Trulia, which provides real estate Web and mobile leads, display advertising and real estate-oriented social media services, has followed in the footsteps of its rival, Zillow, and issued an S1 in preparation for going public and raising $75 Million. Zillow’s IPO has been highly successful — it went out last July at $20 and is now around $35 a share, having fallen a little. Trulia is betting it can be an even stronger longterm player. The issuing of the S1 suggests the end of a great deal of industry speculation that Google or other players would buy Trulia.

The S1 provides a gold mine of new information for connoisseurs of vertical and local service data. Trulia reports that a spending surge in preparation for going public has pushed it to 22 million monthly unique visitors and 21,544 buyers, or “subscribers,” to its real estate marketing bundles — a number that has risen 46 percent since June 2011, and has plenty of potential upside with a pool of 360,000 real estate pros claiming Trulia profiles.

While the company earned $29 million in the six month period ending June 30, 2012, the spending surge has led to consistent losses and an accumulated deficit of $43.8 million. But the company feels its fundamentals are strong, even in the depressed real estate spending environment, as more and more marketing efforts move to digital. It sees a fragmented digital marketplace where its principal rivals are Zillow and Realtor.com, the longtime online real estate leader.

Average subscriber monthly spend has jumped up to $140 from $90 last year, as Trulia has kept adding more services to its bundle. Display advertising, meanwhile, has become a relatively smaller part of the mix — 32 percent — although it’s overall spending has stayed even and it appears to have good prospects to attract business from real estate and consumer brand marketers seeking to get consumers in a house buying mode (or rental.)

Trulia’s monetization of mobile services gets a special focus in the S1– something that investors will notice after Facebook’s well publicized issues with mobile monetization, which was a major industry wakeup call.

The company reports that since launching mobile in May 2012, it “is monetizing its mobile products at a higher rate than web products.” Moreover, “users are more likely to contact real estate professionals through our mobile applications than our website.” Mobile now accounts for 20 percent of overall user traffic.

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Two companies investing in self-service advertising for SMBs agree that self-service is an important and growing category, but isn’t likely to replace direct sales.

This morning’s panel at DMS ’11, “SMBs and Self-Serve: Ready for Prime Time?” featured Paul Levine, COO of the real estate site Trulia, and Ørjan Hanssen, a product manager at the Swedish directory and search company Eniro.

Also, a service component is critical to transitioning small-business advertisers from full-service to self-service.

Speaking first, Levine tried to debunk some myths he sees about online advertising and self-serve, and offered some tips for successful execution.

Myth No. 1: Online Is an Add-On. Levine pointed out that newspaper print classified revenues have plummeted over the past five years, with the main categories of real estate, autos and jobs having more digital revenues than print.

Myth  No. 2: Online Can’t Deliver Foot Traffic. Levine had a two-word response to this: ask Groupon. Online can also drive phone calls.

Myth No. 3: Creating Content Is a Hassle. Levine talked about new tools making this easier than ever. Example? Food cart culture in San Francisco, where vendors use Twitter as their sole marketing platform.

Next Levine offered three tips for selling online in a self-serve environment.

Trulia has kept the freemium funnel filled, with reviews, free webinars and so on. It drives to a ratio of 10 free engagements for every one that is paid.

Tip No. 2: Peer Pressure Is Powerful. Ego plays a big role in SMB decisionmaking, so it makes sense to exploit it. “Realtors are all about their personal brand, so we make sure they understand what their peers are doing.”

Tip No. 3: Cross Over and Back. It’s a mistake to treat self-serve as a discreet channel. Trulia has both self-serve and direct sales, and the two should be integrated. When a customer comes into Trulia via self-serve, a salesperson is assigned to make contact to retain and upsell the customer.

Eniro‘s Hanssen talked about the Scandinavia Ad Networks product, built with the help of systems software vendor Amdocs.

Hanssen said Eniro’s key insight was that if it is going to compete with 100 percent self-service business models, it needed to differentiate itself with a strong service component.

“We had the opportunity to use service as leverage to help SMBs take a step toward self-serve,” Hanssen said. “There is a need for a solution that supports them on the journey from full-serve to self-serve.”

Some of the methods Eniro has used to help SMBs down the path to self-serve include using detailed performance reporting as well as live customer support. The reporting is designed to promote engagement by the advertiser with the self-service platform.

During the questions and answers session, Levine said he doesn’t see self-service as a replacement for live salespeople. “You will find few examples of services that are 100 percent self-service to SMBs.”

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On average, people only move every six years or so. So there isn’t likely to be as strong a list of reviews of real estate agents as there is for pizza. But that hasn’t stopped Zillow from adding reviews of real estate professionals to its Directory.

The company started collecting reviews in December and now says it has “thousands.” The reviews are connected to an agent’s Zillow profile, providing a richer picture for potential Realtor advertisers. The agent’s answers to various consumer questions are also part of the profile, as it is with Trulia‘s Directory.

The drive to have more reviews is something that is felt across verticals. It is among the biggest reasons, for instance, why Angie’s List sponsors its Big Deals — to add reviews to its home and trade profiles. In a release, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff says that “Agent Reviews are another huge step towards transparency for buyers and sellers.

When visitors use the Zillow Directory to search for a real estate agent in their area, results are sorted by local agents with the highest overall ratings and greatest number of reviews. Ratings are on a 1-to-5 basis, with 5 being “very likely” to use again, and 1 “very unlikely.”

Consumers can compare agents’ overall ratings, as well as ratings across several categories of service including process expertise, local knowledge, responsiveness and negotiation skills. Along with ratings, qualitative reviews further help consumers understand a former client’s experience with that agent.

Homethinking, which launched in 2005, has had some experience with agent reviews. But it tightly integrates the reviews with the agent’s transaction history, providing more of a 360-degree picture.

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With the rise of consumer-facing real estate sites such as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia, it seems only natural that Multiple Listing Services would break out from behind the Realtor and brokerage firewalls, and provide truly local, for-profit real estate sites, complete with advertising and features.

Houston Area Realtors has been perhaps the most prominent MLS to do this. Another is MRIS, the mega-MLS covering the entire Washington, D.C., metro area. Another large MLS that has had a consumer=facing site is Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, New York, which has been active on the consumer side for more than seven years.

MLSLI has a friendly site, complete with standard features such as neighborhood and school information. But now, the 20,000 agent-strong MLS, which is owned by the Long Island Board of Realtors and serves Nassau, Suffolk and Queens, says it is ready to overhaul its site for the social and mobile generation. Working with Local Matters, which has been focusing on the MLS market, MLSLI says that its new, locally customized site will be up in 90 days — in time for spring, which is the peak house buying season.

Jim Speer, MLSLI vice president of operations, tells us the site will help spur his members to work more effectively with social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Many Realtors have been effectively using social media, but there is a still huge chunk who don’t. It will also include Zillow-like automated valuation models for homes.

In addition, the site will be more agent-centric. “On our Web site, users will click on a listing and get direct access to agents and their office listing,” he says. “It is really a straight path to our agents and brokers members.”

Speer, however, believes the site will only be enhancing the role of the agents and brokers. It will probably never be a big revenue maker, he says. “Maybe it will offset some of our dues. But we don’t sell anything to our members,” he said. “There won’t be featured listings or advertising.”

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Real estate and rental agents get into big trouble if they mouth off about a neighborhood’s quality-of-life issues. The most they can do is point to Web sites that provide some general stats (i.e., school info, crime stats and market trends).

Now Trulia is getting deeper, a la user-generated content. Three weeks ago, it launched ratings on 12, well-researched quality-of-life issues. Ratings are provided on a one- to five-star basis, and include safety; pet-friendliness; walkability; restaurants & shopping; parks & recreation; schools; traffic; parking; entertainment & nightlife; public transportation; community involvement; and cleanliness. Users may submit their ratings via mobile or Internet. So far, more than 140,000 ratings have come in.

Today, Trulia added reviews as well. The site is asking users to “tell us about the surrounding area, be it the neighborhood, sub-neighborhood or actual block. The more local your knowledge, the more helpful it will be to another person! Do you live on the coolest block in your city? Tell us about it. Does your neighborhood have the best restaurants and stores? We want to know.” Over time, the site hopes to showcase its aggregated local area ratings, and reviews for every neighborhood and every block.

Think about your own neighborhood. Would you have been able to use something like this? I would have. After seven years, I have learned that my neighborhood is very safe, relatively pet-friendly (except for the lurking coyotes), and has excellent shopping and restaurants that are nearby but require a car to get to. Other than dining, it has no nightlife. It has good schools through middle school, but the high school is in the tougher, adjacent town. It has very good parking, lots of tot lots, two pools and weekly block parties for young children but no other community involvement. It is also quite clean.

It might not be the neighborhood for everyone. Most of this would have been picked up by Trulia’s rating system, which has been expertly thought out by Trulia’s research team.

The post Trulia Asks: What Do You Think of This Neighborhood? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Trulia, which is ranked a Top 7 real estate site by comScore, has followed the lead of Realtor.com and Zillow and added rentals to its site. The rentals section features all Trulia’s functionality, such as neighborhood information, mapping and ratings information, and filters for relevant searches such as “pets allowed.”

The site also offers “search on the go.” Roughly 10 percent of Trulia’s usage now comes from mobile devices. Trulia’s mobile Web site is compatible with the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms.

Trulia rentals covers the gamut from multifamily to houses. Listings will come from Independent Listings Services, as well as from brokerages and landlords. There are “millions” of units on the site at launch, with more than 25,000 in New York City.

One advantage of Trulia rentals, per CEO Pete Flint, is Trulia’s ability to assume hosting duties for listers including the hosting of contact info, images of units and floor plans, and other information. That separates Trulia from some of the rentals aggregators in the market, such as Oodle, he says.

Flint notes that 30 percent of the site’s visitors are typically looking to either rent or buy. The market trends are “absolutely in favor of renting,” he says. Overall, rentals “are as large as the ‘for sale’ business.”

Separately, in an interview with BusinessWeek, Flint deflected rumors that Google has been looking into buying the company. Trulia uses many of Google’s features and it would seem to be a nice fit. But Flint told BusinessWeek that the real estate market isn’t strong enough to appreciate the site’s full value this year.

As an alternative, the company is looking for an outside investor that would let employees and owners cash in their shares without waiting for an initial public offering, similar to Facebook’s arrangement with Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian company, and Yelp’s arrangement with Elevation Partners.

The post Trulia Branches Out Into Rentals appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Rumors have been flying that Google is poised to buy Trulia, “the real estate search engine” that competes with, among others, Zillow (which just said it is aiming to IPO in 2011).

But according to reports by attendees, no information was forthcoming at Inman’s 2010 Real Estate Connect conference in NYC, where Google Director of Local and B2B markets Sam Sebastian addressed the audience. Sebastian did note, however, that “we’re actively looking to acquire one to two companies a month.” (Note: This is a corrected quote, per an investigation by Greg Sterling. A previous version suggested he had specifically said “real estate companies.”)

The Trulia rumors have been partially fueled by the development of Google’s new Place Pages, a merchant profile feature that could theoretically be used to develop a national Multiple Listings Service, competing with Realtor.com. If that were the case, Trulia would probably help enlist agents and brokerages.

But there is “not some evil plan we have in Mountain View, with millions of folks talking about how we want to take over the real estate markets,” said Sebastian, again, according to published reports. And there really are no plans to focus on Place Pages for real estate.

Sebastian did note, however, that brokerages were finding out Google’s advantages on their own. “Agents have always been pretty engaged in buying keywords and targeted ads from Google to drive traffic to their Web sites,” he said.

Trulia, itself, reports that it has come off a gangbuster year, with 62.3 million unique visitors, 45 percent more visits and 105 percent more page views. Along with increased engagement, Trulia reports that “consumer interest in homes exploded, with nearly 1 million home buyer inquiries sent to real estate agents in 2009.”

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