Real estate data geeks and curious consumers will have a lot more information to sort through on real estate search site Trulia.com after the company unveils a handful of new tools on Monday.
The San Francisco-based company is using its own search trends as well as county records to show home buyers which neighborhoods have the most real estate action.
Consumers looking for home listings at Trulia will be able to drill down to neighborhood statistics and gain a sense of real estate activity there by viewing the number of active property listings in that neighborhood, the average price relative to the entire city or town, and how often it is searched by others on Trulia.
The company said it is also adding interactive “heat” maps for every major city that show at-a-glance metrics such as average property listing price, average sales price, median sales price, average price per square foot and how much search traffic it has received on Trulia. The company says the new tools will help consumers make more informed buying decisions. Knowing what kind of search traffic a neighborhood is getting could indicate where the next real estate hot spots are located.
In addition to the new neighborhood statistics and heat maps, Trulia will also release a new comparison tool that will show comparable homes for sale as well as recently sold properties to give consumers a view of how their house compares. The recently sold data is based on county records, a company spokesperson said, and the for-sale data is based on property listings that appear on Trulia.
Trulia, which launched in 2005, gets its listings from partnerships with real estate brokers. The site shows photographs and basic listing information and includes a link to the listing broker’s site for more details.
Trulia says it currently has partnerships with two-thirds of the top 150 real estate brokers and that consumer usage of the search site has grown 50 percent monthly over the last four months, while links out to broker Web sites have grown more than 60 percent monthly during that time.
Company officials also said that Trulia will expand its search service to cover markets in all 50 states next week.
