Have you been looking for ways to analyze Trulia homes for sale? This article shows you how to analyze homes on this real estate website.
Table of Contents
If you’ve done some online research on properties to buy, rent, or sell, you’ve probably seen Trulia homes for sale. Trulia provides an online real estate database containing property listings both for sale and rental purposes. The site also connects real estate buyers and sellers with agents.
In today’s blog post, we’re going to look at what Trulia is, its features, and how to analyze property listings on the platform.
What Is Trulia?
Founded in 2005, Trulia is an online real estate website that offers property listings for potential sellers, buyers, and renters. The company doesn’t own any of the listings on its platform. It makes its money from advertising. You can think of it as a middleman who makes his money from connecting buyers and sellers.
Though its headquarters are still located in San Francisco, Trulia was acquired by Zillow in 2015 for $3.5 billion. The acquisition led to what is considered one of the most prominent real estate companies in the United States.
While it belongs to the Zillow Group, Trulia offers its customers a different online experience. The company’s simple website design allows its users to find a home for sale easily and fast.
Trulia is an excellent resource for property buyers and renters who may be moving to a neighborhood that’s unfamiliar to them. It is because the platform provides a lot of neighborhood information, including reviews from other users who’ve lived there.
Trulia Features
Here are some of the features you get from Trulia homes:
- Listing Syndication: The feature allows users to submit properties on the platform for listing. It increases listing visibility and search.
- Listing Management Portal: Users can manage property details on the platform using an agent web portal. Property details that you can manage include property photos, price, and a list of amenities or fixtures.
- Agent Profiles: Real estate professionals and agents can create agent profiles on Trulia, where they can display their specialty market, areas of expertise, and active listings.
- Mortgage Calculator: Trulia homes also provides an integrated mortgage calculator that helps you understand your purchasing ability. The calculator also recommends budget limits.
- MLS Integration: The platform comes with an MLS integration feature where property listings are automatically updated to reflect the MLS feeds. The feature ensures that the information and details on the site are up-to-date and accurate.
- Advertising and Marketing Tools: Property sellers and agents on Trulia can use the site’s marketing feature to advertise locally on other listing service platforms, email newsletters, and even mobile applications. It helps users take advantage of advertising networks to boost their reach on diverse listing services.
Finding Trulia Homes for Sale
Trulia for sale homes web and mobile apps help you search for and browse millions of property listings across the US real estate market. Unlike other listing services that only feature properties for sale, Trulia goes a step further and includes millions of rental property listings.
You can find single-family homes and duplex for sale on the platform, as well as other alternatives, such as condos, apartments, and townhouses. In addition, you can search through a myriad of properties that recently been sold in the neighborhood. It gives you a deeper insight into the local market.
Finding Trulia manufactured homes for sale isn’t complicated. With millions of listings to choose from, you’re going to need to narrow down your options at some point. The platform comes with all the search filters you’d expect for you to find Trulia homes for sale by owner that match your search criteria. The filters include property type, size, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
The main issue with Trulia is that the search filters aren’t as detailed as other property listing services. For example, there’s no option to filter properties based on the number of floors. However, the platform offers a keyword filter to allow you to create custom searches.
If you’re looking for properties to rent, the rental search includes more filters. The rental property filters include both building and unit amenities.
Once you’ve nailed your property search and used the search parameters well, you can save your search and come back to it anytime. You can also save individual listings that you like and share them across other linked apps.
Related: The Best Website for Your Investment Property Search
Get Recommendations and Alerts
While the search feature and filters can be helpful, sometimes you want technology to do all the work for you. Trulia’s alerts feature sends you push notifications or emails whenever a new property hits the market. You also get notifications when there’s a status update for a saved property.
You can choose to receive notifications for both properties for sale and rentals and whether you’d like to receive alerts via emails or push notifications.
Trulia mobile homes for sale platform also creates custom browse recommendations based on your saved searches and favorite properties. You can also get the recommendations through emails or device notifications, as well as the Trulia app.
Map Overlays and Neighborhood Information
We’ve already mentioned Trulia’s Neighborhood feature, which provides a detailed overview of the neighborhood. The platform uses the said feature to provide a visual breakdown of the property’s monthly expenses, including taxes, mortgage payments, insurance, and association fees. It helps show whether you can afford to live in the house and neighborhood and how it feels to live there.
Another Trulia feature that makes it stand out from its competitors is the crime map overlays. Users can apply the said map overlay to see nearby crime issues, such as vandalism and theft. Trulia pulls its crime data from news and local law enforcement reports to help users determine how safe the community is.
How to Analyze Trulia Homes for Sale
Trulia platform offers you data and estimates to allow you to analyze Trulia multi family homes for sale. Trulia estimates are pulled from publicly-available property information and agent-reported transactions, such as:
- The property’s physical characteristics, such as location, square footage, and number of bedrooms
- Property tax details
- Recent sales of comparable homes within the same neighborhood
Currently, Trulia provides estimates for up to 65 million single-family properties, condos, and townhouses across the US.
However, keep in mind that the estimates come with a median error rate of 1.9% for homes currently on sale and 6.9% for off-market properties. It means that the estimates are off by an average of $5,500 to $19,800, based on the median home value in the US.
This is where Mashvisor comes in. Mashvisor is a real estate data analytics platform that helps investors access accurate and reliable data and lucrative investment property opportunities.
Related: Is Mashvisor Data Reliable for Short-Term Rental Investors?
Let’s look at how you can analyze Trulia real estate homes for sale using Mashvisor in just a matter of minutes.
Neighborhood Analysis
When scrutinizing a property to determine whether it’s profitable, the first and most important factor you should consider is location. The neighborhood you invest in determines how much rent you can charge, as well as how much property expenses you’ll have to pay. You can’t just invest in any city or neighborhood.
Mashvisor makes the neighborhood analysis process much easier through the Real Estate Heatmap tool. Mashvisor’s Real Estate Heatmap is color-coded to represent how well different parts of a neighborhood perform in the housing market. Simply, green represents areas with high potential, while red is for dormant areas.
In addition, there are various search options to help you analyze neighborhoods. The filters include:
- Listing price
- Traditional cash on cash return
- Airbnb cash on cash return
- Traditional rental income
- Airbnb rental income
- Airbnb occupancy rate
Mashvisor’s Real Estate Heatmap tool shows the performance of different parts of a neighborhood or certain location, based on your preferred filters.
Investment Property Analysis
Investing in profitable real estate properties involves more than just buying houses that are appealing to your eyes. You want to be certain that the property will help you achieve your investment and financial goals. Mashvisor helps you achieve them.
Investment Property Calculator
Mashvisor’s Investment Property Calculator helps you run all the necessary numbers to determine whether a property is profitable. As we mentioned, our tools are easy to use. To conduct an investment property analysis using our property calculator, click on the property listing that interests you. You’ll find a complete property analysis ready for you.
Conducting an investment property analysis using our tools gives you access to all the real estate data you need to make a smart investment decision. The data includes:
- Property price
- Property expenses, including one-time startup costs and recurring expenses
- Rental income (Traditional and Airbnb)
- Cash flow (Traditional and Airbnb)
- Occupancy rate (Traditional and Airbnb)
- Cash on cash return (Traditional and Airbnb)
- Cap rate (Traditional and Airbnb)
The calculator makes real estate investors’ lives easier. Imagine having to gather all this data, record it on a spreadsheet, compute the numbers, and manually analyze it. It would be such a tedious task that would take days and even weeks to achieve. Let’s not even get started on how a simple error can write off the entire analysis.
With our Investment Property Calculator, you don’t need to worry about all of the above. Property expenses, such as taxes, insurance, maintenance, and others, are already calculated for you.
In addition, the calculator is interactive. It means that if your own research shows that some data, such as property expense, is different, you can tweak it on the tool and see how that would affect the other numbers.
If the property isn’t listed on the Mashvisor platform, you can enter the property’s address and use our real estate API to conduct the property analysis. Analyzing Trulia homes for sale doesn’t get any better.
Comparative Market Analysis
The comparative market analysis (CMA) step helps you connect all the dots and come up with the final verdict of your Trulia homes for sale analysis. For starters, a CMA involves comparing your subject property to other comparable properties within the same neighborhood.
Comparable properties are homes that are similar to your property in terms of property type, size, age, condition, lot size, amenities, and other features. The properties are sometimes referred to as rental comps.
Many people use the MLS to find rental comps. However, you can’t access the MLS if you’re not an agent on the platform. Some people hire agents to get MLS rental comps for them. Mashvisor removes this block. Rental comps are readily available on Mashvisor.
The Investment Property Calculator includes a “Rental Comps & Insights” section. Once you click on the section, you’ll get a list of comparable properties nearby, as well as a list of similar properties sold recently.
Further, every comparable property in the list comes with important data, such as sales date, sales price, monthly rental rate, square footage, and other readily available information.
The best thing about using Mashvisor tools to conduct investment property analysis is that the platform doesn’t only provide analytics for traditional rental properties, but Airbnb rentals as well. It means you can use the data to decide on the best rental strategy for your property.
Related: Rental Comps: What Are They and Where Can I Find Them?
Final Thoughts
Trulia homes for sale are a perfect choice for any real estate investor who wants to search for houses for sale. The platform also lists rental properties for tenants to browse. It provides a lot of useful data, as well as a neighborhood feature, to give investors insights into what it feels like to live in a certain neighborhood.
Trulia also provides estimates for properties’ market value. However, the estimates have been found to have a high median error rate. Such an inaccuracy makes the platform not reliable enough to carry out neighborhood and property analysis.
This is where Mashvisor comes in. Our platform pulls its data from reliable sources and platforms. You don’t need to worry about getting accurate numbers that are up-to-date. In addition, we provide estimates for both traditional and short-term rental strategies, so you can settle on the most ideal strategy.
Sign up with Mashvisor today and start your 7-day free trial, followed by 15% off for life.