ChitownLiving | Chicago Real Estate + Life

Just had a quick look at the Trulia beta site.  As mentioned in a prior post, I always take these sites for a test drive before recommending to clients.  Most are developed for the masses nationwide and I need to see how they perform locally.  Alas, I can not recommend Trulia for a very different reason than Reply.com.  In this case, the data set is incomplete (as is the data for Reply but search is not their main focus).  The site has cool tools but incomplete data, as further explored at 360 Digest.  In other words, when you search listings on the site, you are not searching across all Chicago listings.  Tested this on a few listings out of my office which could not be found.  In fairness, this is not a Trulia technical issue, but rather a political issue created by the local MLSNI and board members (see first give away below). First give away, no login required.  Per MLSNI rules, when searching across all brokerage listings, an email and password must be provided.  Yeah, I know it is a drag, but there is no way around this at present.  Only site I know of where an email and password are not required is Realtor.com. Second give away, when selecting Chicago, the UI indicates you will be searching about 5,000 listings.  Not even close to the number of active listings in Chicago. Other than that, the site seems nice if you don’t mind incomplete data to the tune of about 10,000 listings on the north side of Chicago alone.