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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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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Zillow, after five years and $87 million raised, says it is now in the black for the first time, after focusing more on revenues. It also announced that Spencer Rascoff has been appointed CEO, replacing  Expedia Founder Rich Barton, who becomes executive chairman and focuses on a heavy portfolio of vertical investments, such as Avvo.com, the legal site.

Rascoff and Barton, in a phone call yesterday, told us that the company is currently driving revenues on Zillow.com, Yahoo Real Estate and Mobile from five key revenue streams, including its Mortgage Marketplace, display, national advertising, local advertising and mobile advertising. The latter channel has become especially critical and now accounts for 20 percent of usage on weekends, says Barton.

“Real estate is the ultimate local shopping experience,” suggests Rascoff.

The mortgage marketplace, especially, has become one of the company’s fastest growing areas as well, with 314,000 mortgage leads being processed on the site, up six fold from August 2009 , when it was introduced. This compares in the balance to 4 million homes being listed, and 150,000 rental listings.

Twenty-five percent of home shoppers are now looking at home rentals as a point of comparison, says Rascoff.

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Zillow announced today that it will power Yahoo’s “for sale” listings, in much the same way that Cars.com powers Yahoo’s new and used cars listings. Zillow typically carries 4 million-plus listings. The announcement spearheads a slew of online real estate announcements prior to next week’s Inman Real Estate Connect conference (which I am attending).

The enhanced Yahoo and Zillow tie doesn’t achieve the “buy a slot” status of other Yahoo vertical outsourcing — it would have been too expensive for any of the major real estate portals — but it also goes well beyond the current Yahoo-Zillow relationship, which basically consists of Yahoo’s syndication of Zestimate home valuations. That has been in place since 2006.

Under the new deal, the two companies bring together the real estate Web sites that have the second (Zillow) and third (Yahoo) highest number of unique visitors, per comScore. The deal, which is symbiotic for both companies, shows how things have changed from five or six years ago, when Yahoo itself was seen as a major threat to use open Internet listings to dominate real estate advertising. Now, Yahoo is basically content leveraging its sales relationships with national brokerages, while Zillow focuses on the content and local accounts. Real estate remains highly profitable for Yahoo.

While Zillow listings won’t go up on Yahoo until later this year, the two companies are immediately coordinating their sales efforts. Zillow’s “Premier Agent” program will be extended to Yahoo Real Estate. Current Zillow advertisers will be offered the chance to extend their relationship to Yahoo. Additionally, Zillow’s local “Showcase Ads” and “Featured Listings” will automatically be extended to Yahoo, making it easier for both sites to reach a quorum of users. For Sale By Owner advertising will also appear on both sites. One thing that Yahoo doesn’t get is access to Zillow’s growing display business.

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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.

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Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein  has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and  Home-Account.com, which matched homeowners with mortgage brokers, competing with the likes of LendingTree , Bankrate.com and Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace (whose free to the consumer model is similar).

Today, Goldstein launched a sister site, Refinance.com, which is using the same engine as Home-Account to match refinance prospects with the lowest “TrueCost” loan over time.   Both services rely on a matching system developed with Jack M. Guttenberg, better known as “The Mortgage Professor.” They also collect recommendations and reviews, marrying social networking with leads.

Goldstein contends that the free matching service is far superior to lead generation sites such as Lending Tree, which provide consumers with lists of five or six brokers.  That doesn’t help consumers much, he argues. They’re almost as poorly informed as when they started.

“We’re getting rid of the ‘last mile human being’ and pinpointing exactly the right product,” says Goldstein, noting that consumers will still have an option to self-select their brokers. “They don’t have to take the first one, the second or third.”

The site is currently launching local and regional lenders, with hundreds of lenders ready to sign on.  Goldstein’s timing, however, would appear to be shaky, with many banks still very conservative in their lending practices, post TARP mode.

But  Goldstein contends  “they do want to lend,” and notes that real estate has been in recovery for the past six months. Lending Tree has been doing good business, for example. And Bankrate.com was just taken private in October for $700 million.

“There are very specific people they want to lend to,” says Goldstein.  “What we do is make you look as good as possible before the lender picks up the phone. “

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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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