Have you ever wondered what your home in greater Cincinnati would be worth in Chicago or Sarasota?

Good news,  Coldwell Banker has a neat Housing Price Calculator Index  (HPCI) to help you find out.  The HPCI is based upon a single‐family dwelling with approximately 2,200 sq. ft., 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths.

According to the index a single family home worth $250,000 in Cincinnati is worth:

• $1,019,231 in Chicago
• $350,962 in Sarasota
• $754,808 in Seattle

One of the victims of the recent financial meltdown is new construction of single family homes in the greater Cincinnati market.   The time when builders, large and small, built homes on spec and then waited for buyer to come along has passed.  If you new to the area and want to purchase new construction your realtor is probably scrambling to find properties to show.

As the market gains momentum, some builders are feeling a little more confident and have begun to build homes on spec.  A spec home is one built without a buyer contract.  Spec homes typically cater to the general market (more buyers) and often defer carpet, cabinet and counter selections to the buyer when a contract is signed.

The chart below is data on single family homes from the Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati:

It looks like Butler County has the most affordable new construction available- but don’t get discouraged. If you have your heart set on building- figure out where you want to live- then look for a builder. 

Having trouble deciding and need more information- call or email.

Two days ago, last Friday, Trulia officially turned four years. That is, our site has been available to general public since September 25th, 2005. Of course, prior to that we spent at least a year planning and coding long nights before the big day. But that’s a minor detail when these last four action packed Internet years alone compare to probably 40 years of life in a more mature industry!

After I recovered from the demands of the Friday anniversary event, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the great things that our team has accomplished in such a short time.

When Pete and I started back in 2004, we really had three main goals in mind:

1) Revolutionize the real estate industry by building the most customer centric online company the industry has seen. Yes, ”customer” includes both the consumers and professionals.

2) Have a lot of fun in the process. Fun includes carefully picking up team members who’d buy into our BOFFI vision and unofficial no-assholes rule.

3) Build a successful and independent business, which is the only way to have a real long term impact, offer growth and career opportunities to our team members and satisfy our investors and other shareholders.

We often quote Amazon’s Jeff Bezos by saying “It’s always day one“, but I’m already proud of the team and all the accomplishments that have taken us so far on all of these three goals.

Here are some of the most memorable ones I could recall on this sunny Sunday - it’s a long list, but just scratching a surface:

2005

• June 2005 - We left our home offices and Stanford library behind and opened up a real office (two rooms; engineers had windows, Pete and I weren’t as lucky)
• September 2005 – Trulia launched a residential real estate search site with funding from a group of esteemed Silicon Valley angel investors
• October 2005 - First public reviews started on major media and blogs
• December 2005 - Accel Partners joined the team and invested into Trulia

2006

• January 2006 – Expanded service beyond California and into New York and other states followed soon
• February 2006 - Business 2.0 featured Trulia as one of the NextNet 25 (= one of 25 start-ups reinventing the Web)
• April 2006 – MyTrulia for consumers and TruliaMap for agents launched, allowing Agents to place a custom map showing their properties directly on their own website
• June 2006 – This blog, www.truliablog.com launched
• July 2006 – Won the 2006 Inman Innovator Award for Best Web Service
• August 2006 – Trulia expanded listings into 10 more states including Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
• September 2006 - Trulia launched nationwide listings search and won BusinessWeek’s Best of The Web Award in the real estate category

2007

• January 2007 – We launched our first advertising products to bring the “business” into our operations
• February 2007 – Trulia API was released to the developer community
• March 2007 - Announced a strategic agreement with Realogy Corporation, the largest real estate franchisor and owner and operator of residential real estate brokers in the U.S, to put more than 500,000 of their affiliate real estate listings on Trulia.com. Consumers could easily search and find their dream home on Trulia.com from top brokerage brands including Coldwell Banker®, ERA©, CENTURY 21® and NRT Inc.
• May 2007 – Sequoia Capital joined the team as they led a  $10 million investment round
• June 2007 - Trulia Voices, a real estate community for home buyers, sellers, agent and enthusiasts is launched
• July 2007 – Announced relationship with CNNMoney to provide home listings information to MONEY magazine’s annual Best Places to Live feature
• September 2007 – We hired our 50th employee!
• October 2007 – Trulia breaks into the Top 20 in Hitwise Rankings with the 18^th spot
• December 2007 – Ranked #7 by ComScore for real estate sites, by tripling our traffic within 12 months!

2008

• April 2008 – Trulia integrates Google Street View on all property detail pages
• May 2008 – Trulia launches the first ad network for real estate (TAN) and win’s the People Choice Webby Award for Real Estate
• June 2008 - Trulia Pro is launched to provide agents and other local businesses with enhanced advertising capabilities for increasing their brand visibility and making connections with Trulia users
• July 2008 –  Secured $15 million of additional funding led by Deep Fork Capital LLC with existing prior lead investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim and co also participating.
• August 2008 – Trulia mobile launches with a free iPhone application and climbs into ComScores 5^th spot
• September 2008 – Trulia turns 3 years old and reaches more than 80 employees and more than 3 million property listings and more than 5 million unique visitors per month.
• October 2008 – Inman names Pete and myself to their list of 100 most influential real estate leaders. (Yes, this is the least important milestone of these all!)

2009

• January 2009 – Huge growth in all metrics by end of 2008: 42 million unique users in 2008, a 140% increase from one year ago and 430 million total page views, according to internal Ominiture data.   There are now more than 335,000 registered real estate professionals on Trulia.com. Trulia’s community also experienced significant growth in 2008 as consumers were doing more research and had more questions than ever.  The community had 420,000 contributions, an increase of 420%
• February 2009 - Trulia announces the formation of the MLS Advisory Board including  some of the most respected and forward-thinking executives in the industry, including: Russ Bergeron (CEO, SoCal MLS); David Charron (CEO, MRIS); Kathy Condon (CEO, MLSPIN); Carl DeMusz (CEO, NORMLS); Bud Fogel (CEO, MRED); Lloyd Graves (President, RealAlliance Consulting, LLC); Jim Harrison, CEO (MLSListings, Inc)
• April 2009 - The Washington Post and Trulia, Inc. launch co-branded web site that combines Trulia’s award winning real estate search experience with The Washington Post’s local real estate content. Multi-year agreement is announced.
• May 2009 – Trulia releases price reduction report and announces ongoing plans for a monthly report to track price reductions trends and selected as the Webby Award Winner for Real Estate Category
• June 2009 – Trulia secures #5 spot for real estate in ComScore and Hitwise rankings

What’s next?

It’s always day one, so looking back has little value, except for learning from mistakes. We have a lot in the pipeline for 2009 and even more so for 2010. I wish I could tell more, but both consumers and real estate professionals will soon see an expanded offering in terms of features, tools and content.

Quoting myself, to”Revolutionize the real estate industry by building the most customer centric online company the industry has seen.” means that we have to constantly listen to our customers and innovate based on the signals we hear from them (or you!). We’ve stayed true to that and will continue to do so. So watch out for some really exciting new features that we’ll launch before the year end!

Internally, we are very focused on expanding our team while tightening and even further improving our culture. Someone recently mentioned to me that you need to sacrifice a lot to work in a fast growing startup. Hmm..I’ve always thought that the biggest professional sacrifice in life is to work with people who are not fun to be with, or to spend 9-to-5 (or even less hours) doing something that you’re not passionate about. I find it to be a priviledge to be able to work in fast growing startup with great people and a mission that I am fired up about every morning.

That’s why company culture is so important to us and we even track employee happines semi-scientifically.

It’s always day one, but thank you already for the past 4 (or five) years our clients and partner and our fantastic team of Trulians….Onwards!

The Cincinnati Bearcats won on Saturday. 

The Cincinnati Bengals won on Sunday. 

The sun is out on Monday and it’s time for homeowners to start thinking about battening down the hatches for winter.  Ugh!

Today’s brightness is a glaring reminder of honey-do projects that we may have ignored over the summer.  You know- spotty windows, dusty screens, slightly overgrown landscaping, small particles of “heaven knows what” stuck on the front door paint. Caulking, touch up paint, loose handrails on the deck.

You have now made a mental list of what you might need to “fix” in your home or you’re a statistical anomaly with a perfect home.  Take some time now, before the seasonal change takes control of outdoor work, and take a close look at your piece of real estate and get going on the little projects.  Not sure what needs to done?  Have some fun and play “Homeowner’s Revenge” to test your maintenance IQ.

I know you are not planning on putting your house up for sale for another 5 years-but you’d be surprised how expensive all the little undone projects can cost in the future.  Every property requires annual investments in order to remain “sellable”- don’t wait until 30 days before you list to start taking care of your real estate.

Which brings me back to real estate and windex (or any cleaner of choice).  Cleaning off dirty glasses or windows and taking a close look at your home is a great sunny day activity- take advantage of the sun to make a to-do list.

Related Articles:  Maintenance Must Do’s

Where does the time go? When I joined the ranks of a passionate crew of twenty, I felt I had joined in on the fun kind of late in the game. They’d already put tons of thought in to developing Trulia’s values, defining it’s culture,  built the website (a modest version of today’s), established relationships with the top 100 real estate brokers in the country, and had raised a little money through Accel Partners.

Well, that was January 2007 and I may have been impressed then by the already huge accomplishments since its founding on September 25^th, 2005 but looking back now on four years of growth as a company, as individuals, and as a household name floors me (but doesn’t really surprise me!)

We’re a top 5 site according to Hitwise and Comscore, with well over 80 employees representing at least 20 countries, all with ridiculously humbling smarts (and many with educations to boot), working out of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Fort Collins.  I’ve practically lost track of the exponentially increasing numbers of marriages and babies, which is I admit a little embarrassing, but we certainly celebrate every birth, every marriage, every achievement, and every little success. We celebrate the people and culture of this company, the incredibly powerful legacy that the early employees leave for all “newlians” to come, and the sincerity of caring we share for what Trulia is doing and what it stands for.

It may have been four years since its launch, but if you were to ask anyone here, I’ll bet they’d say it feels like 4 months.

Yes, we still qualify as a “start up” in some ways, sometimes working long hours to pull off a last minute miracle, or push code QA’d until late in to the evening. But, I personally think we tend to play harder still. Even now, glancing up from my desk, our offices here in San Francisco’s Sun Belt are being decorated in Trulia green, white, and black. Party favors (and aperitifs) await, and a wonderfully satisfying buzz of productivity lingers as another great week comes to an end. We have a 4th birthday celebration to look forward to!

With an often enviable athleticism common amongst the crew, weekly in-house yoga, mind-body-spirit days (designed to close the yin yang gap in all of us), not to mention the positive ever reaffirming belief in our core values (B.O.F.F.I), this company and its unique culture simply rocks! There is no doubt that a positive work environment yields positive results…if you also love what you do, then this revelation comes as no surprise.

Trulia, to all of us Trulian’s great fortune, is a beacon of light for other small companies with big dreams and high ideals, and we know that our future continues to look bright.

We’re growing…hiring…and searching for more great people. If you’re interested in a company that believes in you, challenges you, and is constantly iterating on how to improve, then contact me.

Happy 4th Birthday Trulia! And many more…

Trulia’s CEO Pete Flint was on CNBC recently with Diana Olick talking about where housing prices are heading this fall. According to Pete, home prices have started to stabilize over the last couple of months. But some big questions remain: What will happen when the $8,000 first time home buyer tax credit expires at the end of November? Will interest rates remain low? How will the the high level of unemployment effect the fall home buying and selling season?

Good interview Pete!

A few days ago I took a look at the number of real estate sales by school district (See Article).  Many of you emailed requesting sales price data and while the chart below compares the first 2 weeks of September 2008 to the same time frame in 2009- I want to caution readers not to read too much into the numbers.

A better comparison would be year to date 2008 vs 2009 and I will prove the numbers comparing January- September 2008 vs 2009 by mid October.

Questions -call or email.

 We often hear about “buyer’s remorse”.  You know that gut feeling you get when you make a large purchase and then a few hours or days hours later you begin questioning your sanity.  Today there are 13,634 homes and condos for sale in the Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati and some listings exhibit symptoms of “seller’s remorse”.  

It is easy to spot them…. 

• Very hard to get an appointment.  Properties for sale which require buyers (and their agents) to jump through hoops, turn in perfect circles while touching their noses and execute 3 precise click of the heels of their ruby red shoes before being allowed to view the inside of a property.  What makes this even more interesting is that some of the most “difficult-to-show” properties are short sales or lender owned. 
• Never reduce the price.  
• Add numerous exclusions to any purchase contract.  Sellers should list exclusions when they list their property- grandma’s chandelier, antique mirror in bathroom.  Some sellers wait until they receive a purchase contract and them begin to exclude items from the deal.  Best way to exclude heirlooms or expensive fixtures is to replace them prior to listing the property- out of sight and out of mind.

As you can see “sellers remorse” can impede the sale of the property.  If you’re a seller reading this blog and shaking your head because you don’t think these are good examples of problems…..perhaps you have a full blown case of “seller’s remorse”.

According to the Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati the following HUD properties have sold/closed.  If you are tracking or bidding on HUD properties this report may provide insight into selling prices.

I took a quick look at real estate closings for single family homes and condos during the first half of September.  Since many geographic areas fall within school districts, the data is broken down by school district.  Remember, most of the closings happen during the last week of the month - so you should expect a large increase in these numbers. 

As many buyers are timing their purchases to close at the end of November in order to qualify for the the First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit- the closing numbers in October and November should increase significantly.

A word of caution for FHA and VA buyers- as noted previously- new condo approval regulations may delay your closing.  If you are using FHA or VA mortgages make sure to get a list of approved condo complexes or plan on adding several weeks to your anticipated closing date.