Trulia CEO Pete Flint took a shot at his Seattle competitor Zillow.com last month, telling GeekWire that it was “just a matter of time before we overtake them.” Bold words for sure. And now the San Francisco online real estate startup is elevating the rhetoric and the rivalry. In a blog post today titled “Audience Milestones: Trulia’s Ascent to the Top,” the company cites statistics from comScore and repeatedly mentions how it is essentially kicking Zillow’s butt.
“This month, consumers spent more time on Trulia than Zillow, marking Trulia’s steady ascent,” the company wrote. That was one of more than a half dozen mentions of Zillow in the short post, which also describes how Trulia has surpassed its rival in page views.
“In summary, Trulia is now ahead of Zillow in major scale and engagement numbers, and we are growing faster than Zillow on all key audience metrics,” the company writes. “Trulia is growing faster in terms of unique visitors, visits, minutes and page views.”
We’ve mentioned the intense rivalry between the two companies, which are both growing fast and positioning to go public. But the latest Trulia salvo certainly elevates things.
Zillow.com, for its part, doesn’t appear to be taking the bait. The company declined to comment on Trulia’s latest blog post when contacted by GeekWire.
Earlier this week, the company released numbers for March, saying that its unique visitor count topped 19.4 million. (comScore puts the figure at 11 million, which is still ahead of Trulia’s count of 8.5 million). Last month, a Zillow spokeswoman said that page views were not as important of a metric, since it was more concerned with optimizing the consumer experience in order to reduce the number of clicks.
It’s a little unusual to see a company — especially one of Trulia’s stature — taking such an aggressive tone towards a rival. Maybe Zillow is playing by the rules of “Seattle Nice,” but even so I don’t recall seeing such a verbal slug fest played out before in the blogosphere.
I asked Flint about the rivalry with Zillow.com last month, and here’s what he had to say:
“We both started at a similar time, and both have silly names. So, we are quite similar companies in some respects. But at the same time, there’s a huge number of differences between the way we think about the business and the way we are growing. We started as four guys in a student library, and they started with 150 employees and an army of vice presidents. So, we are quite different in how we think about business.”
Zillow.com has raised $87 million from investors such as Benchmark Capital, while Trulia has raised some $33 million from Accel Partners and Sequoia Partners.
