News Corp To Power Up Realtor Website
News Corp CEO, Robert Thomson shared his vision to leverage their other media assets to improve the performance of Realtor.com.
realtor.com Finds Their Publishing Power
If you want to compete as a brokerage, you can borrow the playbook of realtor.com to create articles that leverage your local expertise and deliver the most interesting article content for consumers in your area. The trick here is to make sure that consumers are engaging with your content. That is the benefit of following the headlines of realtor.com.
Newscorp Acquires OPCITY $210 Million
While I was sitting in the NAR Innovation conference, news came across the wire that News Corp, operators of Realtor.com and the realestate.au, acquired Austin based OPCITY for $210 Million. On the very same day, it became official that Pacific Union would be acquired by NYC based brokerage COMPASS. Like OPCITY, the trade was reportedly struck for north of $200 Million. Congratulations to Ben Rubenstein and Mark McLaughlin. WOW – Over $400 Million in deals done in a single day.
How Do Top Homes.com and Realtor.com Compare?
Since internet is among the top three most important methods of generating real estate leads and online listing sites rank as one of the most valuable tools, every agent is challenged to leverage these resources for creating, capturing, and closing leads. But, how can agents effectively compare the value propositions of marketing on the most popular real estate sites? An analysis of online marketing solutions from Realtor.com and Homes.com show that their marketing tools stack up pretty solidly when compared side by side, offering a range of options to suit any agent’s CRM strategy, marketing budget, and revenue goals. Both [...]
News Corp buys MOVE operators of Realtor.com
And so it goes. Move, the operators of the National Associaton of REALTORS portal called Realtor.com have agreed to sell the company to News Corp in an all-cash deal valued at $950 million. MOVE's board of directors were swift to approve the offer, representing a 36% bump in the value of the company. News Corp owns other real estate assets including The Wall Street Journal ( a popular spot for luxury property advertising) and Australian real estate portal - realestate.com.au (part of the REA Group). REA Group will apparently pay for 20% of MOVE, and News Corp will pay the [...]
MOVE acquires Point2 Syndication Contracts
It looks like MOVE, operators of Realtor.com have taken a stride that is not altogether different from the success that Zillow is garnering with their acquisition strategy. MOVE is doing their best to control the pipelines that deliver advertising to portals in the United States. MOVE already owns Listhub, the largest syndicator of listing content. Now they pick up their nearest competitor - Point2 - much in the same way that Zillow picked up Trulia. The biggest difference, beyond taking out a competitor, is that they will removing a layer of duplication of listing syndication. Spencer Rascoff of Zillow describes [...]
The End Of War Between Zillow and Trulia
There is a major war going on in the taxi industry today. Uber and Lyft are duking it out. Both companies have deep cash pockets and they are deploying it in marketing and undercutting each other. It is pretty hard to know which service is better as they work hard to drive market share. As Zillow marches toward the stock swap to join forces with Trulia, perhaps a new wisdom of that transaction will reveal itself. They just avoided a very expensive war where the two of them may have killed each other off to reign supreme. It is pretty [...]
Howard Hanna Promotes 5700 REALTORS on Realtor.com
Today’s real estate broker faces some difficult decisions when it comes to online advertising. The choices are often predicated upon what your competition is doing; what sellers demand; traffic and leads generated by your website or franchise website; website owner terms of use; who gets the lead; who pays – agent or broker. It is really quite a mess. It is so bad, that many large firms have walked away from it entirely and leave it up to the agent. Other firms have taken the proverbial bull by the horn and worked hard to market listings online is a very [...]
Move, Inc. Combats Attack on its Website Services To Restore Operations to Customers and Consumers
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Move, Inc., (NASDAQ:MOVE), a leading provider of online real estate services, reports that it is continuing to combat the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which has interrupted its websites' operations since it began mid-day June 17. Move's technical team is working around-the-clock with the Prolexic division of Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading DDoS mitigation service provider; other Internet security experts; and its network service providers to mitigate the attack and quickly restore operations. In connection with the attack, Move received a ransom demand, which it did not respond to. DDoS attacks [...]
How Great Companies React To Feedback
AgentMatch from realtor.com was a solution that was tested in two real estate markets – Boulder, CO and Las Vegas, TX. The pilot program was developed as a service to connect consumers with agents based on performance, interests and recommendation data. Putting aside the debate about the strengths or weaknesses of this form of rating an agent, there is plenty to learn from how it was rolled out, how feedback was generated, and how the company reacted to the feedback. Pre-roll Out Decisions With any new service, the first question should be opt-in or opt-out. WAV Group has always recommended [...]
Austin Board of REALTORS Bids Syndication Farewell
Sunsetting services are never any fun, especially services that do not cost the membership any money. That is exactly what the Austin Board of REALTORS® is on a path to do this spring. The ABoR directors released a formal statement this week announcing the plan to sunset the Listhub agreement by April 30th, 2014. The process for researching this difficult decision is nicely outlined http://www.abor.com/syndication. In June 2012, the ACTRIS committee, which is the MLS of the Austin area, created a Syndication Task Force with a diverse representation of members and brokers. They cited some interesting findings. The decision to syndicate [...]
FIND Offers Unique Reciprocal Data Sharing.
Before REALTORS® Property Resource (RPR) was conceived, the National Association of REALTORS® was working with their realtor.com partner, Move, Inc. to develop a library of information on every property in America. NAR selected another vendor and developed what we know as RPR today. MOVE took their prototype and developed a free product called FINDSM. FIND is proprietary software for MLSs that provides property centric data on more than 100 million real estate parcels in the United States, and offers agents and brokers access to timely, accurate and reliable listing information across MLS boundaries. Available as a link or a toolbar [...]