Trulia: Spotlight on Boston
Trulia, the national listings website, puts its monthly “Spotlight” on the city of Boston.
The (brief) report (warning, .pdf) includes a “heat map” of what searches were most popular during the month of August.
Back Bay, one of Boston’s most upscale neighborhoods, was the most searched Boston neighborhood in August.
Median sales price in Back Bay is up 18.2 percent over last year, showing that some areas have defied the real estate slump. South End was next on the list … South Boston, or “Southieâ€?, was third most popular.
Median sales price in South End and South Boston was up 8.8 percent and 7.2 percent, respectively, over the previous year.
In my opinion, Trulia has yet to make much of an impression, here in Boston. I haven’t heard any client or agent mention it. If you look at Trulia’s list of “most popular cities” that use their website, it isn’t in the top ten. I’d guess it isn’t in the top 20, either.
I’m not taking anything away from them. I like the website and I like their service. It’s just not used much, here. Yet.
Part of that problem, so far, has been the (serious) lack of listings in its database. The reason is, Boston-area agents have to agree to have their listings uploaded to Trulia. Up until a couple months ago, no major brokerages had done so. Then, our local Multiple Listing Service, MLSPIN, offered to upload listings to Trulia (an agent’s office has to manually approve this, by checking a box on the MLSPIN website … and I bet many offices don’t even realize this!).
In addition, separately, companies such as th Keller Williams and Coldwell Banker started uploading their listings on the site.
Check out their site, and let me know what you think.
(Trulia – update your maps! We don’t have any neighborhoods called Charlston and Alliston-Brighton!