into a third wheel.

HomingCloud looks to directly connect sellers and buyers in a Facebook-style network to trade messages, pictures and videos of the property in question.

Founded in 2008 by Tina Fine, who holds a Ph. D. in economics from Columbia University, the company is completely self-funded and has three additional part-time employees. Transparensee, an unrelated startup also based in New York, provides HomingCloud’s search technology.

The competition hasn’t adapted similar social features. There’s a well-trafficked housing section on online-classifieds website Craigslist that accomplishes the same function, but in a crude (if hugely popular) way, with the connections made mostly by email. Most for-sale-by-owner listing websites also connect users in similarly unsophisticated ways.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693