Trulia, the real estate search engine, has recently announced the launch of new features - including 'Trulia Voices' and 'Trulia Alerts' - in a push to drive their site towards the Web 2.0 arena.Trulia Voices can effectively be regarded as a clone of Yahoo! Answers for the real estate market, where the 1.5 million web users and real estate professionals that visit the Trulia site can post questions and answers about any kind of issue, from schools to market conditions, shopping or finance.
With Trulia Alerts, users are able to set up the characteristics of their desired property, enabling them to receive automatic e-mail alerts when their dream home hits the market. With over 60 million homes for sale in the USA, features like this can make a huge difference for prospective buyers.
Trulia is visually more attractive and user friendly than many other of its competitors, due partially to the use of Google Maps mashups as a means to easily find the properties by location. As well as a list of homes for sale, the site also provides useful real estate guides with statistics and graphs on average house prices, household income and crime statistics to name just a few.
In Europe, Properazzi is the only pan-European vertical search engine that can be compared to the services offered by Trulia in the USA. Properazzi offers information on more than 1.8 million listings within 45 European countries on both properties for sale and rentals alike. Properazzi also integrates Google Maps as an aid to find listings by location, although it doesn't offer its user any form of Web 2.0 interaction.
Properazzi has made a clear effort to offer multilingual services since its inception, and this vertical search engine is now available in more than 28 languages and 92 currencies.
The only way to compete with search engine giants like Google or Yahoo! is to specialised in a certain area and enterprises such as Trulia not only focus on a niche market but are also aware of the growing importance of the social web and user generated content. In the near future, it's likely that we can expect many more websites to mimic the features of offered by sites like Properazzi and Trulia.
