Trulia Announced…
Last night Trulia launched Trulia Pro. Rudy, Trulia’s Social Media Guru, sent me an email an hour or so before it went live, and I was there right away to sign up as a paying customer. Like most of agents, I like to keep my advertising budget under control, and testing new and unproven products is not something I do often. But Trulia really seemed to be offering a GREAT value for a reasonable cost. Plus they are currently giving out 3 months FREE if you mention my name. OK, you don’t even have to mention my name, and you will get the 3 months free, as long as you PROMISE not to tell anyone in my market about Trulia PRO 😉
What Did I Have to Show For It?
A few years ago I stupidly coughed up about $2,500 to buy a “showcased home” slot on Realtor.com for my home town, Birmingham, MI. Allan Dalton is a very inspirational speaker and he convinced me to whip out my credit card at a seminar so I could secure that valuable piece of Realtor.com virtual real estate. Homes are pricey here, so this was in their upper tier for zip codes at that time. I got one of 8 rotating featured spots for my zip code, so half the time my ad was not even on the front page. When I did not have any listings in 48009 I could insert anywhere else, but how useful is that really? After one year, and NOTHING to show for it, I dropped the service.
I have held on to the “enhanced listing” package from Realtor.com for 5 or so years. Frankly, now I don’t have a choice because our brokerage has all of it’s listings enhanced. I do get somewhat regular inquiries from my enhanced listings, and our cost on this is not far off from what I just agreed to pay Trulia monthly, only because the broker negotiated for us. If I were paying myself, I think my cost would be a couple thousand dollars, because I think I have something like 50-70 listings in a 12 month period. Did not do the research on the cost lately.
Is Trulia Better?
At first blush, Trulia is providing a better value and a better branding opportunity. I also think their price might go up, since they are just launching now. That remains to be seen.
Here is what I like about Trulia Pro:
- I get unlimited spotlight ads. That means my little picture and URL show up on all of the locations I want to target. Suggestions/questions to Trulia: let me have different ads for different areas; and how many ads will you allow for an area? I don’t want to be one of eight again…
- I can “feature” all of my listings. That means they come up at the beginning of the search results.
- It’s reasonably priced.
- I use Trulia Voices, so I think this gives prospects a very well rounded picture of who I am. They can click through to my profile, see most of my listings (I claim most of them) and see how I answer questions. There are links back to my sites from my profile.
- Trulia provides some of the most robust information out there for consumers in a very appealing format. If I were a consumer, I would rather search on Trulia than on Realtor.com.
- I have a second listing presentation tomorrow for a prospect who found me on Trulia. His father wasn’t sure what site he had found me on, but he knew I was helping someone with a problem they had with a real estate situation (that was not caused by me). I knew right away it was Trulia Voices.
What Trulia Needs To Do
My biggest “issue” with Trulia is that I wish I could control the feed that they take for my listings. Right now my broker is submitting, I submit, our franchiser submits, vflyer.com submits and the local real estate book submits. I would like to control that they take MY feed first, from miBirmingham.com. That is where I have the most robust information about my listings. I never know which feed Trulia will pick up, and I don’t know how I can influence that.
Oh yeah, and if Trulia would accept American Express for payment, that would make me happy too.
Last night I saw a fair amount of traffic coming into my blog from my spotlight ad. It might have been Rudy checking to see if I was live yet. I’ll be tracking the stats and the results, and I will let you know how it goes.
