Real estate search news

This week, the three largest real estate media sites Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia are launching new features, all aimed at improving their offering for real estate professionals.

Trulia today announces “Trulia Insight” which they say “provides high quality leads to real estate professionals by leveraging big data sourced through Trulia’s consumer search dataset” for $79.99 per month, or free during a trial period for existing customers. The new program shows agents data on buyers’ readiness, qualification data, home search preferences including neighborhoods searched, and client engagement reports that show which email listing alerts their clients open. This data is based on Trulia’s “rapidly expanding dataset of consumer-submitted preferences, online search behavior, email traffic patterns and hyper-local real estate information.” 

In 2011, Realtor.com operator, Move, Inc. acquired social platform SocialBios, today announcing the acquisition has come to full fruition in the form of two mobile-enabled “HyperSocial™” tools in beta, Agent Profile Pages and Agent Recommendations integrated into the Find a Realtor directory. The HyperSocial™ agent search tools will initially span Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google and FourSquare, and the company says that “through social graphing technology, the HyperSocial™ Agent Profiles surface mutual connections, extended relationships, and shared interests by layering the social networks of agents and consumers.” Profiles feature recommendations and have a branded URL.

This week, Zillow and TransUnion announced a partnership that offers rental screening for landlords and property managers on Postlets’ listing creation and distribution platform, which Zillow acquired in 2011 and made free to all of their users. Landlords and property managers using Postlets will have access to the TransUnion SmartMove® rental screening tool at a discounted rate. The program provides credit and criminal background data within minutes, rather than days, saving time and TransUnion says that “renters can feel confident this information is being exchanged in a secure manner, unlike the historic process of providing Social Security numbers directly to landlords.”

Zillow and Realtor.com are publicly traded real estate media companies and while Trulia remains private, they are likely to go public this year. We anticipate more agent-centric news from these three companies in the first quarter as agents set their budgets for the year.

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