Trulia CEO Flint takes aim at Zillow

Could a two-horse race be turning into a three-horse race?
Trulia co-founder Pete Flint is certainly thinks so.
In an interview yesterday with Seattle-based journalist John Cook, he wastes little time taking rival portal Zillow to task.
Some of the juicer quotes:
On their respective pasts…

“We started as four guys in a student library, and they started with 150 employees and an army of vice presidents.”

On the differences in their sites’ traffic…

“It is not someone looking at some foreclosed celebrity’s property, it is individuals looking at properties and that is really the monetizable unit.”

And most boldly, on where they’re heading…

“…just a question of time before we overtake them.”

Hey, we’re fans of both companies and plus, we love a good dustup, so it’s entertaining to watch these guys go nose-to-nose and argue about who’s bigger. But a lot of the time I wonder if all this talk is just a distraction. A lot of aggro and elegantly shaded bar charts get surfaced while very little gets made of the numbers that truly matter: the ones about money.
But as IPOs loom large for both companies I expect we’ll get a much clearer picture soon.
In the meantime, it sure is fun sitting here in the stands.
(As a side note, we’ve been fans of Cook’s reporting since he wrote his Venture blog at the now defunct Seattle PI – he and co-founder Todd Bishop have started a new site GeekWire, make sure you check it out and add it to your readers.)