Now it’s real estate’s turn.

Or at least that seems to be the case in what could be a developing feud between real estate agents and online listing services such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com.

As these sites have risen in prominence, real estate agents are starting to push back, especially as they find it difficult to live without them.

In protest, a small number of agents have started to pull their listings from the sites. (In one case, an agent rambled on about the issue in a seven-and-a-half minute video on YouTube.)

A new white paper issued this week suggests that the topic is gaining momentum.

The report, written by VHT, which sells photography and video services to agents, concluded that agents are no longer competing against each other. The competition, rather, is “the fast-growing, third-party ecosystem of listing aggregators, online publishers, virtual tour providers, advertising networks and media companies that are dominating search engine results in order to capture online leads.”

It goes on to suggest that the remedy is for real estate agents to become savvy online marketers, and to drive sales leads through their own Web sites, rather than advertising on Zillow or Trulia.

A Zillow spokeswoman says only one brokerage so far has pulled its listings — the same one that produced the YouTube video — and a Trulia spokesman said they’ve “only seen a couple” of agents remove listings.

Seattle-based Zillow went public in July, raising $70 million; San Francisco-based Trulia is expected to seek an IPO sometime this year. Realtor.com which is operated by the National Association of Realtors, is owned by Move, Inc., a publicly traded company.

“We are not their competition,” said Trulia’s spokesman Ken Shuman. “We are a marketing outlet with 20 million unique people coming ever month who are looking to buy or to rent a home.”

So, while the practice does not seem to be widespread, agents are increasingly vocal about the shift in power that has occurred over the past decade from real estate agents to online Internet providers.

Indeed, Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com do get the majority of online traffic.

In January, Zillow controlled 37 percent of online visits; Trulia controlled 27 percent; and Realtor.com controlled 25 percent, according to the report. The remaining 11 percent was split among dozens of brokerage firms, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, Prudential and many others combined.

“As an industry, brokerages have done a poor job of making themselves and their Web content visible to search engines,” wrote VHT’s CEO Alex Zoghlin, who authored the report.

But to understand what’s going on, it requires some basic knowledge of how the industry works, so let’s step back for a moment for a brief overview.

The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is a list of most homes for sale in the U.S.

Real estate brokers receive the list and can post it on their Web sites. But other sites, like Zillow and Trulia, are not brokers and therefore don’t have access (unless they strike agreements with the different MLS divisions across the country).

Up until now, Zillow and Trulia have used a mix of sources, including agents, who volunteer to post their listings on their Web site for free.

Zillow and Trulia then make money, in part, by selling advertising to agents, who want leads for home buyers and sellers.

But it’s not exactly clear what has some agents so upset, and more importantly, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.

ARG Abbott Realty Group broker and president Jim Abbott, who recorded that YouTube video, lists a number of reasons for pulling his listings from the sites. He says the information is often display incorrectly, or is out-of-date; other claims he makes include theft of intellectual property and poor customer service.

What Abbott didn’t come right out and say is that he is not happy with the shift in power, or that the sites are profiting off the information that agents give them.

But late last year, Edina Realty of Edina, Minn., was willing to say it: The company said it pulled its listings because it was unfair that the agents are giving up their listings for free to the sites, which were then profiting off those same agents.

But according to Zillow’s spokeswoman Cynthia Nowak, that is not entirely true.

“What many agents don’t understand is that it is completely free to receive prominent placement on their listings,” Nowak said. “All they have to do is sign up for a free Zillow profile and verify their contact information, and their name, picture, contact info, etc. appears at the top of their listings.”

Still, to pull a listing off Zillow or Trulia at this point is somewhat anti-homeowner. The home’s seller is usually looking to reach the largest possible audience in order to sell their home — and is not interested in the politics of placing listings online.

An agent in Phoenix Jay Thompson, who goes by the handle “The Phoenix Real Estate Guy,” sided with Zillow. In a long blog post, Thompson broke down each one of Abbott’s points and explained why he disagreed.

On one point, Abbott said that syndication sites use peer pressure to sell advertising to agents.

Thompson’s response: “If you don’t like the fact that syndication sites sell advertising, that’s fine. Don’t buy it. Peer pressure? Put on your big girl panties and stand up to the peer pressure and do what YOU think is right.”

But who knows if his statements were entirely unbiased? Two months later, Zillow hired The Phoenix Real Estate Guy as its director of industry outreach and social media.

But at least one part of his blog post is true, no matter where he works.

He asked, “Is there an ‘anti-syndication movement’ afoot in the real estate vertical? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell where this is headed.”

Indeed, it is not clear. After all, this might be another example of an industry playing catch-up with the Internet.

A main attraction: the bank’s top-ranked Internet analyst, Mark Mahaney.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The former DoubleClick executive, who sold his company to Google for $3.2 billion, had his pick of high-profile jobs, but instead has landed at a company most people probably have never heard of.

You can be sure that between Rosenblatt’s appointment and an injection of capital from Benchmark, that’s about to change.

Both Rosenblatt and Benchmark’s General Partner Matt Cohler will join the company’s board. Neither 1stdibs nor Cohler would disclose details of the investment.

In an interview, Rosenblatt told me that, unlike DoubleClick, this is not an advertising play.

“What was exciting to me about DoubleClick was that it was an opportunity to usher an industry into the digital age,” he said. “I think we have a comparable opportunity here at 1stdibs in the luxury marketplace. That’s what gets me excited about it. It’s not an ads business.”

The company’s obscurity in tech circles did not dissuade Rosenblatt from the opportunity.

“I have never come across a company that is as unknown among the Internet crowd, but is known as well as it is in its vertical,” he said.

Rosenblatt quoted from a Bain & Company study to highlight the size of the opportunity. It found that only three percent of luxury spending was spent online as of 2009, even though the market size totaled $257 billion in 2010.

Already, Rosenblatt said, 1stdibs’ gross merchandise volume of goods (the value of goods sold by dealers on the site) was set to exceed $500 million in 2011. He said the average price of each item sold is $5,000, which sets it apart from other luxury players, like One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe, both of which are focused on offering daily discounts for items.

1stdibs plans to expand into more categories and geographies for growth. It has already gone beyond furnishings to real estate, fashion, fine art and jewelry. The company is a marketplace, so it makes money by charging dealers a listing fee to post items on the site. Currently, it has 1,200 dealers, who sell 6,000 items a month. Because dealers and sellers connect directly, similarly to eBay, 1stdibs does not stock inventory or have to manage warehouses.

Rosenblatt said he discovered the company through Benchmark’s Cohler.

Cohler said he learned of the site through his brother, a well-respected interior designer who was helping him decorate his house.

Cohler said that countless items in his house were found on 1stdibs. “I was astonished to see how incredibly powerful it was,” he said.

Ironically, Cohler was able to close the investment with 1stdibs and recruit Rosenblatt faster than it took to redecorate his house, which “is never really done,” he joked.

Cohler said that Rosenblatt’s appointment will lend the company the operational expertise it needs to scale a large Internet company. “I don’t think there’s anyone better in the world to take the company forward,” he added.

The 1stdibs marketplace was founded in 2001 by Michael Bruno, who had the goal of bringing the Paris flea market — famous for its one-of-a-kind items — to the Internet.

Bruno, who Rosenblatt calls a charismatic entrepreneur, will continue to play an active role at the company by working on strategy and consulting directly with customers.

Rosenblatt will continue to sit on the boards of Group Commerce, Twitter and IAC.

Seattle-based Zillow said it acquired substantially all of the assets of the Irvine, Calif.-based company.

Diverse Solutions Founder and CEO Justin LaJoie will become the VP of industry solutions at Zillow.

Separately, Zillow announced its second earnings release as a public company.

The company reported record revenues in the third quarter of $19.1 million, up 132 percent year over year.

The company lost $570,000 during the quarter, but when excluding a charge of $1.7 million associated with the move of its headquarters, it would have reported a profit of $1.2 million, or 5 cents a share.

Additionally, it raised its guidance for full-year revenues and profits, not including some items.

Revenues for the full year are now expected to be in the range of about $63 million to $64 million, representing a 108 percent growth rate over 2010. Adjusted EBITDA, which excludes some items, is expected to be in the range of $9 million to $10 million.

In after-hours trading, the stock increased 87 cents a share, or 3.27 percent, to $27.50.

Flint — who, ironically, is a renter in the high-priced city of San Francisco — said Trulia is spending time to build out its management team and is currently looking for a CFO.

Earlier this week, it appointed Dr. Jed Kolko as chief economist. Kolko will lead the company’s research department and will also comment on market trends.

Flint said the San Francisco-based company has raised $33 million in venture capital and was no longer interested in seeking private equity. “We are really focused on the IPO,” he said.

He declined to provide a timeline, or to confirm reports from last week that Trulia would seek an IPO in 2012.

Now that one of the company’s closest competitors is public, Flint knows exactly how well Trulia stacks up. “It makes me even more excited about the opportunity,” he said. “While we compete, I’ve been happy about them telling the story to the market.”

Flint says the company has 300 full-time employees, attracts 17 million unique visitors to its site every month, and has been breaking even for 12 months.

In comparison, Zillow has 264 employees and 25 million unique monthly visitors [up from the 20.8 million I pulled from its latest quarterly filing.]. In its first quarter as a public company, it also recorded its first profit. Zillow priced its IPO at $20 a share. Immediately after, its stock soared to as much as $45 a share, but it is trading today at $27 a share. It is valued at $763 million.

Move, Inc. is another public company in the space, and manages the Realtor.com site. It is trading at $1.53 a share and has a market cap of $244 million.

Flint said Trulia’s biggest differentiation in the space is the amount of user-generated content it receives, including agent recommendations. It recently rolled out estimated home valuations to compete with Zillow’s Zestimate service.

Today, it is live only in the San Francisco area, but Flint said Trulia made an effort to make that more social by allowing people vote on whether they agree or disagree with the value of a home by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The Seattle real estate company reported that revenues totaled $15.8 million, more than doubling from $7.3 million in the second quarter 2010.

The company also reported a net profit of $1.6 million, representing the first time the company has been profitable on a quarterly basis. In the year-ago period, Zillow lost $2 million.

In addition, the company said its monthly unique users during the quarter jumped 93 percent to a record 20.8 million, and that in July, it marked another record traffic month with 23.2 million unique users to both its Web sites and mobile applications.

Zillow’s largest source of revenue comes from agents, who subscribe for special listings. The company said premier agent subscribers totaled 13,385 as of the end of June, up 180 percent from 4,777 at the end of second quarter 2010.

The company sold 3.46 million shares to raise $70 million. It will also complete a private placement, totaling $5 million, and will have the option of selling 500,000 additional shares, depending on demand.

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real-estate listings and mortgage information, trades under the ticker symbol “Z.”

Zillow expects to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including working capital, sales and marketing activities.

The company has a history of losses, spanning the past five years. In 2010, it lost $6.8 million on revenues of $30.5 million, and in the first three months of 2011, it lost $826,000 on revenues of $11.3 million.

Zillow is known for coining the term “Zestimates,” which estimate home values. It covers nearly 100 million U.S. homes today, and has also added rental estimates. It primarily generates revenues from local real-estate professionals.

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real estate listings online, has priced its IPO between $12 and $14 a share. Once the sale is complete, it will have 27,058,139 outstanding shares. At $14 a share, the company will be worth $378.8 million.

The company plans to raise up to $55.7 million, not including over allotments, if any. In conjunction with the offering, it expects to secure an additional $5.5 million from Technology Crossover Ventures, which will buy shares at the same price as the IPO.

Zillow expects to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “Z.”

Its two closest competitors are privately held Trulia and Move, Inc., which has a public market capitalization of $355.5 million.

The company announced the acquisition last month, but only disclosed the price in a document filed with the SEC today.

The Seattle-based real estate listings company, which filed for an IPO after the acquisition took place, did not actually name the company in the filing, but said “it acquired all of the operating assets of a real estate agent and rental property manager marketing service company.”

That matches the description of Postlets, which aggregates listings and distributes them across a number of sites, including Zillow and even some of its competitors, such as Trulia.

In the filing, Zillow said it intends to offer the service as part of its platform for real estate professionals as an additional tool for marketing their listings across the web. In addition to the cash, Zillow also paid with 700,000 shares of common stock.

Zillow is seeking to raise $57 million in the public markets, including a $5 million private placement. Also disclosed in the updated filing was the information that the company expected to be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “Z.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last night, Trulia sent me a small pile of information about the fast-growth year the real estate search and information site had in 2009, despite the near-complete collapse of the U.S. housing market.

You can read all the stats below in Trulia’s press release–62.3 million unique monthly visitors, visits up 45 percent, page views up 105 percent and one million inquiries sent by home buyers to real estate agents via the San Francisco start-up, which was founded in 2005 by CEO Pete Flint and COO Sami Inkinen.

BoomTown also had a short chit-chat interview about the site’s prospects for the coming year with Flint, whose last success was as part of the team that sold travel site lastminute.com to Travelocity for $1.1 billion in 2005.

“We want to be the first billion-dollar real estate site,” he said, referring to Trulia’s valuation and not its annual revenue.

Currently, Trulia seems to be valued at about $150 million, having raised $33 million overall, with investors that include high-profile Silicon Valley venture firms Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Getting from here to there is definitely going to be a long slog, but Flint said that the “mass of confusion about real estate” will be a key factor in growing the site’s traffic and engagement over time.

Trulia allows people to search for a range of data about homes for sale in particular zip codes or cities nationwide. Its business and that of its competitors are largely based on advertising, selling subscription services and lead generation.

Flint (pictured here) said Trulia execs started focusing on revenue about 18 months ago and should achieve profitability by the middle of this year, after which the company is “poised for significant profitability.”

To goose that in 2010, Flint said the site would focus on three key areas: Expanding local content, such as blogs and information about the local community; mobile apps; and perhaps most importantly, launching a rentals offering.

“We are not about checking out what a neighbor’s house looks like, but on buyer intent and monetization,” said Flint, taking a not-so-veiled swipe at Trulia’s clearest competitor–the larger and better funded Zillow, located in Seattle.

Still, while he predicted that the overall real estate market would remain flat over the next few years, he noted that it was probably a winners-take-all game for the big and innovative niche sites like Trulia and Zillow.

Flint added that he doubts big Internet giants could easily compete, since their focus is so dispersed.

Thus, he would not comment on my recent report that Google (GOOG) and Trulia have been “in on-again, off-again acquisition talks…rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.”

“We are going to focus on being a big independent company,” said Flint.

Guess those talks are off again.

In the meantime, here is the Trulia press release:

SMARTER SEARCH AND PERSONALIZATION KEY TO TRULIA’S OUTSTANDING GROWTH AND INCREASED MOMENTUM IN 2009

Mobile and Rich Property & Local Data Provides Enhanced Consumer Experience

SAN FRANCISCO, January 6, 2010–Trulia.com (www.trulia.com ), smart real estate search to help you make better decisions, focused 2009 on providing users with the most relevant and consumer centric experience. As a result, Trulia grew to become one of the Top 5 Real Estate sites on the web according to Hitwise Rankings (November 2009). Last year was Trulia’s largest ever with a total of 62.3 million unique monthly visitors searching for homes, market insights and participating on Trulia Voices.

During the past year, millions of consumers came to Trulia to make sense of the real estate market, spending more time than ever looking at properties and price trend information. Consumer engagement reached record levels: visits grew by more than 45%, total page views grew by 105% and property views grew by more than 130%, according to internal data. On Trulia Voices, consumer questions doubled year over year. Along with increased engagement on Trulia, consumer interest in homes exploded, with nearly 1 million home buyer inquiries sent to real estate agents in 2009.

During the past year, Trulia focused on four key areas for product innovation and enhancements: smarter search, personalization, rich property & local data and mobile. Here is a recap of the key initiatives and highlights from the past 12 months.

SMARTER SEARCH

Price Reduction–A search tool that allows home buyers, sellers, agents, investors and real estate junkies to search for price reductions on Trulia. Users have the ability to receive real-time email updates when homes in their search area have been reduced, or filter their search by the percentage reduced or date of the price reduction.

Compare It!–Allows consumers to compare up to five different properties side-by-side. Users can see all the key attributes of each listing and then eliminate the properties they don’t like and save the ones they do like for future reference. Users can compare key attributes, like price per square foot to the size of the lot, and make educated decisions on what property suits them best.

PERSONALIZATION

MyTrulia–significant enhancements have been added to MyTrulia to make home searches more relevant for every individual home buyer. From saved searches to email alerts, Trulia will immediately notify users if a property they are interested in changes price or is sold. If a similar property comes on the market, Trulia will also notify users of the new home. Trulia also introduced “checklist” to help keep track of all things related to your home buying process and helps you make sense of the entire process.

Local Newsfeed–Trulia’s homepage provide consumers with a snapshot of activity in the neighborhoods they are most interested in tracking with a quick-glance. When a user comes to Trulia, the homepage is updated with price reductions, upcoming open houses, new homes on the market and market data such as average list prices, sales data, foreclosure information and more–only in the areas relevant to that user.

RICH PROPERTY DATA AND DETAILS

Home Price History & Data–Trulia’s product detail pages now includes each homes price history, including sold transactions, listing prices and price reductions. Trulia also added school information and rankings, crime data, competitive mortgage offerings; with a click of a button you can also see all the restaurants, grocery stores, banks and gas stations nearby any individual home.

Neighborhood Coverage–Trulia increased its neighborhood coverage by more than 300%. The expanded coverage improves property search and map displays to help consumers search for and compare neighborhoods, view and track neighborhood market trends, receive advice from local market experts through blogs and Q&A, and find local real estate professionals.

MOBILE

iPhone and iPod touch–the updated Trulia application offers more than 3.5 million homes for sale and has been downloaded more than 300,000 times by real estate enthusiasts, engaged buyers and sellers and real estate agents. The update adds significant new features:

Dynamic Maps–Visual searchers can toggle the map to find homes in areas they most desire. Once the area is defined in the map, a new set of homes that match their criteria is delivered.

Price Reduction Search–With a touch of a button, users can now search for all price reduced homes in their area.

Bigger, Unlimited Pictures–Taking advantage of the fantastic screens on the iPhone and iPod touch, the bigger photos provide searchers with a realistic view of the property.

Augmented Reality Browser Integration–Trulia has integrated with the Layar Mobile Augmented Reality Browser to overlay listings on top of the mobile phone’s camera view. The app allows you to scan all the properties available around you while you look at the actual buildings through your screen.

Trulia for all smartphones–Trulia has also launched a mobile version of its website, m.trulia.com, which delivers all the power and functionality of the web site in a format optimized for mobile handsets. The mobile website works on all mobile handsets from the Blackberry to the Plam Pre and all devices with a web browser, including the iPhone and iPod Touch. Users can search homes for sale, view extensive property details, find price reductions or upcoming open houses, utilize their MyTrulia account, and the Trulia Voices community.

“We dedicated 2009 to delivering a great consumer experience. Looking back on the engagement data makes me believe we are delivering on what the consumer wants. Consumers have told us over and over that they are looking for a real estate site that can deliver relevant and personalized results,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder Trulia.com. “Mobile and local information will be two areas of focus for the coming year. The world is becoming more mobile and real estate information on the go is a very natural combination. On the weekends, 5 to 10 percent of our overall traffic comes from mobile handsets. Deep local information, data and insights is also key to consumers interested in real estate and we will introduce more data and local knowledge during the next year.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

According to sources close to the situation, along with its pending bid for Yelp, Google has been in on-again, off-again acquisition talks with Trulia, the real estate search engine.

It is unclear what price Google (GOOG) would pay, but sources estimate that Trulia’s valuation ranges between $150 million and $200 million, although there could be a big premium on that.

Rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.

But Google has pulled the trigger on a number of acquisitions of innovative start-ups recently and, sources said, will continue to do so.

Trulia–which is based in San Francisco and allows people to search for a range of data about homes for sale in particular zip codes or cities nationwide–is one of the more obvious candidates for the search giant’s local and mobile efforts.

Its business and that of its competitors–which is largely based on advertising and lead generation–has been growing quickly, despite the economic downturn in housing.

More interestingly, Trulia is deeply integrated into Google Maps, an arena the company recently targeted for growth with a series of announcements about new search features.

Trulia has raised about $33 million since 2005, with investors that include high-profile Silicon Valley venture firms Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Interestingly, Accel and Sequoia recently made bank when Google bought AdMob for $750 million.

Trulia’s clearest competitor is the larger Zillow, located in the Seattle area. But, sources said, Google is more interested in Trulia, given its location in the Bay area and lower valuation.

Zillow has raised about $87 million from Benchmark Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, PAR Capital Management and Legg Mason.

Redfin, another Seattle-based rival, has raised about $31 million from its own well-known collection of VCs.

This week, Google’s interest in Yelp, the local review site, also became public, in a deal that could cost upward of $600 million.

It is all part of a buying spree that Google has engaged in of late, with six acquisitions costing $1 billion so far.

The National Association of Realtors announced Monday a plan to give more data to real estate agents eager to show they can still provide valuable information at a time when more and more home shoppers rely on the Internet to bone up on the market.

The trade organization said it has acquired licenses for property-related data and related technology from Lender Processing Services Inc., or LPS. Terms weren’t disclosed, but NAR officials said in a presentation to members last week that they were investing $12 million in assets from LPS and its Cyberhomes unit.

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Initially, Zillow’s Trick or Treat Index was only available for Seattle and Los Angeles. But after being inundated by blog interest and requests for additional data, Zillow added lists of the top candy-harvesting neighborhoods in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.

Zillow used the same factors to calculate its index for these cities as it used in Seattle and Los Angeles: home values, population density, neighborhood walkability and crime.

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