New features and site redesign make it easier for home buyers to customize online residential real estate search

For the 80% of home buyers turning toward the Internet to help make an informed real estate purchasing decision, Trulia.com, the national residential real estate search engine, emerged from beta phase to announce new services and a significant site upgrade. Trulia Voices, Trulia Alerts and new smart filtering features now make it easier than ever for consumers to search the site's more than 2 million home listings and make smarter decisions about buying or selling a home.

Want to get familiar with a new city or neighborhood?

With Trulia Voices, the 1.5 million monthly home buyers, sellers and real estate professionals on Trulia.com can pose questions and offer answers in real time. This expanding collective of passionate advocates will help home buyers get answers to their most pressing questions and assess "curb appeal" during the online search process.

Answers rated best by the community will receive the most visibility, allowing contributors with the highest-rated content to become recognized, trusted experts. Users can set up robust profiles and email alerts to get notified when locations and issues they care about are discussed.

Have your heart set on buying a home just like the one your friend bought?

With Trulia Alerts, consumers can now track the status of over 60 million homes across the United States-becoming the first to know when a new property comes on the market or to stay on top of what is selling in their neighborhood.

An email notification can be set up if any particular home comes on the market, is sold, or has a price change. Consumers can also set Trulia Alerts for any home to learn when a "similar property" comes on the market or is sold.

"Trulia has become the fastest growing real estate site on the Internet by providing incredibly useful tools based on hyper local real estate information for everyone involved in the home buying process," said CEO Pete Flint. "By adding the ability to virtually assess curb appeal, these tools make it easier than ever to exchange information with other home shoppers, real estate professionals and enthusiasts in a pressure-free, trustworthy environment."

Where else should I look for a home?

Trulia's smart filters act as a referral service to help house hunters identify neighborhoods and ZIP codes that might interest them. Upon searching an identified neighborhood, Trulia.com will immediately make recommendations of nearby areas that home buyers might also find appealing based on past consumer search behavior. For example, people who house hunt in the West Village also tend to search in Gramercy Park, SoHo and Chelsea.

About Trulia

Trulia, Inc. (http://www.trulia.com/), a residential real estate search engine, 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, Trulia helps consumers find information on homes for sale using custom search criteria such as price and number of bedrooms to market trends and neighborhood data at the hyper-local level. Founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Trulia is live across the U.S. For more information, go to http://www.trulia.com/.

Source: Trulia, Inc.