Real estate portal Trulia will get all of its multifamily apartment listings from a single source — Primedia Inc., the operator of a stable of rental sites including Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com — the companies said today. Trulia will also sell display advertising and other media products on behalf of Primedia, the companies said.
Trulia CEO Pete Flint called the partnership with Primedia "a major step in solving the fragmentation of the rental market by linking Trulia’s quickly growing, transaction-ready audience with premiere rental inventory."
The new Trulia-Primedia ad network "enables us to offer our advertising partners access to one of the largest housing specific audiences online," Flint said in a statement.
Trulia launched rental property search in 2010, obtaining listings from third-party property listings aggregators Rentwiki, For Rent, ApartmentGuide, and Rentals.com. Last year, it added more than 100,000 new listings to the site by partnering with Apartments.com.
Monthly rental visits are up 130 percent from a year ago, and inquiries sent through Trulia are up 200 percent during the same period, the company said today.
Trulia launched rental search mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system in September, 2011, and for the iPhone in April, 2012. Those apps have been downloaded 1 million times, the company said today.
Primedia says it was the first to develop apps in the rental market for iPhone, Android, iPad, and Kindle Fire, and has seen 55 percent year-over-year growth in mobile downloads, with over 1.8 million downloads.
Primedia CEO Charles Stubbs said in a statement that partnering with Trulia, "also a leader in the mobile space, is very exciting for our valued customers."
Rentals have been seen as a growth opportunity by Trulia rivals including Zillow, which announced this month that it would acquire HotPads for $16 million. Zillow bought rental relationship software provider RentJuice Corp. in May for $40 million, and last month began offering rental property managers, agents and landlords with tools to manage and market their listings.
Primedia announced it was acquiring eBay subsidiary Rent.com in March, and closed on the deal in May.
