Test Drive: Trulia

There are a host of web-based real estate tools out there for anyone looking to acquire, revalue, or manage their properties. What I see out there is that because of the last few years being dominated by moving of single family homes, almost all of these tools are geared for the buyers with that intention.

However, there has to have been some thought put into these online services that allows for them to be easily used by those of us who are in the business of finding, acquiring, and reassessing rental housing. What about us? Hm.

Trulia.

The apparent point of Trulia is to become a more user-friendly version of an average MLS database, free for buyers. Just as with Zillow, you can hit the “advanced search� where after you specify State, all sorts of pick menus blink up. You can go by county, city, or school district (NO zip code). If you pick a particular city that is supported by Trulia’s database, a list of neighborhoods pops up for inclusion into the search! And then you can further break it down by price range, square footage, and fifteen varieties of “Property type�.

I chose a neighborhood that I own property in, curious to see what was available for sale nearby. While I'm not currently "in" in the market, it's always good to keep tabs. Besides, if there are some nearby deals out there, I just might bite.

The pros:

The interface is pretty slick, with all the presented information on one page: pricing, rooms, footage, map, a photo, links to source website, etc. Then there’s the “Property Indicators� which tell you how the price per sq ft of a property compares to others in the same area, which is great. Furthermore, there are “Market Indicators� listed, which intend to display general market data, along with census and school district overviews for the general area you’re looking in.

The cons:

Unfortunately, the “advanced search� won’t allow you to do so within a particular zip code (you can search by zc off the main search, but not in advanced). It simply isn’t an option, and this is rather obnoxious if you know your markets are mainly divided along zip code lines. They don’t have near the number of properties in their system as I KNOW are available in the area. In fact, it only produced one property, when I know there are three other properties currently for sale on that same street. So, the inventory is rather lacking when compared to the joe-shmoe local MLS route, which is strange considering the stuffing of this data is supposed to come from web scraping. Also, there is not indication of contract interest, so I’m not sure if any of these properties are in the final throes of a soon-to-end bidding war. Additionally, there is no indication of lot size, which is an EXTREMELY important piece of information for any property buyer. And finally, the “similar homes for sale� section is stacked with comparably priced single-family homes when I’m looking at multi-unit dwellings, and that isn’t very helpful.

It will be interesting to see whether or not services such as Trulia bump out the traditional MLS groups.