As the housing market cools, the real estate vertical is heating up. Today, real estate search engine Trulia launched several new features, a week after Zillow introduced new functionality and about three weeks after Yahoo! Real Estate announced a range of new tools and a site redesign.
Trulia has now expanded and is offering nationwide coverage through a mix of crawling and listing feeds. It’s also providing a range of new information on real estate price trends, comparable homes and neighborhood guides (i.e., schools, commutes and crime data). Here’s are example guides for Chicago, Illinois and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Perhaps the most fun new feature/tool on the site are heat maps, which show prices per square foot by area. Here’s Chicago and San Diego, California. Zillow introduced something similar last week (Here’s an example for Boston, Massachusetts.) The Trulia heat maps are interactive, however, and can be used as a way to locate homes for sale. Buyers can visually identify an area with a price per square foot they can afford and then go directly from the map to listings or an area guide to learn more.
Read the rest of this post at Search Engine Watch.
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Unless newspapers start to partner with sites like Trulia or independently develop some of the same capabilities and feature richness their online real estate sections will atrophy. Compare Trulia to the San Francisco Chronicle’s real estate section for example.
Also, a recent Classified Intelligence survey of local realtors found that there’s newspaper vulnerability in the real estate sector, which has performed well for them in print over the past few years.
Finally, one additional thing that’s fascinating about the new Trulia features is the ability to see the popularity of an area with other Trulia users. For shrewed buyers wanting to buy into a “transitional area” on the “way up,” this might be a very valuable tool (attention/intention data).
Screenwerk 