Commercial Property

Realty Viewpoint: Microsoft-Yahoo! Merger Won"t Trump Realtor.com When It Comes To Real Estate

Wall Street is buzzing about Microsoft"s extremely generous offer to buy Yahoo! for $45 billion, which is a 62 percent premium over what Yahoo! closed the market for on Thursday before the offer was made public. By Friday, the shares had doubled in price. The deal, once consummated, will create a viable competitor to Google. Google has 56.3 market share of online searches, while Yahoo! (17.7 percent) and MSN (13.8) combined have about 31.5 percent. The battle of these titans should shake up the consumer experience, including buyers looking for real estate. Both companies have been heavily courting Realtors, franchises, MLSs and any other source of listings and advertising. It might surprise you to learn that the number one topic searched on the Internet isn"t Britney Spears or Super Bowl ads. It"s real estate. An astounding 58 percent of Internet searches are on Google, which also registers about 58 percent of all real estate searches. So this contest matters, but as long as Microsoft is throwing money around, it should think about acquiring Move.com. Here"s why. In real estate, neither MSN or Yahoo! is number one. That honor belongs to Realtor.com, the most visited website on the Web, according to comScore, a traffic-tracking firm. Realtor.com is the official website of the National Association of Realtors, and is operated for the NAR through an iron-clad agreement with Move.com. Out of more than 100 real estate sites tracked by Hitwise, Realtor.com was number one with an 8.03 market share in December. It has the most listings of any real estate website, and reached about 4.4 million consumers in December, and that was one of the worst months in real estate history. And it doesn"t hurt that number two was Move.com, with 2.73 percent market share. For one-third of homebuyers, searching for homes on the Internet is the first step they take. Eighty-four percent of buyers use the Internet in the home search process, says NAR. Most buyers (54 percent) used local multiple listing services, which is understandable, but the next most popular site was Realtor.com, probably because most consumers realize that Realtor.com gets the majority of its listings from MLS organizations. And like all real-estate-related stocks, Move.com has taken a beating lately. Gone are the high-flying days when tech stocks were king, and Move.com (then called Homestore) beat Microsoft"s HomeAdvisor to a bloody pulp. It would be a good time for Microsoft to pick up its old nemesis at a bargain price -- not for revenge, but because it would be a good move, no pun intended. Realtor.com"s traffic is high-quality. Users spend 110 minutes versus 13 minutes on Yahoo!. That"s an 800 percent difference. Not even close. And that brings us to revenues. Total ad spending on real estate was down three percent in 2007, but spending online grew 25.8 percent, hitting $2.6 billion, says Borrell Associates. At this rate, online real estate advertising will grow 12.4 percent in 2008. So if it"s market share Microsoft is after, that can be obtained rather easily by bidding for the strongest search portals, but you also have to think about where consumers dock. And in real estate, that"s Realtor.com.


Add your comment:
Name:
Site address: http://
Your message:
Enter today\\\\'s date, 2 digits
(spam protection):

Categories
Commercial Property
Estate and mortgage
Investment property
Primary market
Property Management
Real Estate News
Rent Real Estate
Resales
Residential Real Estate
Technology Transactions
News of the day
Learning from the Loss of a Client
The real estate business can be brutal on the emotions. Most of us, at one time or another, have had to deal with the emotional toll of losing a client. It hurts to have a person you know you did a super job for in the past, who you"ve kept in contact with and seemingly done all the right things to create a client for life, make a move without you. Do you take it to heart and get depressed, or perhaps downright angry? Or, do you use it as an opportunity to take a hard look at your business and see what can be learned?
Popular Articles
pounds till payday

Housing Counsel: Should you Litigate or Arbitrate
Question: We bought our house about a year ago. Recently, we discovered a number of defects, which were not disclosed to us by the sellers. For example, we were told that the electricity had been upgraded, when it was not. We were also told that there never was a water problem in the basement, but some recent rainstorms have literally flooded the downstairs area. We have reason to believe that the sellers flat out misrepresented certain facts in the seller disclosure form which they gave us.

Go Beyond Bankruptcy Law To Screen Debt Counselors
The new federal bankruptcy law helps take some -- but not all -- of the guesswork out of choosing a debt counseling service -- also called a credit counseling service.

© Copyright 2009