Trulia Launches First Real Estate Vertical Ad Network

Trulia.com, the best place to start a real estate search, today announced the launch of a dedicated real estate advertising network that will give ad partners access to approximately 10 million monthly unique visitors across Trulia's network of targeted real estate sites. The Trulia Ad Network (TAN) will provide unprecedented local reach with a highly targeted and engaged audience at a time when real estate advertising dollars are making a drastic shift from offline to online.

The Trulia Ad Network is launching with a collection of premium online real estate publishers, including Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source, with local audiences and content focused on real estate and related life events. Advertisers benefit from broad consumer reach across an aggregated audience of home buyers, owners and real estate enthusiasts; advanced contextual, behavioral and geo-targeting capabilities ensure that advertisers reach their target audience.

Real estate advertising budgets are shifting rapidly online, a reflection of the Web's lower cost and efficiency in reaching the target audience:

• 84 percent of consumers begin their real estate search online, according the National Association of Realtors.
• A Realogy Corp. executive was quoted in a Bloomberg interview saying that the portion of his Coldwell Banker and Century 21 branding budget devoted to newspapers will shrink by up to two-thirds in 2008 compared to 2006.
• Media consultants Borrell Associates forecast that real estate ads in newspapers will drop more than one-third by 2011 while online housing ads will rise 60 percent and overtake print for the first time.

"Recent years have seen a dramatic rise of the Web as a primary source of information and research for prospective home-buyers, and advertisers are adjusting accordingly," said Pete Flint, co-founder and CEO of Trulia. "The Trulia Ad Network facilitates this shift by making it simple for advertisers to achieve targeted reach across a large number of relevant, high-quality content sites, while helping publishers capitalize on the growing movement of real estate ad dollars online."

Trulia.com audience profile data illustrates the highly qualified nature of the network for both real estate and general consumer marketers:

• 72 percent of users plan to buy a home in the next 12 months, and 60 percent are already homeowners.
• 42 percent of users earn over $100,000 in annual household income and 11 percent earn over $200,000.
• 66 percent of users are 35+ years old, and more than 40 percent have children.
• 81 percent of users are college educated.

Trulia's existing publisher network includes dozens of respected content sites, including Kiplinger, Parade Magazine, Village Voice Media, Topix and the St. Petersburg Times. Existing Trulia advertisers include a diverse group of consumer brands, including Wachovia, Lennar Homes, The Carrier Corp., DirectBuy, Prudential Real Estate, Windermere Real Estate, and ZipRealty.

"The Trulia Ad Network will make it easy for us to reach today's real estate buyers (http://www.trulia.com) where they live: online" said Leslie Tyler, Vice President of Marketing for ZipRealty. "Rather than making dozens of individual buys, or settling for more generic sites and networks, we expect to gain visibility on all the best niche sites on the Web quickly and cost-effectively through a single point of contact."

For publishers with content targeted to real estate buyers, homeowners, and those with related interests, the Trulia Ad Network provides instant scale and brand awareness. The aggregated network draws premium brands and real estate advertisers to even small niche sites, and advanced behavioral and geo-targeting capabilities increase ad relevance and performance to support premium rates.

Trulia, Inc. , a residential real estate search engine and the fastest-growing U.S. real estate Web site (comScore), has revolutionized online home search by offering a rich, intuitive user experience that points consumers directly to listings on agent and broker Web sites. By partnering with the real estate industry, including 93 of the top 100 largest U.S. brokers, Trulia helps approximately 4.5 million unique visitors per month find information on homes for sale using custom search criteria. The site also provides market trends and neighborhood data at the hyper-local level, as well as Trulia Voices, a real estate Q&A community, that enables consumers and professionals to exchange information about their local markets.

Source: Trulia