When we launched Trulia back in September 2005, our goal was to help consumers find homes for sale and make smarter real estate decisions. Over the last year and a half or so we’ve been working hard to help fulfill that mission, by adding lots of tools, partners and content and have been used by millions of people in their home search.

Today we’re delighted to announce the launch of Trulia Voices together with a major site upgrade taking us a big step forward towards achieving that overall goal.

Trulia Voices
Trulia Voices is an interactive real estate question-and-answer service designed to help real estate professionals and enthusiasts share their expertise and connect directly with an online audience of serious home buyers and sellers. Consumers now have a tool where they can ask those very specific questions about neighborhoods, schools or just get a sense of the “curb appeal” by tapping into the local knowledge and insights from millions of residents, experts and agents from all across the US.

We know that most of the millions of users that come to our site are engaged and ready to buy in the next 12 months, 70% of them told us so in the our last survey, while 60% of our consumers don’t already work with an agent. For real estate professionals, this is a large and unique audience to market themselves for free and share their wisdom.

Three quick & easy ways to get started on Trulia Voices:

1. Set up your My Trulia profile and put in a good looking picture like the guy on the left!
2. Become the local expert in your community – the more quality questions you answer, the more likely you are to appear on the “Top Voices” leaderboard as a local expert.
3. Set up email alerts – Want to be the first to answer when someone asks a question in your city or neighborhood? No problem.

HousingWidgets.com
We also launched a new service for the real estate community called HousingWidgets.com, a portal for all real estate professionals to share, find, upload and review real estate Internet tools.

Along with the launch of HousingWidgets.com, we launched widgets.trulia.com where you can find TruliaStats, a new tool that allows users to show a graph of listing prices and volume for any location on their Web sites, and all of the Trulia widgets.

Taking the hassle out of home hunting
And finally, this launch has included a lot of improvements for the consumer experience. There are lots of cool features including:

Trulia’s smart filters which act as a referral service to help house hunters identify neighborhoods and ZIP codes that might interest them. Upon searching an identified neighborhood, Trulia.com will immediately make recommendations of nearby areas that home buyers might also find appealing based on past consumer search behavior. For example, people who house hunt in the West Village also tend to search in Gramercy Park, SoHo and Chelsea.

Trulia Alerts to spy on individual properties. Have your heart set on buying a home just like the one your friend bought? With Trulia Alerts, consumers can now track the status of over 60 million homes across the United States—becoming the first to know when a new property comes on the market or to stay on top of what is selling in their neighborhood.

Finally, you might notice a small change on our logo at the top. YES, we have taken off the BETA label. While this doesn’t change much here for all the hardworking Trulians around here, it is a huge milestone for the company.

As always we love your feedback so let us know what you think and what we can do better.

See the full press release here (PDF).