Trulia Enters The Real Estate Rental Market And Starts Collecting Location Ratings
Real estate search engine Trulia is launching rental listings for the first time in an attempt to broaden its offerings from home sales listings. Competitors such as Zillow and Realtor.com already offer home …
Context & Ripple Effects
Trulia comes into this from a position of strength: real estate search sites posted record traffic and revenue through the downturn in 2009, and by that December Google was reportedly eyeing the space with Trulia specifically in mind (BoomTown's report on a Google real estate search play). The rental launch is the answer to an obvious gap — Zillow and Realtor.com already list rentals, so Trulia has been monetizing home sales only while rivals cover both sides of the market.
The second half of the move is quieter but more strategic: collecting location ratings turns Trulia's users into a data source. Listings are commoditized across every portal; neighborhood-level opinion is not.
First-order effects
- Trulia can now retain users searching for rentals rather than ceding them to Zillow and Realtor.com at the top of the funnel, broadening its inventory beyond for-sale homes.
- The location-ratings collection gives Trulia a proprietary content layer its rivals must either match or differentiate against on their own terms.
Second-order effects
- Zillow and Realtor.com face pressure to deepen their own neighborhood-level data and review features, since listings parity alone no longer separates the portals.
- As user-generated ratings accumulate, they become a ranking and ad-targeting asset — the portal with richer location data can charge more for placement around high-intent searches.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, real estate portals compete less on listing access (increasingly uniform via MLS feeds) and more on community-generated data, shifting barriers to entry from feed licenses to accumulated user contributions.
- A market where Google is circling plus portals racing to own the discovery layer points toward consolidation among the survivors rather than a field of independent search engines.
The trend: Real estate search is evolving from syndicated-listings aggregation toward differentiated, user-contributed local data as the basis of competition among portals.