Trulia: Homes For Sale & Rent

Review by eFreeware

House hunting usually splits into two jobs that don't fit together well. Most search tools handle the first job and leave you to piece together the second from a dozen browser tabs.

Trulia: Homes For Sale & Rent is built for both halves at once. It comes from Trulia, which is owned by ZillowGroup, and it has been in the Play Store since March 2011. The app is free, carries advertising, and does not sell in-app purchases. It has more than 10 million installs and a 4.7 average from 319,697 ratings, which is a substantial record for a category where users tend to move on once they have signed a lease or closed on a house.

A listings catalog with the street around it

The core of the app is a searchable catalog of more than a million real-time MLS listings. You filter that catalog down with the usual criteria, save the ones worth a second look, and come back to them later. Listings carry photos, and the developer says they also include details such as property taxes and sales history, which is the sort of information that normally means a separate trip to a county records site.

What separates Trulia from a plain listing feed is the neighborhood layer. The app offers over 30 map overlays covering schools, local amenities and estimated commute times, so you can look at a property and then look at what surrounds it without leaving the screen. There are also more than a million local reviews, written by people who live in the area, and virtual tours for getting a feel for a place before you commit to driving out.

The developer pitches this as a home-hunting companion that brings a neighborhood to life, and that framing is fair: the listings are the entry point, but the surrounding context is where the app does most of its work. If you have ever ruled out a house because of the school district or the length of the morning commute, the overlays are aimed at you.

Filters, drawn maps and saved searches

Search filters do the narrowing, and there is a notable extra: you can draw your own search area on the map rather than accepting the boundaries the app suggests. That matters in places where the interesting streets do not line up with a neat rectangle, or where you want to follow a particular corridor rather than a radius.

Saved searches pair with customizable alerts. You choose the criteria, and the app notifies you when a matching home hits the market, drops in price or schedules an open house. The alert settings are adjustable, so the flow of notifications is something you shape rather than something that simply arrives. A recent update added enhanced activity feed controls, which the developer describes as a way to manage what appears in your home feed, notifications and emails.

For anyone watching a slow market or a specific street, this combination is the part that earns a permanent spot on the home screen. A saved search with alerts does the repetitive checking for you, and the drawn map keeps the results from drifting into neighborhoods you never intended to consider.

Planning visits and running the numbers

The app includes a tool for organizing open house visits. It offers recommendations and directions, and it syncs with your calendar, which turns a scattered list of weekend showings into something closer to an itinerary. If you have ever tried to fit four viewings into a Saturday afternoon and given up on the fourth, that scheduling piece is the appeal.

Affordability calculators handle the other side of the decision. They work through mortgage, insurance and tax costs together, so the number you see is closer to what the place actually costs per month than the sticker price alone. These calculators sit alongside the detailed listings and scheduling tools in the app.

Property taxes and sales history sit alongside the photos, so you can check what a home last sold for and what the taxes have been before you run the monthly figures. For a first-time buyer working out what is realistic, that pairing is more useful than either piece on its own.

Renter tools and pet-friendly filtering

Renters get their own set of features rather than a trimmed version of the buyer experience. You can contact landlords directly from a listing with one click, and the catalog covers apartments and condos with floor plans and availability information attached. That is a narrower job than buying, and the app treats it as a first-class one.

Pet policies are filterable for people searching with an animal in the household, and the filters can be combined with proximity to transit and other amenities. Anyone who has filtered through rental listings only to discover at the bottom that pets are not allowed will recognize why that filter matters.

The renter side shares the same neighborhood data as the buying side, so school overlays, local reviews and commute estimates apply whether you are looking to lease or to purchase. That consistency is worth having if your plans are still open between the two.

What the app asks of you

Trulia is free to install and use, with advertising in the app and no in-app purchases to consider. The trade-off for a free catalog of this size is that you are not the customer in the usual sense, and the app puts you in touch with agents as part of the search process.

The other thing to weigh is scope. This is a US real estate tool built around MLS data, so its usefulness depends on the market you are searching in. The developer's examples run from a house in Summerville, SC to apartments in New York, and that range tells you what the app is designed for.

There is also a practical ceiling on what any listing app can do. Photos, virtual tours and neighborhood reviews narrow the field, but they do not replace standing in a kitchen or walking a block after dark. Trulia is good at getting you to a shortlist; the visits still have to happen.

Who gets the most from Trulia

The clearest fit is someone in the middle of an active search, whether buying or renting, who wants listings and neighborhood context in one place. If you are comparing two or three areas and need to know about schools, commutes and what residents say about the streets, the overlays and local reviews do that work without a second app.

It also suits the patient searcher. Saved searches with alerts are built for people who are not in a hurry and would rather be told when something matching their criteria appears than check the same listings every week. The drawn map and the affordability calculators reward someone willing to spend an evening defining what they actually want.

Renters with pets, people planning open house weekends, and first-time buyers trying to work out a realistic monthly budget all have specific tools here rather than a generic search box. The app is at its best when you arrive with criteria and use it to narrow a wide field.

A search companion worth keeping through the process

More than a million MLS listings, 30-plus map overlays, local reviews, virtual tours, drawn search maps, alerts and affordability calculators add up to a tool that stays useful from the first browse to the final shortlist. The 4.7 average across 319,697 ratings suggests a lot of people have found it worth keeping installed.

The costs are the advertising that comes with a free app and the fact that this is a US market tool built on MLS data. Neither is a surprise for the category, and neither undermines what the app does well.

If you are buying or renting and want to understand a neighborhood as thoroughly as the property, this is a sensible app to install and leave on your phone for the duration of the search. If you only need a quick price check on a single address, the depth here is more than the job requires.

What's new in version 14.50.0

We are continuously working on making the Trulia app better. In this release we've made some performance improvements and fixed some bugs. Thank you for choosing Trulia.