Trulia is following in the path of its larger rival, Zillow, once again. This time, it’s launching a mortgage marketplace that allows consumers to get personalized mortgage quotes and other loan information while on the go.
Sound familiar? It should since Zillow launched its very own mortgage marketplace more than three years ago, expanding it to the iPhone last summer and Android earlier this year.
In fact, Zillow’s mortgage business is booming. During the first six months of the year, the company recorded nearly 5.5 million loan requests, the same amount that it tallied for all of 2011.
Obviously, Trulia is playing a serious game of “catch up” in the mortgage arena. Nonetheless, the San Francisco company, which is readying to go public, thinks it can compete with the new offering that’s simultaneously launching online and iOS. The new service allows users to input a property location, loan purpose, home price and other information in order to get a customized mortgage quote.
“As more people search for homes on-the-go from their smartphones and tablets, we understood how important it is for today’s mobile house hunters to be able to search for rates in real-time from anywhere, at anytime,” said Lee Clancy, Trulia’s VP of Consumer Products.
Backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and others, Trulia filed to raise up to $75 million in a public offering earlier this summer. Zillow remains the bigger of the two companies in almost every key metric.
