A few weeks ago, I wrote about Trulia copying one of Zillow's poorer ideas, when they launched Trulia Luxe Living, a dishy celebrity blog gossiping about the real estate deals of the uber-rich. This is just my opinion, but I found both the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the Perez Hilton style approach, slightly in bad taste and inappropriate for a serious transactional real estate site in the current market.
Now, Trulia is still one of my favorite innovators of real estate tech, advertising and data visualization. Yet again, they seem to be simply regurgitating another extremely controversial Zillow product, the Zestimate. Zestimates have infuriated owners and buyers alike, providing wildly inaccurate (just look at their own forums) estimates, as their secret proprietary algorithm has proven incapable of distinguishing actual comparable properties. Home values fluctuate drastically by neighborhood, by amenities and even by renovations, especially in New York City, where many owners choose not to list their properties on Zillow, because the Zestimate is so consistently wrong.
Trulia is now jumping on the home valuation bandwagon, launching a beta version of what looks like exactly the same thing as a Zestimate, called a “Trulia Estimate,” for the San Francisco area. I don’t know if Trulia is envious of Zillow’s successful IPO, or if they are just trying to expand the resources on their site, but I wish it wasn't by copying Zillow to the letter. At least they are not calling it a “TEstimate.”
My musing on Trulia's beta launch of their home valuation tool.