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When Pete Flint, CEO of the online real estate search start-up Trulia, moved to San Francisco in 2003 from London, his knowledge of the city's real estate market was close to zero.

But like many transplants, "I had a million questions," he said.

Flint searched for real estate data online but what he found, or rather, didn't find, was unsatisfactory. He asked his friends in the city if they'd had better luck but they agreed that the services available were "terrible."

"When you have a problem, and your friends have a problem, the light bulb goes off," Flint said of the genesis of Trulia.

Since its launch in September of 2005, the site has grown to 1.5 million unique monthly visitors with 2 million properties for sale, he said.

The site's "heat maps" allow consumers to compare prices and popularity by state, county, city or neighborhood. The local real estate guides provide information such as sales statistics, real estate price trends and community information such as crime statistics.

The site is linked to the websites of over 40,000 real estate agencies, Flint said.

Trulia announced a $10 million third round of funding from Sequoia Capital last week.  Existing investors in the site are Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co. The company has raised $17.7 million to date.

The funding will allow the San Francisco-based company to add to its team of real estate and search technology experts, develop new services and further marketing and sales efforts.

AVM interviewed Pete Flint about how the number of visitors to the site has grown so fast, so quickly, where advertising dollars are spent in real estate and how the company plans on keeping consumers coming back.

AVM: What is Trulia's focus now?

PF: What we've really been focusing on over the last 18-20 months since we launched in September of 2005 is building up content on the website. Today we have over 2 million properties for sale, we have historical transactions and property records for over 16 million properties and a whole range of other information about home buying and real estate.

Secondly we've been building up the audience. Today we are around 1.5 million unique users up from zero 18 months ago and growing at a good double digit monthly growth. So we've been focused on building content and we've been focused on building audience. And around that, building technology and building a platform for us to scale.

So looking forward in the next 12 months the big missing pieces there is revenue.

The next thing for us is to really scale up the revenue piece and that requires additional investment in technology to scale out some of the advertising platform services and also continue to build up audience and content.

If I was to summarize what the additional $10 million will be used for, it's frankly general operational purposes, so that is hiring more engineers, growing traffic for the website and continuing to build out the content and product experience to deliver an amazing online real estate service. So you won't see any Super Bowl ads soon.

AVM: Are you looking at a purely advertising revenue model right now or do you see adding paid services in the near future?

PF: We are solely going for an advertising revenue model right now.

The sort of question we get in the industry is, "Are we going to become a real estate brokerage firm?"

We absolutely are not going to become a real estate brokerage firm. We collect advertising revenue from real estate brokerage firms, the last thing we would want to do is compete with our customers. We are really focused on being a media company generating money from advertising. And it works pretty well from Google and Yahoo.

We also look at the amount of money that is spent on the real estate industry. There is something like $11 billion is spent marketing real estate in the U.S.

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