Real estate search engine Trulia is expanding its mobile offerings today with a new Android tablet app as well as an Android app devoted specifically for rentals. The company already offers comprehensive iPhone, iPad, Android and mobile web apps that feature much of the functionality of the site.

Trulia’s Android tablet app is similar to the iPad app in that it uses the full screen to display property photos and a large, interactive map with properties. Unique to Android, the app allows you to view property slideshows on the tablet’s entire screen. You can also see where restaurants, schools and other points of interest are in relation to homes for sale or rent and access the agent’s contact info for the property.

Because rental information is such a desirable portion of Trulia’s business, the company is launching a dedicated app for this vertical. As Trulia explains, renters generally operate on a much shorter timeline than house hunters, so they need to move even more quickly and have real-time access to properties that may only have a brief window of time-on-market.

The app shows rental properties in your area, and you can save or nix properties via the apps. Color-coded “markers” will show you what properties you’ve yet to view vs. previously viewed properties. You can also add your own photos and notes to properties as you tour them and access search alerts for recently listed properties from the app.

The company says that it is also developing for the Amazon marketplace and intend to be in the Amazon app store in November. Trulia, which is profitable, has raised $32.8 million in funding. Last year, the company acquired geodata startup Movity, and traffic has been steadily growing over the past year.

When selling or buying a house, working with a trusted, certified broker or agent is extremely important. Generally you find trusted real estate agents through word of mouth, whether that be through a neighbor, friend or contact. But as more and more consumers look online to find and sell listings, sourcing personal recommendations can be challenging. Real estate search engine Trulia is adding new social functionality that aims to replicate word-of-mouth referrals for brokers and professionals in the real estate industry.

Trulia Social Search essentially brings the verbal endorsement of a preferred agent to Trulia and Facebook, helping consumers discover trusted real estate professionals by searching their Facebook social network for agents and brokers their family, friends and acquaintances recommend. Basically the feature allows consumers to recommend their agent on Trulia and Facebook simultaneously.

These agent endorsements then help build a personalized list of recommended agents for fellow consumer as they search Trulia’s Find a Pro directory. When a user searches and logs in with Facebook, they will see any agents who their friends or friend of friends recommend as well as highly recommended agents in the Trulia community.

Recommendations are also published to the agent’s Trulia profile, consumer’s Facebook profiles and their friend’s Facebook News Feeds. On an agent’s page, you’ll be able to see if he or she is recommended by friends, family or a client. Agents can also request recommendations from friends and clients via Trulia.

Trulia says that while some of its competitors (i.e. Zillow) already have ratings for agents and brokers, the company is trying to add a social component to recommendations that creates a greater sense of trust between the client and agent. Plus, Trulia believes that recommendations need to go beyond a star rating, and should include relationship to the the broker/agent, and detail on the interactions (i.e. sold a house, time period, professional manner).

Of course, Trulia’s future is in the spotlight because of the recent IPO of one of its main competitors, Zillow. An an IPO is definitely on the horizon, the company tells us. Trulia, which is profitable, has only raised $32.8 million in funding (by contrast Zillow raised $87 million). Last year, the company acquired geodata startup Movity, and traffic has been steadily growing since last year. In June 2011, Trulia saw 9.1 million unique vistors compared to 5.4 million unique visitors in June 2010, according to comScore.

The real estate bust is still dragging down the economy, but some startups are making the best of a bad situation. Real estate search engine Trulia, is still growing by zeroing in on subscription services for real estate agents. CEO Peter Flint tells me the company edged into profitability two months ago—six years after the company was founded. He won’t give specific numbers, but says that revenues are doubling from a year ago and almost half comes from real estate agents who pay for Trulia Local Ads and the premium Trulia Pro service to help market their listings.

Traffic to the site is up more than 50 percent from last year, up to 9 million unique visitors a month, according to Flint. ComScore estimates a smaller number—6 million U.S. visitors in September—but even stronger growth of 155 percent (Zillow grew even faster at a 200 percent annual clip to 7.6 million uniques, so it’s not just Trulia that is doing well here). Trulia’s growth comes from expanding its listings to rentals earlier this year, and in general trying to help people make smarter real estate decisions with all sorts of tools and data.

Demand for Trulia’s private shares on SecondMarket are among the fastest-growing. Flint plans to expand further in 2011 with new products aimed at the real estate market. He still has some catching up to do, however. Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, and Realtor.com are all still larger sites.

Real estate search engine Trulia is launching rental listings for the first time in an attempt to broaden its offerings from home sales listings. Competitors such as Zillow and Realtor.com already offer home and apartment rental listings, but at a time when up to a third of people looking for a new place to live in the U.S. are still on the fence about buying, going after renters is an obvious strategy.

Trulia is leveraging its existing relationships with real estate brokers and other sources of real estate listings to jumpstart its rentals offering. CEO Pete Flint says that Trulia’s rental listings are more comprehensive at launch than his competitors, with millions of units nationwide. In New York City alone, Trulia lists 25,000 apartments for rent, compared to 65,000 nationwide (and 3,600 in NYC) for Zillow, according to Flint. Home ownership levels are down across the country. Going after renters makes sense. I caught up with Flint on Monday in New York City. He explains the new rental and location rating products in the video above:

Along with the launch of rental listings, Trulia is also introducing location ratings. These will be geo-coded and tied to a neighborhood or similar area. Visitors to Trulia’s site can rate any location based on schools, traffic, safety, parking, cleanliness, and other attributes. These will be bundled up into an overall rating.

Once Trulia collects enough ratings, it will begin showing them on color-coded maps along with reviews of the location itself. The screenshot below is a mockup of how this might look on Trulia’s site when it launches in a couple weeks (the final design will very likely change, but this gives you a good idea). Also this location rating and review data could become very valuable for other sites and mobile apps which might want to integrate it into their own services. Flint hopes to be able to open up the data via APIs eventually.

The economy is in the hole, and real estate is in an even deeper hole. What better time to invest in a real estate search engine? Shasta Ventures just led an $8 million series B financing in Roost, a real-estate search engine that is grabbing data from MLS listings (actually from something called the IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, which is a close proxy to MLS listings).

As a result, Roost claims to have more comprehensive and accurate listings in the cities it covers than competing real-estate search engines such as Trulia and Zillow. Roost offers 3.1 million listings in about 30 major metro areas.

Yet Roost’s traffic barely registers. It is much smaller than Trulia, Zillow, or Redfin (which I’ve charted as a comparison below because Redfin also is not yet nationwide). Roost was late to market, so it is a bit surprising that it was able to raise a second round in this environment. Direct access to the MLS listings is an advantage, but is it enough to get Roost over the hump?

Roost raised 5.5 million last January from General Catalyst Partners, the Cross Country Group and Geolo Capital. They all participated in the current round as well. Roost also just added foreclosure listings from First American CoreLogic, a pretty common feature on real-estate sites.

But they don’t hate it so much that they won’t compete.

MRIS is launching a beta version of a service called HomesDatabase that shows MLS listings. For now only homes covered in their region are shown, but they hope to partner with the other MLS systems to create a complete database covering the U.S.

They say they’ll compete with better and more up to date information. They can ensure this by simply restricting the data they release to third parties. Since they’re a geographic monopoly, that’s trivial.

MRIS CEO David Charron says “if you listen to the consumer, everybody wins.” But one thing they’ve left off the site are for-sale-by-owner listings, which cannot be mixed with MLS listings. Until that rule is abandoned, brokers and agents still have a ridiculous advantage over people who sell their homes directly.

How to enter the Hidden Gems Contest (it’s easy, I promise):

* Step 1: Write a blog post about your favorite local hidden spot on your Trulia blog.
* Step 2: Choose the “In My Neighborhood” category for your post (you don’t have to mention anywhere in the post that its for the contest).
* Step 3: Publish your post for all to enjoy.
* Step 4: Send an email to hiddengems@trulia.com with the URL of your blog post.
* Step 5: Repeat! You can enter as many posts as you like to increase your chances of winning.

Enter HERE.

Last week, I announced (in conjunction with Dash and Trulia) that we would give away a Dash GPS car navigation device to whoever could come up with the best new app for it. Readers came up with more than 300 suggestions, including the sketch at left (which I have no idea what it is supposed to be). But many of the ideas were pretty solid.

They included things like calendar integration, ride-sharing apps, an OpenTable mashup, and some interesting location-based games.

But the Dash GPS goes to Alfred Toh, who came up with ParkSpot:

ParkSpot – A real time social parking utility.

Basically, dash owners will help other dash owners find parking on busy city streets. When one dash owner is getting ready to leave, set your ParkSpot status to ready to leave and this will broadcast your location to nearby dash owners whose set to finding spots.

Another great idea, which a few people hit upon, revolved around location notes or geographic bookmarks, but the person who nailed it best was Rob Graff, who came up with Muck:

Muck – ‘A location based twitter like app’
You write a 200 character or so message, which is then geo tagged and sent to a database. When other people drive pass location where you wrote the message, they are read you message through their dash. Stuff like “this is the longest red light in town” or “there is a funny looking bum on this corner every morning” come to mind.

Rob will get a TechCrunch T-shirt. The second runner-up, who also gets a T-shirt is JW, who came up with:

*Ad-Supported Tolls*
The GPS knows when you are going thru tolls and could show however many geo-targeted ads would offset the cost of that toll. This could be linked to an E-Z Pass account so Toll-Booths wouldn’t hafta make any changes.

Honorable mentions (sorry, no prizes):

Seth McGuinness:

Garage Sale search and proximity locator.

Tim Baker:

My app would be a shopping utility. You input the item you’re looking to buy and it shows you retailers on the map that sell that item and the price. You can find the shortest distance to get the product for the lowest price.

Chester Ng:

Blabba.

An app that blabs to you; er, reads (e-mail, RSS feeds, etc.) to you so you crazy drivers (me included) can stop thumbing around on your iPhones and Blackberrys while you drive.

John Whitney:

Guided Tours!

Your in a new city, or maybe your hometown. You download a tour, maybe for a specific topic like architectural history. You follow the tour in your car and it tells you some interesting things about where you are. It tells you stop & park and then you can read some more, maybe get out and look for something interesting. The cool thing about this is that the tours could be on many subjects. I’d love to take a guided tour of my town, Schenectady – there’s lots of hidden history all around.

JSL:

Valet Monitor – it keeps track of how far they took your car! (think of Ferris Bueller) You enter a PIN and the device won’t shut off till you disable it. I think the Ferris Bueller car scene would be a great marketing ad for Dash in general.

IdeaTagger:

P2P Parcel Delivery: A peer-to-peer parcel delivery service that brings people who want to send parcels with people in their area who are going to the parcel’s destination area. Dash can be used for tracking purposes.

Do you want a Dash GPS? We are going to give one away to the person who can come up with the best idea for a geo-aware app that would work on the device. (Courtesy of Trulia and Dash).

The Dash is a GPS unit that is connected to the Internet through a cellular data network so it can tell you where is the nearest restaurant, gas station or hospital. You can also download geo-RSS feeds and apps that tell you where is the nearest WiFi network or winery. In May, the startup opened up its API to outside developers. Some apps that have been created for the Dash include Trulia’s real estate search (handy when home hunting in the car), weather updates from WeatherBug, nearby speed traps from Trapster, geo-tagged Wikipedia articles, and you can even Twitter from your Dash (not while driving, please).

So how do you win your own Dash? It’s simple: think about some of the Dash apps you would most like to see and submit your best idea in the comments below. Bonus points if it is not one of the 80 apps already created for the device. Super-bonus points if you actually create the app. Deadline for submissions is Saturday at midnight PT. The winner will be selected by me. Two runners up will receive TechCrunch T-shirts.

The iPhone app is decent, although limited in the same way that Trulia proper is (more photos, please). And it doesn’t let you click through to the original broker’s site (where you can usually find more photos). I’m more excited about the Dash version. Although it is even more limited in its features (no pictures), it is more practical. When you are on a house hunt, typing in all of those addresses can slow you down. Being able to search on the Dash for nearby homes for sale cuts out a few steps, and automatically routes you to unfamiliar neighborhoods. (Now, how about letting me put in multiple destinations in one search?)

Another useful feature Trulia added today to its regular homepage is feeds. This is generated automatically based on your recent activity, and keeps you up to date on new listings and average price changes. It acts like a prospective search every time you come back to Trulia. Now, why isn’t this built into the iPhone app?

(Although competitor Zillow does not have an iPhone app yet (such a shame), you can try out iZillow, a bare-bones Zestimate finder for any given address which has been customized for the iPhone browser.)

But just how comprehensive are these sites, and how accurate are their listings? Trulia offers 3.5 million listings nationwide, and Zillow has 3.1 million. But people look for houses in local markets, not nationwide. What matters is comprehensiveness withing local market

A few hours after I put up that post, I heard from Roost, a competitor to both Trulia and Zillow (with only 1.4 million listings in the markets it covers) that differentiates itself by getting its data directly from the same Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) that real estate brokers use. They just happened to have study in their back pocket (which they commissioned and paid for) that compares the “accuracy” of search results in three cities (Dallas, Miami, and San Diego) across different real-estate search services (Roost, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo, and Google). The study, which was done by real-estate industry consultants the WAV Group, defines accuracy as the percentage of listing results that match listings the MLS for that city.

The results are in the chart above and, not surprisingly, Roost comes out looking great. For each city, it returns between 95 and 99 percent of the listings in the MLS. Trulia’s accuracy in the study ranges between a pitiful 9 percent for San Diego to 61 percent for Miami. (Zillow generally does worse across the board, with its accuracy ranging between 12 percent and 36 percent across the three cities).

Trulia disputes these results. Heather Fernandez, vice president of marketing, says:

The data looks very questionable, and not in line with our internal coverage data. Our data shows that we have roughly 70% coverage in most major metros.

And indeed, if you do a search for homes for sale in San Diego on Trulia, you get 4,395 results, compared to 6,036 on Roost. That’s 73 percent. (Zillow claims 7,661 listings in the San Diego city limits). Even if half of them are stale listings or not accurate in some other way, it’s hard to get to the 9 percent that the Roost-financed study claims. That’s because for some reason, the WAV study only compared homes in each city with exactly 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, within a $50,000 price range.

That methodology seems random and flawed to me. Would Trulia’s accuracy be greater if the study had looked at homes in San Diego that cost $400,000 to $450,000 instead of $300,000 to $350,000? Comprehensiveness would have been a virtue in the study’s methodology as well as in what it was trying to measure.

Still 70 percent accuracy is not that great, and it doesn’t seem like Zillow is any better. If the MLS in any given city is the benchmark, both have a lot of work to do. And Trulia, for one, is striking deals with different MLSs to incorporate their data. But it only has 14 so far, out of about 900 nationwide. MLS-based sites like Roost and Redfin may have more listings in the markets they serve, but they don’t serve every market yet. For instance, in San Diego, Redfin tracks 6,300 homes for sale, better even than Roost. Yet neither has any listings in New York, and Redfin only has 473,000 listings total.

Yet Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman also balked at my earlier suggestion that either Trulia or Zillow are even close to comprehensive within any given market. In an e-mail to me, he said:

What got me was that almost any real estate site has more homes for sale than Trulia or Zillow.

Frenandez doesn’t think that having the most listings matters. She responds:

Listings are commoditized –there are dozens of sites that offer basic listing information in every city across the country. It’s not a competitive advantage for an Internet company.

What is more important, she says, is the filtering the site allows home buyers to do to help them make an informed decision. I’d say it’s both. Those filtering tools (heat maps, sales comps, local school info) are also becoming commodities. You want to cast your net as wide as possible before you filter down so you don’t miss out on that one house that fits all of your criteria.

Trulia, the real estate search engine and community, has released Snapshot, a new interactive housing map that is a bit more fun than it should be.

Snapshot overlays a Microsoft Virtual Earth map with thumbnails of houses on the market. Each image hovers over its proper location on the map, and users can drag them around to get a better look at the terrain if some houses are too close together. After releasing the image, it snaps back into place – complete with a nice jiggle.

Users can move a sliding bar to set the price range of houses that appear on the map. As each house appears, it enthusiastically pushes nearby pictures out of the way, leading to lots of totally useless (but fun) bouncing. There’s also a slideshow function that lets you sit back and watch as this odd combination of real estate and Jello does its own thing.

Snapshot does have some more practical functions. Clicking on a photo will present more detailed information, including the price and a link to the realtor. And the sliding price limits are handy for getting a feel for what’s available in a neighborhood. That said, there doesn’t seem to be much in Snapshot that wasn’t already on Trulia already, it just presents it in a more visually appealing way.

Trulia was founded in 2004 and has raised nearly $18 million in funding, with investors including Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Other competitors in this space include Redfin, Zillow, and Roost.

And while he isn’t an investor in Seattle-based real estate startup Redfin, I’m pretty sure he likes their business model. The company is doing its best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers (and their absurd fees) from at least half of a home sale. If you use them when you buy a home, they reimburse 2/3 of the broker fee to you, keeping 1/3 for themselves.

60 Minutes covered the company last May, which led to a surge in business. CEO Glenn Kelman told me today that, since launching in February 2006, they’ve been involved in 1,500 transactions and have reimbursed $12 million to customers. The average refund is $10,000. The company had 2007 revenues of $5 million, he says.

They’ve just launched a new version of the website that includes more frequent MLS updates and the ability to group home sales by neighborhood and download the data. They are also providing deeper data on homes currently on the market as well as historical sales (they compete with a number of other startups in search, including Zillow, Trulia and Roost).

If you want to use Redfin, check first to make sure they cover your geographic area, which include the San Francisco/Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, LA, Seattle, Washington DC/Baltimore, and Boston. Chicago is coming soon.

I gave Frink a hard time because I always find the Zestimates for properties in New York City to be way off base. “New York is tough,” he admitted. But Zillow has tweaked its algorithm and improved the accuracy of its Zestimates by 12 percent (as measured by the actual sale price versus the last Zestimate on the day of the sale).

The algorithm improved by diving deeper into the data. “We went from having a model for each county to 20 models for each county,” says Frink. The Zestimates also now take into account more than one million corrections and facts added by home owners. The margin of error is now 8.8 percent. That is an average for the entire country. You still can’t trust the Zestimates on New York City apartments. But Frink notes that a third of the site’s Zestimates across the country fall within five percent of the selling price, and that half are within 10 percent. Still, he cautions that “the Zestimate is just a starting point.”

You’d think that real-estate sites would be hurting right now, given the severe correction in the housing market. But Frink argues that in a down market research is more important than ever and says that Zillow is still benefiting from the overall shift in real estate activities to the Web. Zillow’s ad model certainly benefits from various targeting capabilities-geographic, demographic, and behavioral. Each action on the site is zipcode-specific. Frink notes that the EZ Ads Zillow sells itself go for $10 CPMs, versus $3 to $5 CPMs for backfill ads from ad networks.

Zillow is trying to create a database of all homes in the U.S., which is a different approach than other real-estate sites. “It is the database of all homes, not just homes on the market,” notes Frink. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the downside, Zillow lists only 400,000 homes that are for sale, out of about 4 million nationwide. A deal with real-estate publisher Network Communications will bring that total to 900,000. Trulia, in comparison, has 2 million.

On the upside, Zillow has a lot more comparable data than most sites. (Although, I think Cyberhomes has better data). And since Zillow lists all existing homes, it makes it easy to provisionally put your house on the market through its “Make Me Move” feature. About 100,000 Make-Me-Move homes are on the site. And in some markets, it is a pretty significant number. For instance, in Seattle (where Zillow is based), there are 30,000 homes officially for sale and another 6,000 Make-Me-Move listings, or 20 percent of the number on the market.

The other big news is that Zillow is joining Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, Oodle, Homes.com, Realestate.com, Vast.com and others in adopting a standard way for brokers and multiple listings services (MLSs) to send in their real estate listings in a feed format. That way brokers can use the same data format for all the different real estate search engines and Websites. It is called the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). [Correction: RETS is actually a different, pre-existing, standard that the new listing feed standard will interoperate with]. That should make it easier for brokers to propagate their listings everywhere.

Zillow claims 4 million monthly unique visitors. Comscore shows 1.4 million in December, and that’s been flat for the past year. Trulia, though, looks like it just passed Zillow with 1.6 million.

Trulia moved out of beta earlier this month and launched a number of new features.

Sequoia is joined in the funding round by previous investors Accel and Fayez Sarofim & Co. The $10m takes Trulia’s total funding to $17.7million. The new money is being used for additional staff, product development and a new marketing push.

There’s a wealth of potential in the real estate market. Advertising spending alone in real estate will total $11 billion in the United States in 2007 (Borrell Associates), with over 80% of the consumers using the Internet as part of their home buying research.

Trulia is not alone in chasing this market. Zillow has raised $57 million and Redfin has previously raised $9 million in two rounds. Internet Brands also is also a competitor with Real Estate ABC.

Trulia’s main features include a comprehensive database of active real estate listings, price trend heat maps, and a Q&A service.

Trulia’s front page and search feature have had some usability tweaks. The new front page more clearly highlights the four different ways to search Trulia’s data and displays live data feeds. Trulia’s search page features an easier sidebar interface for refining your search. The engine will also suggest related neighborhoods to search in based on how other users have searched. Their heat map and search subscription features (RSS & email) are still there, but the email subscription will now track the life cycle of individual properties and recommend listings similar to a selected property or search (similar neighborhood, price, type, etc.).

The major release along with the revamp is their own Q&A service, Trulia “Voice”. The service lets members post and answer questions about the qualitative aspects of neighborhood. The questions can be searched by geography and tag. Each question or answer can be rated by other members, affecting an overall karma score for content you contribute to the site. This would enable a certain amount of self promotion, because asking and answering with high ratings and gets you better placement in the Q&A rankings. I’d imagine also letting posters earn listing search placement instead of paying by tying the Q&A rankings to listing placement would really set the service on fire. Zillow has a Q&A service, but it’s geared toward asking questions about specific listings.

Finally, Trulia is publicly announcing widgets.trulia.com and housingwidgets.com. The widgets site is currently home to four widgets they’ve developed off of the API they released a couple months ago. The four widgets are the housing map (pre-existing), Trulia Stats (tracks average home prices), Home roll (new listings, filtered), and a Trulia search box. Housingwidgets is a new site that aggregates links to popular widgets related to home rental listings, such as MeeboMe or MyBlogLog. Unfortunately, you can’t use any of the widgets within your Trulia postings.

Trulia is claimed 1.5 million unique visitors in April. During the same time period Zillow claimed 4 million. Both services are close in function, covering search, heat maps, trends, and guides. However, Trulia follows attention data and historical pricing trends on over 2 million live listings. Zillow powers Yahoo Real Estate’s historical pricing graphs, but also has their hallmark formula-based Zestimates for over 70 million homes.

To demonstrate the types of things made possible by the API, the Trulia team made available two interesting mashups they built themselves. Plotornot (a play on HotorNot) correlates a variety of demographic information like gender, marital and income data for any state in the US. TruliaHolic (presumably a play on Alexaholic given the similarities) provides visualization of the differences in average list prices and search popularity for any city or county in the US. Real estate use of new web services is hot so I expect we’ll see any number of interesting uses of the new API on other sites.

One of the most notable things about today’s announcement is that Trulia created its API with the assistance of Mashery, the API management service we profiled here in November. Last week Mashery helped launch an API for traffic analytics service Compete and the company is working with three other companies on APIs that will be released soon.

One potentially mitigating factor is that the Trulia API is for noncommercial use only according to its terms of use. Though terms like this are often considered open for interpretation, I was disappointed to see it. Presumably though this is just a first step for the program; the company will likely increase its call limits (now only 1000 per day) and open itself to select commercial users in the future.

Trulia’s major competitors in the real estate search space include Zillow, who released APIs of their own in October, the crowd sourced My-Currency (our coverage) and a host of others. See our previous coverage of Trulia here.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

The site launched a month ago with California listings only. Trulia will be rolling out new states (the next one will be this week) in the near future.

Like Oodle, Trulia pulls its content from multiple, distributed sources. In Trulia’s case, its data is indexed from real estate professionals’ websites, where the most detailed information on home listings is located. Trulia often has listings that aren’t included in the MLS, either because the agent hasn’t uploaded the listing yet, or for some new home construction, they never appear in the MLS at all.

The site, which is advertiser supported, has excellent integration with Google maps and provides email and RSS notifications of new search results. Another feature that I really like are the statistics. For any given search, Trulia will show statistics on average home prices per bedroom (but for some reason no average across all home listings), average time a home is on the market, average price per square foot, etc.

Trulia does not show for sale by owner listings at this time. Their main goal, in addition to providing a rich user experience, is to serve real estate professionals by lowering their marketing costs and driving traffic to their websites. Pete tells me that indexing information from professionals’ sites is not easy – it has to be properly parsed and formatted for re-display on Trulia, and duplicate listings removed (some websites show listings from third party agents).