Trulia on Tuesday scored a win in announcing it broke into the comScore top 10 most-visited real estate sites. The company pulled ahead of Zillow in terms of unique visitors and Trulia’s unique visitors nearly tripled over the last 12 months, from 579,000 to more than 1.6 million in December.

The more interesting observation out of the latest comScore rankings is that more people are visiting real estate sites despite the housing market downturn. ComScore counted about 32.7 million visits to real estate sites in December 2007, up 5 percent from December 2006.

Either more consumers are suddenly waking up to the availability of real estate information online or we are seeing the effects of an uncertain, slow market causing consumers to want more information. NAR’s often quoted percentage of people starting their home search online has steadily climbed over the years, now at somewhere around 80 percent.

Top 10 most visited real estate sites for December, according to comScore:

1. Move Network
2. MSN Real Estate
3. Yahoo! Real Estate
4. Rent.com
5. Apartments.com
6. HomeGain.com
7. Trulia.com
8. ServiceMagic.com
9. HPCInteractive
10. Zillow.com

Hitwise, a separate analytics company reporting Web traffic, earlier this month reported its latest rankings of most visited real estate sites. The top 10 in order were: Realtor.com, Move.com, HomeGain, Zillow, RE/MAX Real Estate, Rent.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, ZipRealty, Apartments.com, and ServiceMagic. Trulia ranked #11. See full story here.