Trulia, the real estate portal, has added a new “StreetView” feature that enables home buyers to not only check out a house, but navigate up and down the street and neighborhood. The feature was built on the API from Google Maps, which was released in late March. Trulia’s StreetView is now in 40 markets, including San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. More will be added on an incremental basis.

VP Jamie Glenn says that Trulia has been working closely with Google on the feature. The biggest challenge was to make sure that house locations were accurately represented. He notes that other real estate sites don’t yet have the feature because they are using other map tools, such as Microsoft Virtual Earth. But they’ll probably soon catch up.

Given evergreen issues with traffic/parking/landscaping/ commercial, school and playground proximity, StreetView often makes more sense than satellite and/or map views. I wish I had it when I purchased an investment property.

In fact, StreetView is really great, but I want more! I want a Web cam that shows me the exact traffic pattern of the house at different times of the day. The street view footage can be several months old.