Trulia’s ‘What Locals Say’ feature gives homebuyers neighborhood insights

Your home is only as good as your neighborhood, and no one understands that quite as well as online real estate portal Trulia. And now, the company is launching a new product feature called What Locals Say in the hope of helping buyers and renters alike discover a community that will make a house feel like a home.

“More than 10 years ago, Trulia revolutionized the way people found homes by making real estate listings searchable online. Fast-forward to 2018, house hunters now expect to see listings on the Internet,” said Tim Correia, senior vice president and general manager of Trulia. “We understand that neighborhoods matter. Our new mission will guide Trulia to deliver even more innovative products to help buyers and renters discover and understand what it’s really like to live in a home and neighborhood before they move in, much like a trusted friend or neighbor.”

With What Locals Say, house hunters will be able to glean neighborhood insight tips from their potential new neighbors. Already, the new feature boasts over 6 million answered polls and write reviews by locals that seek to provide a sense of what it would be like to live in a neighborhood.

Reviews focus on the best aspects of a community, while polls provide quantitative information about how easy it is to find parking, how often folks decorate their homes, how dog-friendly an area may be, and other such details. On average, Trulia says that locals are submitting around 100,000 poll responses and reviews a day, and this number is only expected to grow as the feature takes off.

Last year, Trulia found that a whopping 85 percent of homebuyers planning to buy a new home in the next year and a half said that the neighborhood would be as important or more important than the house itself. And 76 percent of those buyers noted that their motivations for moving was a neighborhood or lifestage-related reason. So if you’re part of that statistic and looking for insights as to what new community may be best for you, Trulia and its What Locals Say functionality may be a real game changer.