How Does the Co-Founder of Trulia House Hunt? On His Site, Of Course

I spent a delightful hour last Thursday in San Francisco with Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia.com. Please note it was 68 degrees! Trulia probably needs no introduction to most of you, but for the uninitiated it is a popular real estate site for searching real estate, buying or renting. Trulia arms you with cool consumer information about an area to help you decide where you might want to live, as well as peruse listings.

Now Trulia is going to help you find agents.  In fact, co-founder Pete is on a wild house hunt and tells me he will definitely use a realtor for his house hunt, but —

“I have not selected them yet. I’ll find them based on the recommendations of my friends using Trulia’s new awesome Social Search functionality that we launched last week: http://info.trulia.com/index.php?s=43&item=128.”

Trulia launched a feature that allows Realtors to link a Trulia profile with their FaceBook recommendations. Agents will be able to get crowd-sourced recommendations and display them. Could this be bye-bye “Best (paid for) Realtor?”

According to Trulia, “every recommendation  an agent receives on Trulia increases the opportunity for an agent to  meet a new buyer or seller through their clients combined social  networks.”

The new Realtor recommendation site is called Social Search, and it integrates personal Facebook recommendations  into Trulia’s Find a  Pro directory. Consumers can search the directory to not only see who their Facebook friends have endorsed, they can send private messages to the endorsers, asking them, I guess, to vet the agent. In any case, this “crowd-source” concept might very well be magic for an agent’s lean marketing budget. Agents swear that word-of-mouth and referrals are a primary source of business, so who needs to spend mega-bucks on expensive vanity ads when Trulia Social Search provides actual, live digital referrals from happy clients?

This underscored what Pete made clear in our interview: real estate agents are very fearful of the internet, but they shouldn’t be.

“The industry is more fearful of change, technology,” Flint told me, “We at Trulia are not in the business of disrupting the real estate industry. We are in the process of disrupting the newspaper industry.”

Wow. And here all along some Realtors thought they would be replaced by the internet now that 99% of all real estate search begins on line. 

Trulia doesn’t want to put the Realtors out of biz; it wants to suck up ad revenue.

I thought this was compelling given that A. H. Belo recently  shuttered Quick in Dallas, R.I.P. Tell me about print media, I asked the 39 year old, British-born Stanford Business School graduate who created Trulia in 2005 when he found it difficult to shop for housing on line. (Trulia was valued at about $200 million back before the bust, now has about 400 employees, and there has been talk of finding outside investors and going public, as Zillow did a week or so ago, though Flint’s lips are clearly sealed in that topic.)

Flash ahead to five years –what will the print publishing world look like?

I think the middle market will dissappear, Flint said without blinking an eye. The large papers will survive — USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, etc. There will still be small community newspapers if they offer relevant niche content with appeal. It’s the regionals that will suffer, those that mix local news with non-relevance. The middle, says Flint, will be gone.

As for Real Estate, Flint outlined three major forces re-tooling it:

Technology has totally transformed the real estate industry, and mobile search is going to be THE primary search mode — that is, people will look for homes on their tablets and phones, while out in the field.

Data –there is an abundance of data, but most lacks context. Data needs to be turned into easy to understand stories, not necessarily written word stories, but interactive maps, video, pictures, like Trulia’s popular heat maps.

And Real Estate will be very human, as relationships are integrated into social network relationships (like the new app). According to NAR, said Flint, 40% of consumers find their agents by a personal recommendation.

“We have digitalized word of mouth,” he says.

If you are in social media be afraid, be very afraid. FaceBook is like a big, huge party and everyone’s invited. Companies that focus on delighting the consumer, accelerating value and utilizing great technology, will thrive. Real Estate will remain high on the radar despite our current down-turn because often a home is the single largest financial purchase in an individual’s life.

“It’s incredibly emotional,” says Flint.

He knows first hand: Flint, who was married just two months ago, is house-hunting. Though he currently leases a 1000 square foot condo in the heart of San Francisco — he loves being able to walk as much as possible — his French-born bride desires a larger closet, a kitchen and a garden. Which means he may have to sacrifice his ideal spacial desires — spectacular views, walkability- for love.

“I’m a sucker for views and right now I have a great big view of San Francisco Bay” says Flint. When he lived in London, his flat had a small roof-top deck, where he would spend hours. Having a great view, he says, visually doubles the size of your home.

The newlyweds are looking at properties in the hilltops of the Peninsula area outside of San Francisco, near Palo Alto where Mark Zuckerburg bought a $7 million home last spring. There (for less than $7 million) Flint says he can still get his great views and his bride can have her hearts’ desire.

See how women drive real estate decisions?

Naturally, their home search is being done on Trulia.

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