Friday Flash: Money moves, content flows and pleasure is shaken
If you think the big online real estate players have been making a lot of noise the past couple years, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The stakes are getting a lot higher.
Inman.com reported today that Trulia expects to net $78 million from its upcoming IPO. Zillow’s bagging more than $140 million in its secondary offering. And Move dropped $22 million this week to buy TigerLead, an agent lead generation and management company.
That’s a lot of money moving around.
Cash balances look (very roughly) like this:
Trulia (if the IPO goes off reasonably well): $85 million
Zillow (after yesterday’s offering and including short-term investments): $190 million
Move (post TigerLead acquisition): $25 million
That’s 300 million for more products, more ads, more innovation, more competition and – yes – more controversy.
Bring it!
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Bing continues to do interesting, underdog-type things. Check out this latest Facebook integration: pulling all your friend’s photos onto one page within the search engine.
Relevant content, shared and shareable, aggregated elegantly.
Would be cool to see more of this in real estate, eh?
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Homes.com is now letting newspapers co-brand its site. Where Realtor.com has partnered with AOL and MSN and Zillow has locked up Yahoo!, Homes seems to be taking a shotgun approach.
I think this is a perfectly fine move, but I wonder how broker or MLS permissioning for what is effectively re-syndication will work. I hope it’s clear. Otherwise I worry about more grist for the angst mill.
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This article from GigaOm awhile back, “What happens to advertising in a world of streams?” is worth a read.
Digital advertising is becoming more intrinsic to apps and experiences, more native. Think Facebook’s Sponsored Stories or Twitter’s Promoted Tweets. Display ads get more obnoxious – and less effective – every day.
Right now, most online real estate advertising isn’t elegant. The block ad, the directory listing, the lead-gen form placement – they all sit somewhat outside the user experience, and don’t add value to it.
They also won’t translate into a world where, IDX rules be damned, listings will flow to users in a hundred different ways and real estate search, with all of its ad impressions, collapses.
People will get just the listing they want when and how they want it. Maybe it’s a push notification triggered by a geo-fence. Or a property photo flung from an magazine-style tablet app onto a television using Apple TV.
So, what’s the real estate ad of the future? Who knows? I don’t. But I think it has something to do with content. A contribution from the agent advertiser, not a distraction.
There’s a touch of this baked into our Nudge app, but someone smart is going to get this right in a pure ad context. I hope.
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You become numb to stats about mobile usage after a while, but this is nuts: 1.3 million Android devices are activated every day.
The “Web page” is so 2010.
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Forget Steve Jobs. The person who created this is a design virtuoso.
Enjoy the weekend!
[Disclosure: Move, Inc. is a 1000watt client]
WOW. A lot of money mentioned and tossed around like its nothing!
Lets review what is going on with Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, etc – the Lead Farms :
Agents gather the listing data from a client that wants to sell his or her home. The listing is posted on MLS hoping to attract buyers – that is what we do – that is the real estate business.
Then the Lead Farms (RZT etc) aggregate the listings hoping to attract consumers so they can sell access to those they attract to the very agents and brokers that make their business possible in the first place.
Then the agents pass on that cost in the fees they charge the next client that wants to sell their home. It is a cost of doing business.
So, the parties that bring the value, the agents (and their clients) pay, while the Lead Farms get paid.
So, 300 million is invested on the bet that more will be paid to these companies by agents and their clients (all costs are passed on to the consumer in the end) – the folks that make the business possible in the first place.
Is this good for agents and consumers, or just good for the Lead Farms?
Does it matter?
While the agents starve
While families loose their homes
Money makes the world go round
On the cash front – shouldn’t Realogy’s cash balance be on your list (assuming a successful IPO)?
From my seat out here in the sleepy Midwest, it seems they would be in the best position to dominate the whole space – they control the listings and participate in the transaction – isn’t that where the action ($) is?
What am I missing?
As an “add-on” – I do realize your list was for “big online real estate players” – I just can’t imagine that tag isn’t on Realogy’s list of things to do.
But……I’ve been wrong before
Thanks,
These companies are maggots that feed on the host.
The trend is to take without adding value and that can only go on for so long. All one has to do is pull out a calculator to see that the numbers don’t add up in terms of agents that actually sell enough homes to make a living vs. companies vying for their dollar.
This is basically VC’s trying to make some quick $$ in the space and then move on — more maggots.
Brian – you are obsessed with Realogy for some reason. Their ship sailed long ago…
Crea,
(re: Realogy) – not obsessed, more curious how such a large organization with so much potential and opportunity stays so quiet – especially when it seems so simple for them to compete for re portal dollars.
- They do business on just about every corner in every community – seems like a no-brainer to take (big-portal) market-share. Again, they control a large % of the listings and have their fingers in the commission – two great attributes to launch something cool – just my opinion.
Thanks,
It is going to be interesting to see some prospective competitors attempt to get a slice of the real estate market – fact of the matter is that there is only so much space within the business sphere occupied by these big players.