I Am a Lead. Trulia, Your Move.

Update: Brian at Trulia left a nice comment on this post. Go read it.

The title of this post completely rips off a post by Marc Davison from a couple of days ago.

Marc runs a consulting firm called 1000Watt Consulting that helps real estate companies, startups and media organizations embrace and implement technology and the Internet in smart, effective ways.

His above "I am a lead" post provides readers of his blog with a clever and telling snapshot of how most real estate broker/agents use the Internet to find and communicate with potential leads.

In the post, he contacts an agent in his local area about an attractive home he's interested in. He contacts the agent via the agent's user-unfriendly website using a "request information" form.

Marc than goes on to give us updates after 48 hours have passed with no follow-up. After 72 hours have elapsed. And, finally, after 96 hours with no broker/agent follow-up.

Definitely give the "I am a lead" series a read because it provides plenty of insight into how a large portion of the real estate industry uses the Internet.

Anyways, last Friday I blogged that I was confused by Trulia's "recently sold" data.

In short, when you view their "Avg price/sq ft" market trend data for specific cities they instead provide you with "Average price per bedroom."

This is confusing for two reasons: 1) It's doesn't provide "Avg price/sq ft" data and 2) They don't differentiate between large bedroom size and small bedroom size with their actual "Avg price per bedroom" data.

What am I going to do?

I'm going to copy Marc Davison and become a lead.

Not a lead in the traditional real estate sense. But, in a confused-real-estate-2.0-user sense.

The future of real estate 2.0 is very bright.

However, Trulia and the rest of the real estate 2.0 gang need to make sure that the real estate revolution that they are calling for is useful and makes sense to the Average Joe (Note: I affectionately call the excellent group of real estate bloggers that 1000Watt and Trulia are part of as the "Real Estate 2.0 Mafia").

Trulia and gang need to make sure that they provide clear and relevant "recently sold" data to the Average Joes.

They could start by providing actual "Avg price per square foot" data. Or, by changing the data category to "Avg price/bedroom" and letting users know what the average sq ft per bedroom is for a specific city.

Consider me a lead.

I've chosen to use this blog post to communicate with Trulia. They live, breathe and eat "2.0" so I think its an appropriate way to respond to their service.

I will also send them an email since that's what most of their users would probably do.

I will keep you updated with how they follow-up.

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Similar Posts

40 Hours Later - I Am Still a Trulia Lead
Dear Real Estate 2.0, We Need Better “Recently Sold” Data
Brian at Trulia Clears Things Up

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