Local Onliner

Trulia, the “other” venture-backed real estate portal — besides Zillow — has been gaining users and is now the seventh most used real estate site with 1.6 million unique visitors, according to the most recent ranking from comScore. Trulia’s Chief Executive Officer Pete Flint engaged us in a wide-ranging conversation on the occasion of the new ranking, which represents 300 percent growth over the past 12 months. I have written a fairly extensively report for Kelsey Marketplaces clients. But here are some highlights.

Flint notes that one-third of Trulia’s revenues come from listing enhancements, another third are from broker ads and the remaining one-third are from “everything else.” “In 2008 we are going to focus more on the monetization of our audience,” says Flint. He adds that Trulia is going to continue building up the product, relationships and the audience base, which won’t necessarily be easy in a housing slowdown.

One of Trulia’s latest strategies is to provide white-label versions to publisher partners. Last week, the company came out with a publisher platform that lets local publishers put their own “skin” (i.e., colors and art) on a Trulia-powered service. The idea, common among Internet Yellow Pages sites, is to grab eyeballs wherever they can be found. Participating publishers can keep all the money around Trulia’s search results. “It is incredibly simple and very customizable,” says Flint.

The publisher service launched with several small and medium-sized publishers, including NorthJersey.com and alternative newsweekly companies such as Village Voice Media. Going forward, Flint sees that real estate shares many commonalities across the verticals. But there are important distinctions. In real estate, he notes, purchases are much larger than in travel and autos. “The purchase cycle, however, is infrequent. It is every seven years. So the brand is important. You need to think carefully about it.”