Trulia Gets a Voice, Widgets and Funding

It has been a busy two weeks for Trulia, one of our good distribution network partners. Last week, Trulia moved out of Beta (Pete Flint, Trulia's President and CEO, made the prediction at our Real Estate 2.0 dinner earlier this year) and announced two great new services: Trulia Voices - an interactive real estate question-and-answer service, and HousingWidgets - a central directory of real estate widgets. Yesterday the company announced Series C funding lead by one of Silicon Valley's best known venture capital (VC) firms - Sequoia Capital! Congrats to Pete and the team at Trulia.

For industry watchers, I think it's safe for me to make the following conclusions:

Community is Where its at!
Real estate players are moving quickly to build communities and capture market through "accelerating" community-building. Here is why:

• Community is hard to build, and its hard to start an online conversation - but "break the ice" by allowing people to ask and answer questions (something there is no shortage of) and "viola" you have a "instant" conversation which hopefully leads to community or at least better community. ActiveRain (Q&A), LinkedIn (Answers), and Zillow (Home Q&A) have all taken a similar path to help build or enhance their communities.
• Overlay community with commerce and you've got a winner! The next step in rolling out community is enabling some form of commercial activity. Whether its placing ads or buying services, the process is akin to building a stadium: Build it and they will come - and then they'll stick around and buy something! But the trick is to build community first, then introduce commerce. Pete is super smart guy so I am sure Trulia has some interesting things in the works!

Widgets Rule!
HousingWidgets is a great idea since it provides a directory of real estate specific widgets. If you are hungry for more widgets, you may also want to check out the real estate category on WidgetBox as well. Here is why people love widgets and why widget will inherit the earth:

• Widget add functionality and interactivity to your site. Almost everyone has a blog or a website today! Widgets give bloggers and site owners a quick and easy way to add interactive and interesting content to their site! (Okay, maybe not everyone, but many people). Companies like Trulia and vFlyer have a growing number of widgets aimed at online sellers and real estate agents in particular. (Examples: vFlyer Widget, Trulia Widgets)
• Widgets let you take it with you. Widgets, like vFlyer's commerce widgets, let you take your listings, inventory and other important information with you! That means you can embed the same widgets on your blog, your social network and your website, at the same time, driving people the the same listings or content.