Interview with Peter Flint, CEO of Trulia

Trulia is a real estate search engine. Our goal is to give unbiased results to help the consumers find real estate information online. Primarily our real estate listings help people narrow down their search criteria, view information, properties on the market and connect directly to real estate agents and brokers.

The company was started back in 2004. It’s really born out of personal frustration. I started the business with a classmate while I was at Stanford Business School. I was very frustrated and disappointed with the services that were available to me as I was looking for properties. I spoke to lot of my friends and they also had similar frustrations and they really thought there must be a better way. At that point I started looking at the real estate industry and trying to understand the interest and needs of the brokers. What they really wanted was additional traffic to their websites and to also have fantastic assets available to them. We developed this model which is really about providing a more effective search experience to consumers and directing traffic to individual agent and broker websites where they can follow up with the properties. That’s the genesis of the idea.

Exactly. We follow the general principles of a search engine. It’s free to be included within the index and then if you want premium placements then there will be a fee associated. When advertising or premium placements are shown, they will be clearly differentiated from the general listings.

We work with a combination of data providers. So we do have many, many direct relationships with large brokerage firms. We also work with some of the service providers within the industry that help manage relationships with individual agents and brokers. So it’s really a mixture. The sites are getting included in our index. So it’s a sort of pre-codified substance with the Internet that we link to.

We see one of the keys to our success is providing relevant search results. As part of this quality control we need to make sure that what we display is relevant. It’s actually the key to our long term success. That’s why we think being focused on real estate search specifically provides a much better consumer experience, which consequently drives much more qualified traffic to agent and broker websites.

We launched back in September 2005 and we have been steadily rolling out different states. So we are taking a step-by-step approach or rather state-by-state approach and will launch nationwide in the future. We launched in California followed by New York. California obviously is a huge real estate market and also our home market. So it made sense to launch here. Similarly New York is unique market and has a significant media spend within that market. Hence we have been really focusing on the primary markets. So Florida and Texas and New Jersey were next and then step-by-step moving out we will be launching in additional markets.

The real estate industry is incredibly complex and extremely massive. We really thought it’s better to nail the proposition in one market and then roll out rather than have a potentially weak proposition in all markets and improve it from there. Having a density of consumers and brokers is a great proposition and will help each other out market-by-market. It is a slower approach but allows us to ensure that we won’t disappoint consumers.

Every single day we get substantial demands from brokers and consumers in states we haven’t launched in yet. There is also a sense of anticipation about the service within the individual markets. We are happy with our approach. It won’t be very long till the end of the year when we plan to launch nationwide.

No current plans to go international. I personally was born in the UK. So I am intrigued about the European prospects but there are no plans right now to go international. The US market is particularly unique and that’s where we are focused right now.

The US has a much more sophisticated service market than in the US, buying and selling homes is a much more significant part of the culture and economy. Secondly the availability to information technology means consumers are searching on the web in huge numbers. We believe that we can successfully run this company based upon advertising to this market.

Every state is a huge market and it’s relatively easy for us to scale within the US whereas in other countries it is much more difficult. The online real estate area is going through somewhat of renaissance right now. This is driven by broadband which has created very rich and compelling map applications that you are seeing in the map innovations in consumer market. The industry spent close to $2 billion last year on online real estate marketing. There’s a significatnt amount of money and technology going into building a platform with very interesting applications. Ultimately the online real estate market is really exciting right now.

We certainly love the blogosphere and the concept behind providing information to consumers. These conversations are instantaneous. We have been fortunate to have received quite a bit of word of mouth advertising as well as been picked up by a few trend setters within the technology industry. Within the vertical search area we have been covered for our mapping mash-ups.

We have created a great real estate search experience providing the best search tools. The addition of tax information and a simple mechanism to direct consumers to the real estate listing of agent broker website for the majority cases. This allows us to connect consumers with the information available directly from brokers. As a search engine we provide the most relevant search results for the consumer looking for homes to sell. Its about delivering an advanced search experience.

I came to the US via business school and having been in entrepreneurial environments within the UK and across Europe, coming to Silicon Valley is like a Mecca. Silicon Valley is really home of so many great companies and it’s personally very rewarding to me surrounded by such talented individuals and then also professionally it makes life a lot easier because there is an actual infrastructure around the legal, finance and support for companies. There are a lot of core ingredients for growing companies at your doorstep so it’s certainly a lot easier. The West Coast is very much open to new ideas, very much open to entrepreneurship so certainly I think it’s a lot easier to be building companies and starting companies here than it is perhaps in Europe.

I think it’s absolutely a market trend. If you are trying to solve a specific problem, then a vertical search engine will work specifically for you far better than a horizontal search engine. That is for a couple of reasons; one is that they can fine tune the interface to make the search criteria specific to solving that problem. You will find it hard to have good search sessions if you are not able to fine tune the search interface for your specific type of search. Secondly, the search results will also be more relevant to your specific search, this also goes for the advertisements that will be featured.

I have any doubts that if you expand it out there will be many, many niche search engines for the targeting niche areas. Consider legal, medical, and many other targeted search engines. This is all possible because the cost of technology is going down, while the cost of targeted media is going up. So when you look at buying advertising on Google, it can be very expensive so advertisers will look to other media and sites where they can get more targeted traffic and more targeted leads.

I have known Sami for almost 3 years. A successful partnership is really crucial to a successful business. We divide roles fairly clearly. Sami is focused on the industry. He is very familiar with what drives the real estate market; processes, brokers, prices, commissions, etc. Your question about how we compliment each other comes down to determining what one person does better than the other. It also helps that we both have a similar operating style in that we both come from Europe. We both have a similar mentality. it is in other sense you do realize that one is better than the other that and allow you know people to take what’s best.

The key is to have a passion and to never give up. This is imperative because is creates a drive to solve business problems. It is critical to look at your business from a technical, marketing, and operational perspective. At the core thought it comes down to teamwork and culture. Ultimately the success of the company will be due to the people that we work with and the environment that we work in. It’s really important to us that the culture is both fun to be in and generates a sense of ambitions. We really focus on building a great product for consumers but also building a great team, which we think will create a great company. That’s sort of thing we work very hard on and that seems to get the best people and to actually have the people solving the problems that they love to solve.

We have an Human Resource slogan on our site which is one of our guiding principals, which simply states that ‘the best ideas win’. This means we are always open to new ideas and we want individuals who can contribute ideas and solutions. Secondly, we want individuals that contribute to the company. People need feedback, so we encourage feedback throughout the organization, from customers, peers, and management.

To become a leading real estate site and to be the best real estate search engine in the US. As we all know real estate decisions happen around the kitchen table. So ultimately we ought to be there at the kitchen table, talked about by agents and brokers and consumers.