Online home finder Trulia just went global, announcing today it has formed a partnership with ListGlobally, an international property listings firm, to allow users to look for homes outside the States as the tug-of-war between for homebuyers, sellers and renters looking for properties online continues to heat up.
Trulia not only gives you a list of properties in a neighborhood, it also lets you plot them on a map, search by keywords, and narrow your results based on distance from a specific location.
It also lets you rate each property based on the area’s schools, night life, safety and more. Users can then share that data with others on a building, block or neighborhood level.
Although initially launched as a buying-only site, Trulia quickly followed the leader in the space, Zillow, into rental listings last April, and is now eyeing ListGlobally’s presence in 17 countries as it reaches out to buyers looking for homes overseas.
Trulia says that 5 percent of its overall traffic is currently from international buyers, with as much as 10 percent of its traffic in large cities such as Miami, New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles coming from interested buyers abroad.
Zillow, which already leads the pack of housing search startups, added support for rentals six months prior, in December 2009. It does not currently offer a global component but did announce today it has added a feature to let home buyers and sellers search for and find local real estate agents based on ratings and reviews from former clients.
Trulia saw impressive growth in 2010: Consumer inquiries to real estate agents were up 54 percent; visits to the website and via mobile have grown by 66 percent; property views have grown by more than 50 percent and mobile traffic spiked more than 400 percent year-over-year.
On average, Trulia consumers view more than 2.2 million properties per day, or around 90,000 properties views per hour.
Whether those stats and this new strategic partnership will be enough to help Trulia catch Zillow — which logged more than 13 million unique users in December, a year-over-year traffic growth of 77 percent — remains to be seen.
“Bringing international home listings to our current audience is a natural extension of our services. This is a global market place and we are excited to offer homes for sale across the globe,” Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia, told me today. “Not only are investors looking for properties overseas, but we know lots of retirees and professionals are moving around the globe.”
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