Trulia Adds Featured Listings

Trulia has introduced “Trulia Agent Featured Listings“.

Here’s the highlights:

Features:

Photo & contact info. featured on your Trulia listings, as well as a new email tool enabling consumers to email property inquiries directly to your mailbox

Totally new, enhanced property detail page embedded with useful neighborhood stats (see attached mock)

Listings featured in top three search results (based on search relevancy)

Weekly traffic reporting details the number of times a listing is viewed on site and visitors sent to your Web site from Trulia

Highlight up to 10 listings for a monthly subscription fee of $50

Why?

Agents who participated in a two-month Agent Featured Listing beta test received 4x more traffic to featured listings, on average, than to non-featured listings (in many cases, traffic increased 7x!)

Agent Featured Listings are one of many steps Trulia is taking to help agents connect with Trulia’s serious home buyers – 81% of who are looking to purchase a home within 12 months

How?

Agents must have listings on Trulia to participate – here’s a great “how to” video: http://www.trulia.com/agent_featured_listings.html

Sign up at: http://www.trulia.com/agents/feature

Future Enhancements – we’re already on it!

Ability to reroute property links from your broker’s site to your own site (if this is not your default traffic route)

Additional tools for agents who want to promote more than 10 listings at one time

More behaviorially targeted advertising

I’ve been beta testing Featured Listings for several weeks, and can attest that listing views and click-throughs from those views are up significantly (tends to happen when your listing is at the top of a long list. Look no further than Craig’s List to see what being at the top of a list can do. Heck, look at a blog with its chronological posts — the latest, i.e. top post, is almost always the most viewed).

Creating a featured listing is a snap. You just have to enter the address of an existing listing and check a box. In the beta period, it took half a day or so for your listing to become featured. I have no idea if that will continue now that it is live, though I suspect it won’t take too long.

Is it worth $50/month? Dunno. It’s relatively cheap, though $50/month in Pay Per Click for the right term with the right landing page may be a better use of your money. It’s certainly cheap enough to experiment a little with. I “featured” 6 – 8 listings during the beta period. Some did very well with respect to views. Others not so much. Featuring outlying land parcels was a waste of time. That is likely due to the low volume of searches in general for outlying properties, not a result of Trulia’s featured listing.

Note to Trulia: Posted at 6:33am to honor your self-imposed, self-broken embargo.