I ran into Ken Shuman, comms chief at Trulia, the San Francisco based real estate search site. He said business is up even though prices in real estate markets continue to drop.
"People are doing a lot more research and we're providing them with the tools." Trulia recently released an iPhone/iPad and Android app, which has proved quite popular.
Unfortunately there are no tools that can predict the bottom of a real-estate market. The problem is that huge numbers of foreclosures have depressed prices in most nieghborhoods around the country. Banks are unable to manage their inventory of empty housing. For example, a friend of mine lost her beautiful home in Noe Valley to foreclosure. Now the outside is covered in graffiti and people are squatting inside.
Mr Shuman says that there more than 30,000 foreclosed and empty homes in San Francisco alone. That's not helping the real-estate market to recover.
While Trulia is doing well, Mr Shuman says it is getting harder to find good engineers. It doesn't help that other tech companies have come to San Francisco, such as Twitter, and are now competing for talent.
"We chose San Francisco because you could find good staff here, then other companies followed."