A lot of ink had been used about the self-proclaimed price tag of $5B that Landmark Communications put on the Weather Channel (and weather.com).
However, in our little niche of online real estate it appears to have been largely overlooked that the CEO of Landmark Communications also mentioned he’d like to sell Dominion Enterprises and that the sale could occur as soon as this summer… This means that some pretty big real estate properties, including eNeighborhoods, Advanced Access, Harmon Homes, and homes.com, could end up with new owners before long.
Here’s a question – with eNeighborhoods’ rollout of MLS Alliance – what would the buyer do with all of the contracts for MLS data?
Jim,
My guess is that the buyers wouldn’t necessarily want to mess with anything (good) that eNeighborhoods has going.
I’m also thinking of the fact that they just agreed to run the backend of Realogy’s national websites (they already run the backend of the re/max sites) and I can think of at least one company that would almost definitely be interested in that contract. 😉
Dustin: Can HomeStore afford it or get financing for a piece of the Real Estate space in this environment?
I think as the economy continues to stumble more and more internet properties will become available. There’s already rumors in our industry but it’s tough to invision someone spending 50-200 million for a site that could effectively be built now for 1/50th of that.
It’s going to be an interesting 10-12 months as we see a lot of premier properties come to the selling block.
OMG, I was surprised to see this subject on the wordpress home page. I work for Advanced Access. I’ve been working there since a month after Dominion bought us. We (The lower level people) just heard about this ourselves, but it has felt like things were not good for a while. Advanced Access has been under a lot of pressure to lower costs and raise the profits. I guess we couldn’t do enough, so Landmark is dumping us. I don’t blame them because that’s how the American corporate world goes, but I think they should give it more time. Most, if not all of the sites that they are selling have to do with real estate. The real estate industry is in a slump, but that doesn’t mean it will be like this forever. Real estate is always a good investment over the long term.
Tom: Depends on how much NAR is willing to pay to get out of their R.com contract. 😉
In reality, Move has plenty of financing options at the moment. They are still sitting on a pile of cash and if anything my guess is that investors are probably a bit frustrated that the company decided to run a $50M stock buy-back with part of the money rather than invest in companies/tools that will grow revenue.
Best of luck John Doe! Please feel free to stop back by any time to give us an update on the changes from the inside of Advanced Access! 🙂
Yeah, definitely. I’m gonna keep an eye on this one too. I’m hoping to hear from other people under dominion. Maybe someone out knows if I should be polishing my resume or not. lol
Advanced Access I am sure will mess all this up. Their known for this. Their management I hear is like a 3 ring circus with the directors at the helm!
Wow, John Morris, the founder of Advanced Access saying such horrible things about the company? That’s not good. I guess he doesn’t like the way things have gone since he sold the company to Dominion. lol
Dustin, I started at Advanced Access years ago and still have many freinds in upper management, not to mention John Morris is a dear freind of mine. I would say this is a “fake John Morris” not actually John himself.
Robert, I hate it when people wrongly impersonate others, so I’m going to change the name to anonymous.