Open House? Google Has Also Been Eying Trulia in Real Estate Search Play.
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. — According to sources close to the situation, along with its pending bid for Yelp, Google has been in on-again, off-again acquisition talks with Trulia, the real estate search engine.
Context & Ripple Effects
BoomTown's report is sourced talk, not a done deal: Google's interest in Trulia is described as on-again, off-again and unconfirmed, running alongside an equally rumored pending bid for Yelp. What makes the pairing notable is the pattern — both targets own the kind of structured local content Google's results traditionally link out to.
The Trulia rumor lands in a deliberately expansive week for Google: days earlier it launched the Nexus One handset, which the paper's own coverage framed as a shot across the bow of smartphone incumbents and a signal of a broader strategic push beyond pure search. Buying vertical data owners like Trulia or Yelp would be the same ambition applied to local information.
First-order effects
- Trulia faces the defining question of any rumored Google courtship — sell and see its listings absorbed into Google's results, or stay independent and eventually compete against the world's default search box for the same queries.
- Yelp's pending negotiation effectively becomes a two-front process: Google is sourcing local and vertical content through acquisition rather than licensing, so both deals draw on the same M&A appetite.
Second-order effects
- Independent listings and review sites across categories read the same signal Trulia's board does — Google will either partner with them or route around them — which puts upward pressure on valuations of every structured-local-data property and shortens the window for rival bidders to surface.
- Brokers and local advertisers who buy placement on sites like Trulia gain little leverage from a single rumored suitor; the more Google consolidates these channels, the more pricing power over real estate and local ads migrates toward Mountain View.
Third-order effects
- If Google keeps acquiring vertical content owners instead of crawling them, search economics shift from sending traffic to destination sites toward answering queries inside Google itself — a structural threat to every ad-supported vertical site built on referral traffic.
- A pattern of Google buying its way into verticals would likely draw antitrust scrutiny earlier than organic growth did, since each acquisition removes an independent alternative in exactly the markets regulators watch most closely.
The trend: Google is shifting from indexing the web's vertical content to acquiring the companies that own it, part of the same late-2009 strategic broadening its Nexus One launch signaled.