Data Prioritization: The Trulia Way

This is an article by Mark Weiss, Director, Business Development at Trulia, Inc. It first appeared on Trulia’s blog as How Trulia handles duplicate listings (i.e. “data prioritization”). Data Prioritization is clearly an important issue in the world of property search and portals, and and propertyportalwatch.com is pleased to republish it here.

I recently attended Clareity’s Annual MLS Executive Workshop where I spoke on a panel about Listing Distribution and Syndication. One question that was repeatedly asked of the panel and throughout the event: How do you display listing information if you get it from more than one source?

This is an important consideration for us at Trulia, because — unlike some other online real estate sites — we do not display the same home multiple times in our search results. Seeing “123 Main Street” twice would be a confusing experience for any serious home buyer/seller, which would also reflect upon the listing owner, agent and broker, poorly.

Therefore, we have made sure that one home appears only once in search results, even if a listing was submitted to us by a local MLS, broker, agent and possibly some other third party on behalf of an agent. So how do we go about solving this?

At Trulia, we call this “data prioritization.” Data prioritization is challenging because we currently receive for sale listings from franchisors, brokers, agents, MLSs, aggregators and other service providers representing agents or their web sites. It is not uncommon to receive the same home listing from more than 4 sources, and with over 3.5 Million individual unique listings on Trulia it happens fairly often. We identify duplicates first, and then we assign priority to each listing.

1. Identifying duplicates
Our engineers have built a solid algorithm for accurately identifying duplicate property listings, after which we prioritize the multiple data sources found. The most important criteria for prioritizing data sources on Trulia is the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of listing data, which is what both consumers and agents want. Better data quality translates into better results for consumers and better results for brokers/MLS/agents. (Check out our updated data feed spec to see how you can make your feed more complete today!)

2. Prioritizing by source
Typically, but not always, the outcome of this prioritization is that the Broker and MLS-provided listing feeds are considered first. This is followed by franchisor and agent-provided listings, and then the listings sent by third parties on behalf of an agent. We always work with the legal owner of a listing, the listing broker, if there is uncertainty about how they want their listing assets to be handled.

Unfortunately there is no simple “A->B->C” prioritization we can follow in all cases. However, the fact is that we and our partners share the same goal – make sure that all listing data is accurately, completely and fairly presented to the potential home buyers and sellers on Trulia.com.

We have made a lot of progress in this area in the past few years and we will continue to work on it! Want to know more? Shoot me a note at Mark(at)Trulia(dot)com.

by Mark Weiss
Director, Business Development at Trulia, Inc.

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