MediaFile

Real estate Web site Trulia.com has hit an important milestone: the company is now profitable, according to CEO Pete Flint.

Trulia has been in the black for the past two months, Flint told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday, as the web site’s visitors and advertisers have continue to grow at a healthy pace.

Unique visitors to Trulia’s Web site, which offers listings for home sales and rentals, now total 9 million, up from 6 million visitors at this time last year, said Flint. The company’s revenue is growing at 100 percent clip, though Flint would not divulge the amount of money that Trulia is making.

The last few years have been a “roller coaster” ride for anyone in the real estate business, Flint said, but he said that he believed the housing market was slowly recovering.

Trulia competes with Zillow in the online real estate listings business, and shares of the privately-held San Francisco company are among the most sought after by investors who buy stock in private companies. According to a report by SecondMarket, an online market for trading shares in private companies, Trulia was among the companies that saw the greatest percentage of increase in interest among investors during the third quarter, alongside private firms like Groupon, Pandora and Zipcar.

Why do we care about Facebook? People you know and respect use it. That includes you. People you know and respect who scoff at it still know what Facebook is. Facebook, like Google, is popular enough to have become a verb as well as a noun. If the public ever got a crack at buying shares in it, lots of people would get rich.

That’s why mass clucking ensued among the technology press when the word came out Tuesday that Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu is splitting. The Wall Street Journal, so far as we can tell, broke the news. It said:

The departure of the 37-year-old Mr. Yu and the ensuing search for a replacement are likely to renew speculation that Facebook is stepping up plans for a public offering, despite the rocky economy. The company, which has turned down several acquisition offers in the past, has said it is hoping to go public in the next few years.

But some employees and investors, who have poured roughly $455 million into the company, according to VC Experts.com Inc., are eager for Facebook to start planning an offering and have raised questions about whether it has enough money to sustain its growth. Many others have said the company is over-valued, which — in addition to the economic downturn — hampered its efforts to fund an employee-buyback program last year.