Realtor.com, which is the largest in the highly fragmented market, has launched an iPad application catching up with two of its closest rivals, Trulia and Zillow. Update: The app will actually be live tomorrow.

The top-visited real estate website in March was Realtor.com; however, none of the companies enjoys a commanding lead.  In fact, a new source of traffic for any of them, whether it comes from a mobile phone or tablet, can turn into a first-mover advantage.

Last month, Realtor.com’s market share totaled 6.5 percent, followed by Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow.com, with 6.04 percent and 5.36 percent respectively. Trulia was listed fourth with 4.63 percent market share, according to Hitwise.

Realtor.com was one of the first online destinations to publish housing listings, and today it is the only one that has a direct relationship with the National Association of REALTORS.

Because of its ties, it gets a direct feed of the information from the Multiple Listing Service and claims to have the most accurate collection of listings because more than 80 percent of all property listings are updated every 15 minutes.

Realtor.com’s parent company, Move Inc., went public in the late ’80s, and last year reported revenues of $197.5 million and a net loss of $20.9 million. Meanwhile, Zillow filed documents with the SEC last week announcing its intentions to go public. In 2010, it’s revenues totaled $30.5 million and it recorded a net loss of $6.8 million. Trulia is also preparing for a public offering.

“Mobile is such an important part of the way you look at real estate now,” said Steve Berkowitz, Move’s CEO. “It’s something we’ve seen grow exponentially year over year.”

The free iPad application is the latest push, joining Realtor.com’s presence on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7. Berkowitz said they don’t break out traffic it receives from mobile devices, but that people are viewing about 10 properties a second from the various apps. So far, mobile traffic does not exceed the PC, but he says the audience is two to three times more engaged than on the Web. Additionally, Realtor.com mobile apps have been downloaded 3.6 million times and active users have increased by 79 percent in the past four months.

With the release of the iPad app, users will be able to use the large screen to search for homes for sale or properties to rent across the country. Users can hunt for homes or open houses based on location, the MLS number, or by city, state, or street name. Listings can be saved to be viewed later, and one feature lets you search a section on the map by circling that area with your fingertip.

As with Realtor.com’s other applications, users can also reach out to an agent to schedule a tour or ask questions. In the past year, Realtor.com mobile apps have contributed to a 240 percent increase in consumer outreach to local agents and in-app communication between agents and consumers has increased by 148 percent since December, Berkowitz said.

Of course, the one downside of the iPad application is that it only works when a user has Wi-Fi connectivity, or if they’ve opted to buy the 3G model.

Realtor.com makes money by charging agents a subscription fee to showcase various listings and make them stand out from the rest. Inclusion in the mobile apps is a part of those rates.

In a blog post, Twitter said it expected to move to its new Mid-Market office in mid-2012. “San Francisco’s unique creativity and inventiveness is a part of Twitter’s DNA, and we feel like we are part of San Francisco,” the company said.

The Market Square building (formerly known as the San Francisco Furniture Mart) is about eight big blocks away from Twitter’s current SOMA office and will need to be extensively renovated before Twitter can move in. The building was bought last month by Shorenstein Properties for $110 million.

Chicago-based real estate agency Dream Town is hoping that’s the case with its weeklong $25 deal offering $975 off your next home.

The Chicago-area deal stipulates that for $25, you’ll get $1,000 in cash at the time of closing if you buy a house or list a house with Dream Town Realty over the next year. The deal requires the buyer to enter a minimum transaction of $150,000, and of course, there’s a limit of one per household.

Groupon is not disclosing how many vouchers have been purchased so far, but it was successfully “tipped” after 50 were bought. There is no cap on the number that can be sold.

On the company’s Web site, Dream Town bragged that it was offering the “nation’s first ever Groupon offer for Real Estate.”

Dream Town’s co-founder and President Yuval Degani told Chicago Breaking Business: “What we’re trying to do is acquire new customers. We’re not really looking at it as a reduced commission. We’re looking at it as getting customers for life.”

Under that rationale, any business could consider offering a group-buying discount from Groupon, or one of its competitors, such as LivingSocial. Already, we’ve seen major categories emerge, such as travel and family-centric activities.

Could real estate be next?

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But as part of the acquisition, Seattle-based Zillow said Postlets co-founders Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen will join as full-time employees.

Postlets, which was founded in 2005, has more than 500,000 registered users, who distribute more than 350,000 for-sale and for-rent listings across the U.S.

In the online real estate space, one of the biggest differentiators between Zillow and its competitors–such as Trulia and Realtor.com–can be having the biggest selection of listings, so in many ways, an acquisition that could potentially increase inventory makes sense.

Postlets helps real estate agents, property managers and landlords create listings and send them to 13 real estate and social media Web sites. Zillow said it will continue to let Postlets send listings to the other distribution partners, including San Francisco-based Trulia.

Both Trulia and Zillow are prepping for initial public offerings. Trulia has said it is ready for an IPO with the recent appointment of a COO, and Zillow has reportedly been talking to bankers.

Trulia.com said it is now supporting iPad and Android in addition to iPhone. Zillow has released a BlackBerry application, adding to a portfolio that supports iPad, Windows Phone, Android and iPhone.

Both are trying to offer access to information to home buyers wherever they want it, and not necessarily when they are in front of computers.

Being accessible to users whenever they want the information will be critical as both companies may jockey for an initial public offering in the not too distant future.

San Francisco-based Trulia recently said it was prepping for an IPO as it continued to build out its management team, and Zillow was reportedly in talks with investment bankers to discuss the prospects of going public.

Trulia said the addition of iPad and Android applications builds off a base of more than two million mobile users, who visited Trulia.com from their phones last month. That represents a more than 300 percent increase compared to the year earlier, it said.

Both the iPad and Android apps will be slightly different from what was being offered on the iPhone. The iPad app will use the larger screen real estate to display a color-coded heat map that examines the differences in average listing price and sold price within a city or county. The Android app will allow users to add open houses to their calendars and scan QR codes.

Zillow said with the addition of its BlackBerry app, it will now cover more than 90 percent of smartphone users. The Seattle-based company said its services are used on mobile devices more than 6.5 million times each month with 23 million visits to home detail pages.

In addition to being able to search the BlackBerry app for homes based on a user’s location, they will also be able to filter searches by price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and other information. Homes will be viewable in satellite or street view, and will feature color photos.

Were Apple to create the cloud-based version of iTunes that’s long been rumored–one from which users’ entire iTunes libraries could be streamed–and were it to bolster MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery services with more robust storage, even the 64GB Air might seem an attractive option to the high-end user. And Apple’s new N.C. data center, which is nearly five times the size of the one it operates in Newark, Calif., may well make both those things possible.

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News of the move was first reported in the Palo Alto Daily Post in November, and multiple reports of real-estate transactions have been published since. (Those realtors are a chatty bunch!)

Facebook will finally make things official on Tuesday at Menlo Park City Hall.

Its relatively new office complex is on the east side of Highway 101, near the Dumbarton Bridge and not much else. It was formerly occupied by Sun Microsystems, which moved out after being bought by Oracle. When Sun occupied the buildings, most employees had private offices, so Facebook has already been working to tear down walls to create the sort of open floor plan it enjoys at its current office. According to a former Sun employee, every time he’s passed by in recent weeks, the dumpsters have been overstuffed with detritus.

Coincidentally, the address for the new office park is 1601 Willow Road; Facebook’s current main building is 1601 S. California Avenue in Palo Alto.

Facebook’s current offices in Stanford Research Park are definitely less cool than the company’s original home, which was surrounded by restaurants and cafés in downtown Palo Alto. And eastern Menlo Park is much, much less cool. It’s also less bikeable and convenient to public transportation.

But it is considerable consolation to employees that the campus is more accessible to San Francisco, especially relative to most other nearby major tech campuses in the deep south Peninsula and South Bay.

Facebook moved to its current offices in just 2009, and has since expanded down the street to a building on Page Mill Road that currently holds much of its nontechnical staff. The company currently employs 2,000 people, although sources say it expects to grow to as many as 3,500 before the end of 2011.

Staffers don’t have much reason to venture out, since they are fed three gourmet meals a day plus unlimited snacks.

Prior to the 2009 move, Facebook had expanded to 10 or more buildings in downtown Palo Alto, where it had operated since formalizing operations after being founded by Mark Zuckerberg and some of his Harvard classmates in 2004. The company celebrated its seventh birthday last week.

For most of those years, Facebook offered employees a $600 monthly stipend if they lived within a mile of the offices. When the company uprooted itself two years ago to California Avenue and ended the stipend program, many employees moved their homes out of the immediate area. Facebook now offers multiple shuttles per day from San Francisco and from Caltrain stations near its offices.

Moving from Palo Alto’s main business district to a quiet office park owned by Stanford was a big change for the company, but a necessary one after it outgrew the downtown area. Many of the company’s former downtown offices are now occupied by the analytics start-up Palantir.

Those noisy, frequent shuttle buses that come with a swarm of young employees migrating to work every day are among the annoyances that caused much tension with the residential neighborhood that surrounds Facebook’s current office on California Avenue. Residents of the College Terrace neighborhood have persuaded the city of Palo Alto to institute an actively enforced two-hour parking limit, in part to keep Facebooker vehicles contained in the company’s designated parking lots.

Commenters on local news discussion boards complain that these NIMBY folks drove Facebook, its employees’ business and corporate tax revenue out of town. But the reality is that the social networking giant is too big for its current space, which it had said from the beginning was temporary.

The new Menlo Park campus has 57 acres and one million square feet of office space, and Facebook has already reportedly purchased nearby buildings, likely to ensure it has room for further growth.

Plus, fostering a close-knit pod of employees all living within walking distance of the office has become less important as Facebook expanded. With the company saying it’s likely to go public next year, expectations are that many employees will be buying mansions in the suburbs and pieds-à-terre in the city soon enough.

(You might ask, why do I know so much about the minutiae of Facebook’s office locations? Well, in addition to having covered the company for the last six years or so, I grew up in Palo Alto, my mother lives around the block from Facebook’s current offices (where I am now in constant fear of parking tickets) and my husband (as mentioned in my ethics statement) has done research for the company off and on for the last three years.)

And if you guessed it was from all of those people putting up their unwanted presents on eBay, you are completely, 100 percent…wrong. Dec. 25 and 26 saw record mobile traffic to Zillow.

In general, mobile traffic to the real-estate site surges whenever people are out of the office. During the average weekday, Zillow says that only about 15 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. On a typical weekend, anywhere from one-fifth to one quarter of Zillow’s traffic is from phones. On Thanksgiving, that figure reached 30 percent, while Christmas Day saw a record number of visits to the mobile site, with phones accounting for a third of all Zillow’s traffic.

As for eBay, it said Dec. 12 was its busiest mobile sales day ever, with the number of transactions well more than double that of the busiest day of 2009. That marked two years in a row that the second Sunday in December was the busiest eBay shopping day.

For those who want to slice eBay’s mobile business in all sorts of ways, the company has posted an interactive graphic with all sorts of fun facts. For instance, auto parts represented 15 percent of mobile sales in Germany as compared with only 8 percent in the U.S.

Movity was founded this year, with $1.3 million in funding.

Here is the full press release, along with some real estate news about Trulia’s new HQ:

TRULIA ACQUIRES MOVITY TO ACCELERATE AND ENHANCE THE ONLINE REAL ESTATE EXPERIENCE

Trulia Moves into New 30,000 sq foot Downtown San Francisco Location as the Company Continues to Grow at a Rapid Pace

SAN FRANCISCO, December 21, 2010–Trulia.com (www.trulia.com), a top site for homebuyers, sellers and renters, acquired Movity (www.movity.com ), a stealth start-up focused on surfacing geodata to help new movers make better decisions and creator of social check-in tracker www.weeplaces.com. Movity was part of the Winter 2010 YCombinator class and the team includes Eric Wu, co-founder of RentWiki.com, Sha Hwang, design technologist from Stamen Design, Vaughn Koch, program manager from Bing, and Zain Memon, a contributor to the open-source framework Django.

“The consumer real estate experience will continue to change dramatically and we believe adding this team of talented individuals will accelerate our innovation and growth,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. “Movity brings strong engineering skills, visualizations specialists and a passion for real estate. We looked at their vision and our vision and we knew we had a perfect match.”

“We are excited to join a leader and innovator in the real estate market and contribute to a world class engineering organization,” said Eric Wu, co-founder of Movity. “I’ve been impressed what Trulia has accomplished in the past few years, and together, we want to change the way people discover local information and find a place to live.”

New Office Space

In 2010, Trulia doubled the size of its workforce and today moved in to a new 30,000 sq foot office in the heart of SOMA in downtown San Francisco. Trulia occupies multiple floors and built the space to include user experience testing rooms, 27 conference rooms and a handful of cool design elements including bike racks, a library and open collaboration spaces to foster an environment of innovation and collaboration.

“About 18 months ago we asked our employees what they wanted in a new office and it was pretty clear they wanted to be closer to public transportation, they wanted a bright open office and they wanted to be in the center of the activity downtown,” said Sami Inkinen, COO and co-founder of Trulia. “We took their feedback and we found an office that meets all our needs and allows for future growth opportunities. Moving into the new office today you could feel the sense of pride in our employees and this begins another new and exciting chapter in Trulia’s history.”

Apple.

About a five-minute drive from Apple headquarters, the 98-acre parcel of land is adjacent to 50 acres Apple acquired back in 2006 and will be used to house a workforce that’s expanding nearly as quickly as the market for iOS devices.

“We now occupy 57 buildings in Cupertino and our campus is bursting at the seams,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told the Mercury News, which first reported the story. “These offices will give us more space for our employees as we continue to grow.”

No word on HP’s asking price for the parcel, but real estate experts estimate that it may have been $300 million or more.

According to Catawba County Geospatial Information Services, Apple owns a little over 70 acres across the street from the 183-acre parcel on which its 500,000-square-foot data center is being built (click on image above to enlarge). That land was purchased in July of last year, but for what purpose?

The scuttlebutt around Maiden is that the company intends to use it for office space. But that seems about as likely as Apple using it to build some Jobsian theme park.

A more plausible explanation is that this parcel, too, will be used for data center space. As I reported last week, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling the size of its Maiden data center operations, and architectural renderings posted to a Catawba County, N.C., Flickr page that show two structures side by side suggest this may have been the plan all along.

But these renderings don’t account for this newly discovered 70-acre parcel, and they were drawn up just a few weeks before Apple signed the deed on it. Which raises the question: Are Apple’s plans for the cloud so grand and its road map so clear that the company has already set the stage for further data center expansion by buying this lot across the street?

Below, parcel information for all of Apple’s recent land purchases in Maiden (click to enlarge).

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According to sources, Jeff Dossett has taken a job at Demand Media as its SVP of Content Partnership Development.

That means Dossett, who has held top online jobs at both Yahoo and Microsoft, will be focused on content distribution partnerships for the online content company’s Demand Media Studio platform.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand, which sources said is now prepping its road show for its upcoming IPO, has been picking up big company execs to add to its roster.

In March, it hired Yahoo U.S. advertising sales head Joanne Bradford, who worked with Dossett at Microsoft.

When BoomTown last checked in with Dossett in mid-2009, he was leaving Yahoo for an adventure-focused start-up.

As its SVP for North American Audience, Dossett had been in charge of all of Yahoo’s media assets, including its powerful News, Sports and Finance content sites.

Dossett had joined Yahoo in late 2008, coming to the company from Microsoft, where he was MSN executive producer and general manager.

In his job at MSN, Dossett was the lead for audience, content and programming strategy and execution in the U.S.

He had worked at the company since 1991, in a variety of sales and marketing jobs in Canada, and later worked on strategy and business development for MSN.

Dossett was also CEO of Carpoint, now MSN Autos, and was GM of its real-estate arm.

He also took two years off from Microsoft in 2002 to climb the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, finally reaching the summit of Mount Everest in May of 2004.

Dossett reached the summit of Everest for a second time in 2008.

In an interesting corporate move, the COO of online real-estate site Zillow, Spencer Rascoff (pictured here), has been promoted to CEO, replacing founding CEO Rich Barton.

Barton–who is also venture partner at Benchmark Capital and on the board of Netflix (NFLX)–will remain executive chairman of Zillow.

He co-founded it in 2005 after founding the Expedia travel site in 1994, while an exec at Microsoft (MSFT) and spinning it out in 1999.

After Expedia, Barton moved on to Zillow, also based in Seattle, which has raised $87 million in funding.

“Zillow is in a fantastic spot on many metrics, so it was ready for a new leader for the next phase,” said Barton, who said he would still remain very involved in the company.

One of the reasons Barton said he felt he could move on: Zillow is now profitable on a cash-flow basis via local and national advertising and referral fees. And it had 12.5 million unique users in August, up 41 percent year over year, despite an economic downturn.

Zillow has been focusing a lot on mobile apps, which now represents 15 to 20 percent of Zillow traffic on weekends.

Rascoff said he will focus on further growing reach and revenue on the Web and via mobile. “It’s a priority to grow the size of our audience,” he said.

The overall goal? Unlike a lot of start-up heads who are wary of IPOs, Rascoff said a public offering was the likely path for Zillow.

“I would like us to be public and we intend to be,” he said.

Here is the official Zillow press release:

Zillow Appoints Spencer Rascoff CEO

Co-founder Rich Barton Remains Executive Chairman

SEATTLE–September 14, 2010–Zillow, Inc., which operates leading real estate website Zillow.com®, Zillow® Mortgage Marketplace, and the industry’s largest mobile real estate platform, today announced Spencer Rascoff has been named chief executive officer. Co-founder Rich Barton, who has been the company’s CEO since it was founded in 2005, will continue to be actively involved in Zillow as executive chairman of the board of directors. Fellow co-founder Lloyd Frink will move from president to the new full-time role of chief strategy officer.

Rascoff joined Zillow in 2005 as one of the original executive team members and has been serving as chief operating officer since October 2008. Previously he was chief financial officer and vice president of marketing. As COO, Rascoff has been responsible for the majority of Zillow’s day-to-day operations for the past two years, overseeing marketing, finance, partner relations, legal and human resources as well as the execution of the company’s recent partnership with Yahoo! He is also a frequent housing market commentator on CNBC, CNN, FOX and Bloomberg TV.

“Spencer is an immensely capable and energetic leader who has been a driving force at Zillow from the beginning, helping to grow the company from a spark of an idea into a profitable industry leader. This promotion is well-deserved and reflects the leadership responsibility he’s been carrying for a while,” said Rich Barton, co-founder and executive chairman of Zillow, Inc. “As executive chairman, I look forward to continuing to work with Spencer and the entire team to extend Zillow’s leadership position in online and mobile real estate.”

“Working with Rich, Lloyd and the entire Zillow team has been the most exciting and rewarding period of my career,” said Spencer Rascoff, chief executive officer of Zillow, Inc. “I am extremely proud of our progress to date and even more excited about the opportunities ahead.”

Prior to Zillow, Rascoff served as vice president of lodging at Expedia, which he joined after InterActiveCorp’s $675 million acquisition of discount travel site Hotwire.com in 2003. Rascoff co-founded Hotwire in 1999 and helped grow the company from an idea to a leading online travel company in just four years. Previously, he was an investment banker in the merger and acquisitions group at Goldman Sachs and held other investment-related positions at TPG Capital, Bear Stearns and Allen & Co. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University, and he serves on Harvard’s Digital Community & Social Networking Advisory Group.

As one of the most-visited real estate sites on the web, Zillow has broken multiple records in operating and financial metrics in the past year and is profitable. In August, 12.5 million unique users visited Zillow.com, up 41 percent year over year. Zillow Mortgage Marketplace logged a record 314,000 loan requests in August, up six-fold from a year ago. National and local advertising sales, including sales through the company’s location-based mobile apps, are also accelerating. Total downloads of Zillow’s mobile apps have surpassed 2 million, making Zillow the most popular real estate app on iPhone®, iPadTM, Android® and Windows® Mobile devices. As previously announced, Zillow recently teamed with Yahoo! Real Estate to create the largest real estate ad network, for which Zillow coordinates sales across the two platforms. Later this fall, Zillow will power all for-sale listings on Yahoo!, bringing more than 4 million home listings to Yahoo! users.

Here’s an interesting video interview I did earlier this week with Sherry Chris for the Better Homes and Gardens blog on the impact of digital technology on the real estate industry in the age of consumer empowerment and ubiquitous information availability.

The reason: I was a speaker at the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco, where about 1,500 real estate professionals gathered to talk apps, cloud computing, tablet devices, mobile innovations and more.

It’s a good idea, since real estate is one of the industries that has been massively disrupted by digital shifts.

Here’s the video: