Sequoia Capital's $10 million Series C investment into online real estate information site Trulia is a smart move for the firm. Growing company. Rich market in flux. Very high CPMs. I get all that. Even if the deal was done at $50 million pre-money, in the post-Geni world, that's not a bad valuation.

What I'm confused about is if this is it for online real estate. Is what we've seen so far in applying new technologies to a very stale market all we're going to see in the immediate future. What is out there now are a few real estate web sites based around a media model. Think Zillow and Trulia. A couple others are out there based on disintermediating real estate brokers. Redfin and Movato come to mind. And the innovation in real estate stops there.

Sequoia likes to diversify its portfolio across different investment stages. That's smart business. But, I have to believe that a firm focused on betting on companies addressing large markets must have been wanting to place a bet on real estate for a while now. They saw Benchmark in Zillow and Accel in Trulia and must have been looking for their own play. And while the Trulia investment this week certainly doesn't preclude Sequoia from investing in an earlier stage real estate startup later, it seems to suggest that none are impressing them right now.

For more on Trulia's $10 million fundraising, see:
VentureBeat
Trulia blog

Tags: trulia, sequoia, zillow, vc, venture+capital