Wisest of the crowds

Trulia took a big step into socializing camp by creating a Q&A platform with the help of Pat Kitano. Very sharp looking implementation that now solidly takes Trulia from exclusively broker centric to also being agent centric. The list of reviews worth reading follows: Pat Kitano, StartupSquad, TechCrunch, Joel Burslem, Greg Swann.

Trulia’s implementation is clean and certainly ups the feature ante but is basically catch-up with others including Zillow and My-Currency. User generated content is interesting and valuable but is this going to turn into some sort of vertical social networking war where winner takes all? The audience of home shoppers currently is much older and much more tech phobic than what you might see at typical social networks so what the hell are we all doing? Is this web2.0 hipsters flexing, an investment in future behavior by home buyers & sellers, or part of some master plan to disintermediate the existing ecosystems? All three isnt a bad guess.

For a while I have been wondering which direction Trulia would point their ship - towards the incumbents or away?. It feels to me like listings are a commodity waiting to happen and so the question for listings aggregators, like Trulia, is what next? Going social gets them on plan to taking Zillow head-on without alienating their existing constituents. Zillow has ignored the brokers while Trulia has made them their buddies. Each has their natural advantages and disadvantages but Trulia’s is a safer and more optionable route. Only if you raise a bunch of money can you take the path Zillow is taking. The payoff for Zillow, however, is much bigger with the risk because the consumers are the customers and Zillow does this very well. The real estate industry will never go back and the question I have as an entrepreneur is which strategy will win? One that eats its way through the ecosystem (Trulia) or one that completely goes around it (Zillow)?View blog reactions

Since returning to SF from London a little over a year ago, my wife and I have delayed looking for a house until we have decided where we want to live. Our eldest child just went through the interview process in the private schools (San Francisco public schools are poor with only a few exceptions) and lucky found a spot so we are only now truly testing our will to raise our kids in the City.

I spent all day looking at single family houses across the city’s open houses. Here’s how my search went:

-Started with Google base via My-Currency (developement site) for listings

-Re-Checked listings at SF MLS (this site sucks!)

-Re-re checked listings at Trulia and Redfin

-Re-re checked listings at various local firms

-got annoyed at the fragmentation of listings

-Found a few properties

-Checked for tax & prior purchase records at Zillow (some there, some not)

-Checked analytics at My-Currency

-Checked analytics at Trulia

-Read Robert Shiller’s assessment of housing and got scared (recommended reading:”Long-term perspectives on the current boom in home prices”, March 2006)

-Tried to find a good open homes site and failed so grabbed the SF Chronicle Sunday pull-out (yes paper…I still read paper).

-Got annoyed that I had to type in the addresses of a bunch of properties to decipher agent language about location (hint to one exuberant agent: Lyon at Geary is NOT Lower Pacific Heights jackass - not even close!)

-Reviewed some of the price predictions for square feet in various zips in our alpha site.

-Got annoyed again that this is taking so long

-went to open houses

-got frustrated with descriptions that are BS (hint to another exuberant agent: a large closet off of the kitchen is NOT a bedroom unless your dog or cat need bedrooms in your house)

-got pitched by 10 agents (unsuccessfully).

-Learned that one property sold for a whopping $600k over to $3.5 (this may be a lie since the agent was using it to justify her pricing)

-Came home after a full day of research and tours exhausted and feeling no smarter

We real-estate entrepreneurs have a lot of work to do to get this right because this is taking too long, there is still substantial holes in the listings aggregation of all sites including the MLS, and is is still difficult to get things down to numbers. Here’s my review: For listings go to Redfin (only a few cities) or Trulia. For tax and property records Zillow or Redfin. For statistics Trulia. For open house, go fish. For area price predictions and agent reputation, My-Currency (coming soon!)

Today, as I spend the day with my kids and prepare them for a holiday with their grandparents, in the background I ignore my blackberry buzzing and my phone ringing knowing all along knowing what is at work - one of the largest players in my vertical has moved the ball further and in my general direction. I admit I was expecting it but what surprises me is how indifferent I have been to their impressive announcement. Perhaps I was expecting them to up the anti even more or perhaps I am just happy to be in the intellectual company of some really smart entrepreneurs. They see what I see but are just going about it differently.  Plus, I got a free ride on their press thanks to Matt Marshal at VentureBeat and Rafe Needleman at WebWare. Congratulations Rich and Lloyd! You guys are making this fun!