Real estate site Trulia says traffic is still growing

July 2, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

trulia-real-estate-logoTrulia, the real estate website backed by prominent venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel, published some numbers today showing that despite continued problems in the housing market and the general economy, the San Francisco startup has been having a strong 2009.

That continues a pattern we’ve seen already, with Trulia claiming record traffic and revenue back in January — due in part to interest from investors looking for real estate deals. Now the company says that momentum has continued over the first six months of the year, with visits growing 40 percent compared to the same period in 2008. Trulia says it has seen 30 million unique visitors in the last six months, with property views up 83 percent and page views up 90 percent.

Zillow, the heavily-funded startup seen as Trulia’s closest competitor, has apparently been doing well too, with traffic up 67 percent during the last six months.

Third-party data services show traffic growth for both sites, too. Compete says Zillow is way ahead of Trulia, but both sites bounced back after a tumble following last fall’s financial meltdown. ComScore shows a much tighter race, with Trulia catching up to Zillow, with 2.85 million visitors in May compared to Zillow’s 2.74, after many months of the latter company holding the lead. (Trulia says both Compete and comScore are understating its traffic.) Presumably, this is a sign that the desire to find good information about real estate continues even when the market is terrible.

Trulia has raised more than $32 million in funding.

comscore-trulia-zillow1

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Traffic numbers from both compete and comscore are lower than actuals by a multiple of 2-4x the numbers reported above. As a website operator, I have seen this time and time again, where Google Analytics or similar reports much higher traffic than what compete or comscore publish.

    While this is a close and exciting race, what really matters are their financials; revenue and earnings, as well as their growth over time. Unfortunately that information is undisclosed until their status as privately held companies change and/or they have enough of an incentive to disclose them.

    Either way, given the disparity in funding, I think we already have a winner. I know where I'd put my money and let's just say its a little closer to home.
  • "Either way, given the disparity in funding, I think we already have a winner."

    Maybe my brain just isn't working because it's the 4th, but I'm having a hard time parsing this. Can you be more explicit here?
  • Trulia is the clear winner, given the fact that Trulia has only received $32MM in funding and Zillow nearly $90MM and your traffic graphs show them neck and neck in terms of monthly visitors. For Zillow to win, they need to generate 3x or about 7.5MM visitors per month in the Comscore report (they already report more than 8MM/month internally).

    While some reports show that Zillow may have as many as 2MM more monthly visitors (Compete), what really matters is the quality of those visits. Zillow, although it has recently made an aggressive SEO effort, is mainly powered by PR and Zestimate related traffic. They pull PR stunts, like the White House Zestimate to add an extra 1MM visitors to any month that needs a little growth. Those people aren't active buyers and sellers of real estate and therefore can not be monetized effectively. How long will they be able to sell impressions that don't convert?

    Conversely, Trulia's traffic is extremely targeted due to their SEO positioning. Most of their traffic comes directly from the major SE's and many of these people are engaged buyers and sellers. So if I'm valuing two private companies without financial data but I know that one has three times the "debt" (yes, Venture Capital is essentially a fancy debt instrument) and the other has dominant search engine positioning, lower overhead and a superior user experience... It becomes clear that one deserves a premium over the other, in terms of valuation. So that's how I got my winner.
  • srascoff
    Spencer from Zillow here,
    Zillow gets about 8.5 million unique visitors per month according to our internal Omniture stats. We believe that this is the only way to accurately measure traffic since Comscore, Hitwise, Nielsen, Quantcast, Alexa and all other public traffic sources use a representative panel of internet users and extrapolate from there. Our traffic is growing 67% year-over-year.