Guest: Pete Flint - Trulia
Host: Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow


Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, who are you and where are we?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Hi, I am Pete Flint and we are at Trulia. Trulia is a Real Estate Search Engine and we're in San Francisco.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And what do you do here?

Pete Flint - Trulia
I am the CEO and co-founder of Trulia.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And how old is the company?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Company is, kind of conceptually is about two years old, but we -- little over one years old. So, we had our one year anniversary couple of weeks ago.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Very cool!

Pete Flint - Trulia
Cool!

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And where are we, so where in San Francisco?

Pete Flint - Trulia
So, where in San Francisco? We are between Potrero and Mission. Not quite so much, but in Southern part of San Francisco.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, and what are all these people doing behind you?

Pete Flint - Trulia
So, we have -- there are about 25 people here, in our offices. We have a couple of people on the East Coast. It's mostly engineering, so we have -- most of the team it's engineering products. Also some sales folks, some product managers, some customer services, whole mix of people.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, what kind of person uses Trulia? How do you spell it, again? It's Trulia?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, it's Trulia.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How did you come up with that name first, before we get...

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, so with the people who use us are typically home buyers, primarily we are a little bit skewed towards first time home buyers. So kind of average profile is, maybe a 35 year old female -- slight female skewed home buyer. So, we are primarily -- we're nationwide, but we also have quite a metro skew as well.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay. And where did you come up for the name, Trulia?

Pete Flint - Trulia
With the name, so we -- the name's really a play on the words of truth and trust. So, we felt we want, went on the business of selling houses, it's really a mixed providing truthful and trustworthy information. So, and we don't want to be firm this or real that or how's this? So that's where we came up with the name Trulia. Plus we liked the sound of it.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. And so what does your site do that others sites don't do? Why would I come to hear at your site, instead of some of the others that are out there for home buyers?

Pete Flint - Trulia
So we -- first of all we help people find homes for sale, so we have hundreds and thousands of listings across the US, and we connect consumers directly to the listings by website. Plus we combine it with a great interface and huge amounts of data and tools to help consumers make better decisions at the local level. So, a real estate is obviously a credibly complex process trying to make sensible of all this information data. So, we provide access to information so, listings on the web, and also comparable sales, recently sold homes, similar properties there's on the market, trends, heat maps, huge amounts of really useful information.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
It can vary a lot from even from house to house, right? Because like -- I just sold a house up in Seattle -- Bothell, Washington. And our house sold immediately, where a house, just less than half a block away, was on the market for weeks.

Pete Flint- Trulia
That's just you Robert, I am sure people just wanted to be there.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
No, it's not that, the buyers didn't know anything about me, or anything about - it has to do with -- if you are on a major street, you are not going to have as -- interesting house as, that one on the colder side.

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, it changes so much. We analyze a lot of neighborhood information, so we look at, for instance in San Francisco, whether it's your neighbors, so they are rising in price? Up in coming neighborhoods and then will separate properties and neighborhoods which, decline in price? So, it's fascinating to look at -- figuring out, which neighbors are hot or not? And we actually launched a product which enables you to visualize that as well. So you can visualize, within a city, which air is rough and coming, and which perhaps are so popular.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Does weather change the Real State market?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Does weather change the Real Estate market? It could do, I mean..

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, I mean, it can really happen in Bay, which is typically in the summer time, it's very cold and a dreary place, very grey, And I have a sense that if a geek came here from Kansas and got stuck in Silicon Valley, and then went over the hill and got cold, ready to go - he'd call his wife up and say, no, we're not going to bid on that house.

Pete Flint - Trulia
I am sure, I recognize, anyone wants to live in a place with good climate, so I am sure if you live in a sunny area, than maybe a little bit high, and may be that's a little thing we should, may be we should launch it on the site.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
If I was a developer, could I mash up your data with the weather reporting system and see whether there is a co-relative trend?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Not yet, but may be sometimes in the future.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So you don't have an API?

Pete Flint - Trulia
We don't have a public API. But we have a whole lot of information they're about, some school information, to community information, to crime information. So, whatever information we may have -- we may add that on there.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And in the United States are you noticing housing pricing growing up right now, or down, or what's happening to the market?

Pete Flint - Trulia
It's across suddenly that......

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
As of middle of October, right 2006 right?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, I mean the house prices have come down unfortunately, say over the last twelve months, the house prices have -- the average, the medium sales price has declined. But that's on the macro trend. So, on the top line numbers the housing market has come down, but actually the local changes can be very, very different. So, there are places in Texas and Colorado, which have gone up significantly, whereas....

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Bothell's gone up 30% last year.

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, I mean there were some cities and also some neighborhoods within city, so that city may have gone down, the average price may have gone down, but the individual neighbors are gone up, and that's probably why we built the tool, because you really won't understand exactly what is going on, on these individual neighborhood levels.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting, what are the challenges of running a -- do you call your self a Web 2.0 business or?

Pete Flint - Trulia
I guess in some ways, I mean people will look at us, and say we are mash up, we are a search engine, we are Web 2.0. I think we can buy, and what we think is the best idea -- is a Web 2.0, which have participation, which are about mash-ups, locals business models, but there's a proper company behind us. So we have, proper sales functions, we have proper customer service, so we are much more than just a product. And some of the challenges, I think understanding the real estate industry, I think it's -- a lot of people have said, okay we're going to launch a product within the real estate industry. We can tell those, those realtors how to do their job, and so many companies have found because they really lacked understanding about what's - - what a real estate professional does, how important it is and really not understood the market at all so... I think when we started in 2004, we spent ages trying to figure out the markets incredibly complex to understand all the different participants, and that is -- that's not trivial. And so that's, I think it's been very fascinating and also challenging to really understand the real estate industry.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How do you guys make money?

Pete Flint - Trulia
We are advertising supported, so we are -- we sell advertising primarily to real estate brokers and agents. So, we are as a search engine it's free to be in the service, but then there is premium advertising on the site, so if you want to have premium inclusion of listings or advertising around the service, then we make money from that. And there are some things like, two billion dollars spent online, marketing real estate,

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah? It's a big business?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Huge business and that's a fraction of the overall money that's spent offline in newspapers and I'm sure you can walk into any coffee shop and seal these dozens of real estate advertisements in newspapers. So, we do help with the say, broker's advertise, much more effectively than offline.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How did you get into this business?

Pete Flint - Trulia
I have a strange -- really,I guess like most people I - and certainly I'm from the UK originally, I came to the Bay Area and I knew just nothing about the -- where to live, neighborhood, should I buy, should I rent, all these decisions that anyone that relocates has to figure out, and I was (Inaudible) okay my travel in the internet, buying electronics from the Internet, groceries, everything I'd done was on the Internet and I tried to find information about real estate on the Internet, and it's back in, certainly 2004, it was almost universally terrible consumer experience. As all this rich information that does exist but it's terribly bad interface, so we've thought - certainly I did it from trying to navigate that world. Spoke to some other people and they equally had the same problem, so. I was actually at Grad School at Stanford at the time, teamed up with a classmate and we started researching industry back in 2004, and then -- as an industry as fascinating, it's absolutely fascinating industry.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That is. Since I just sold and bought a house, in the last four months, but it is a fascinating industry.

Pete Flint - Trulia
Fascinating industry and you know as a entrepreneur, I just -- I want to be involved in big industries and solve meaningful problems, and real estate is as meaningful as they come is, it's where you live, it's where you spend your time. So it's just a fascinating industry to be in.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What surprising things have you learned since starting the business?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Surprising things that I have learnt?

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Have you been able to speculate on buying houses and selling because you get details before any body else so?.

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, we don't really get that much detail before any one else, I think...

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Can you tell what the housing report is going to be, two weeks before the government reports it?

Pete Flint - Trulia
We can't unfortunately, we get some inside information but we publish it on the website site. So, there's no real privilege information we get...

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What I'm saying, by looking at the trends, can you tell what the government is going to report in a month or something?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, there's a kind of a little bit of date we can get, but we have and unfortunately have the time to make personal speculative investments about -- about where the market's going? I think it's -- that kind of fascinating thing is that it's, credibly local. I had not -- you kind of think one house as you say one house make sure, another house is very similar, but the fact is so local, and varies so quickly across kilometers or blocks. That's just kind of, that's fascinating. So I think that's one of the surprising things.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, mostly is it, do you think it's because of school districts or it's an address, like I know Paul Alto (ph) always had a very clean demarcation between rich people and poor people, just based on the city boundary, because in school system, and probably because of school system that other factors as well.

Pete Flint - Trulia
There's so many factors from -- if you are in a school, there are no amenities no, highways no, developments and the schools there are so many different factors and it's -- I don't think that we can tell absolutely, everything about particular neighborhood, but, and the tools we have, are incredibly valuable. But some of them Map-into the satellite tools, where you can see, okay there's a park next door, well there's a view, this is -- it just gives you a view that's amazing (Inaudible) about it.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What else cool thing should we know about your business very different?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Cool stuff, so we -- say nation wide, so we have property listings nation wide. We have -- we used to notice heat maps, which incredibly cool. And also, there's comparison tools, so you can pick; and going into the site, you pick your target property and compare that with the whole bunch of other properties near by.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Tell me a little bit by your architecture, what kind of -- are you on, one server underneath the desk or...

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, we are on -- I guess in a way we are a typical Web 2.0 Company. We have a LAMP architecture, so pretty much, everything is open source. I guess we use Google maps, Google maps is great because it's pretty much free, in terms of using the service, but the stuff we'd put on top of that, is obviously very, very complex. And I think one surprising things for us is that, it's being incredibly cheap to start the business. When we look back a year ago, we were literally started while we were, at Stanford, we were, kind of four guys in the library room, routing the stuff and now we've moved into a proper corporate company. Its being raised Venture Capital, but to actually get off the ground, in the first instance was, tens of thousands of dollars, and that's one of the amazing things about starters right now. You can actually, you can launch your product, incredibly quickly and that's been great for us, to just get off the ground, running learning, and so we've been over the last twelve months. We've been learning huge amounts, changing, I think in terms of the architects, the site -- we changed the site, almost every week in terms of adding new features or changing interfaces, or writing things around and trying, you know looking, if you look at what's consumers are doing? What they're clicking on, what they're not clicking on, and change that. So that's incredibly from a Technorati standpoint, it's incredibly faster than in a cycle, and being currently responsive to, users request, or what their explicitly saying, I want this feature, or they don't want this feature, that's been -- that's great for us. And so I think we, as we look forward at the next 12 months that, the number of features, we add, is just going to grow.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What's the best decision you made as the...

Pete Flint - Trulia
I would say, probably hiring some great folks, this is one of the toughest things?

Robert Scoble - The Scoble Show
Tell me about some of them?

Pete Flint - Trulia
So, we have a set of -- most of them are engineers, we have a whole mix of people from -- we have some guys from other search engines, some other vertical search engines. We had one of our my senior, a guy called Jamie Glen, he was previously at Yahoo! running Yahoo's real estate group. He's a great asset and really understands the industry. Some other rock star engineers, so we've had a whole group of engineers who are incredibly talented and dedicated. So, really very strong teams and my business partner, actually one of my best decisions was teaming out with Sami Inkinen who is -- he's actually on the road right now, speaking to real estate brokers and agents, so he spends, I think 300 days of the year rushing around the US, speaking to conferences, speaking to real estate brokers, trying to -- or evangelizing about our business, and also learning from them. What are the things that real estate brokers want? So, actually all-in-all, we are working with Sami; that's been a real highlight.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Very cool, well I almost are (ph) done. You might give me a demo?

Pete Flint - Trulia
Yeah, I'll give you a demo.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, that'll be great, cool. Thank you very much.