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You Found the Right Place -- Trulia Alerts You at the Right Time
A house in Vienna, listed at $899,000, had been on the market more than 30 days. The listing, which appeared on Trulia.com, was taken off the market unsold a few days ago.
(Courtesy Of Richard Ganley)
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The site gets 1.5 million users a month nationwide, Trulia spokeswoman Heather Fernandez said. If you're interviewing real estate agents before listing your home for sale, ask them if they plan to put your home on the site or on any others. Some agents like to keep a tight hold on where their listings are posted online, but it's probably to your advantage that the listing be posted as broadly as possible, and Trulia doesn't cost your agent any money. The site does not accept listings for properties listed for sale by owner.
Listings show full addresses, unlike the listings on Realtor.com, the official Web site of the National Association of Realtors and the most-visited real estate site, according to Hitwise. I gave Trulia a workout searching for homes for sale in the Shouse Village neighborhood adjacent to Wolf Trap in Vienna. It's a well-kept neighborhood with a lot of split-level houses built in the 1970s. I zeroed in on a five-bedroom house on Tuba Court listed at $899,000.
The site said it has been on the market more than 30 days. That's handy information, but it would be much more useful to know precisely how long it has been on the market. A long listing time can indicate that the sellers haven't been willing to lower the price enough to get the house sold. In fact, the home was pulled from the market, unsold, a few days ago. When I asked the listing agent, Richard Ganley of Long & Foster, about the listing, he was unaware that it had been posted on Trulia. "Never heard of it," Ganley said.
One of Trulia's calling cards is that, once you find an appealing home, you can see loads of statistics for that home as well as comparisons with nearby homes. You can get quarterly statistics and charts for that Zip code showing average listing prices, average sales prices, median sales prices, average price per square foot, and the number of sales. You can compare the price per square foot of the house with that other houses that have sold recently.
I found the plethora of data mind-numbing. There is no analysis, and if I were considering buying a home, I would have to tune it all out and focus on the condition of the bathroom tiles, the view from the kitchen window and the traffic during rush hour.
Trulia also offers a list of comparable homes on the market along with those that have sold recently. That's a useful feature but only if you already know enough about the neighborhood to pick the real comparables out of the list. For example, I signed up to receive e-mail alerts about houses similar to the one on Tuba Court. Among them was a notice about a five-bedroom house on Towlston Road in Great Falls on 2.76 acres, for sale at just less than $2.2 million. As the crow flies, it's nearby, but it's a world away in terms of dollars.
E-mail Elizabeth Razzi atrazzie@washpost.com.
