Real Estate Site Trulia Acquires Movity
San Francisco real estate site Trulia said it has acquired Movity, a buzzy stealth start-up that searches and aggregates geodata for home buyers and renters, such as noise, crime and pricing, from a variety of sources.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Movity deal is a direct extension of the push Trulia began in April 2010, when it entered the rental market and started collecting location ratings — its first move beyond home-sale listings into the renter side where Zillow and Realtor.com already operate. Movity's aggregation of noise, crime and pricing geodata is exactly the kind of neighborhood signal that ratings program was groping toward, but sourced automatically rather than user by user.
First-order effects
- Movity's geodata layer — noise, crime and pricing pulled from multiple sources — now folds into Trulia's buyer and renter search, upgrading a feature Trulia had only been assembling manually since April.
Second-order effects
- Zillow and Realtor.com, which Trulia joined in rentals earlier this year, face pressure to match automated neighborhood-intelligence features rather than compete on listing counts alone.
Third-order effects
- If portals keep differentiating on aggregated third-party data instead of raw listings, the competitive moat shifts from who has the most homes on screen to who owns the richest location dataset — with Google's earlier interest in Trulia as a real estate search play (reported December 2009) a sign that the biggest search players see the same value.
The trend: Real estate search is shifting from competing on listing inventory to competing on aggregated neighborhood-level data, with portals buying the startups that aggregate it.