The San Francisco-based company, Trulia, filed today for an initial public stock offering up to $75 million with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Though the operator of Trulia.com real estate website has filed for the IPO, the amount of shares to be offered and price range have not been finalized yet. Company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker (NYSE:TRLA). The company also revealed in the filing, that its owners, Accel Partners, Fayez Sarofim & Co., and Sequoia Capital plan to sell their stakes.
JPMorgan Securities and Deutsche Bank AG (ETR:DBK) (FRA:DBK) (NYSE:DB) Securities are joint book-running managers for the company, while RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Needham & Company, and William Blair are co-managers.
Trulia operates a real estate website and mobile apps that help visitors to locate homes for sale in their desired locations. The company’s database has some 110 million properties, including 4.5 million homes for sale and rent. One unique point about the search of property on Trulia, is that desired listings also shows information regarding nearby schools, crime rates, and local amenities, and are also paired with user-generated content.
Trulia revealed in its filing, that for the six months ending June 30, the number of monthly unique visitors to the site jumped to 22 million, from 5 million in the six months ending June 30, 2009. Most of the users on Trulia are free members, but the company has registered an increase in paid members from 2,398 three years ago to more than 21,500 currently. The company earned $38.5 million in revenue from display advertising sales last year, though the company reported a loss of $6.2 million. In 2010 company posted $19.8 million in revenue and $3.8 million loss. This year, up till now, the company earned revenue amounting to $29 million, and reported a $7.6 million loss.
Another online real estate company and a rival to Trulia, Seattle-based Zillow Inc (NASDAQ:Z), went public last summer. In fact there are a number of IPO’s lined up within next few months, including offerings from Chesapeake Oilfield Services, Intelsat SA, and Domus Holdings etc.
According to the estimates from Trulia, the residential real estate industry in the U.S., which is considered “undergoing a profound transformation” with the rise of technology, accounts for more than a trillion dollars in annual spending?
