Big time acquisition
As we implied in 2011, this year has been the year of acquisitions as real estate media companies line up their ten year plans, no longer competing just for consumers’ eyeballs on listings and traffic, but competing to be the tool to meet real estate practitioners’ business needs.
Move, Inc. owns and operates Realtor.com, Top Producer, ListHub, HomeInsight, and has already acquired SocialBios, announcing today its newest addition, TigerLead, for a cool $22 million in cash. TigerLead co-founders Howard Tager, Art Sawyer, and Adam Ingersoll will continue to run the company’s business supported by their management team, leaving all talent in tact.
TigerLead is a tech company out of Los Angeles that captures, cultivates, and manages buyer and seller leads for agents, teams, and brokers.
Move, Inc. explains in a statement, “This unique platform provides a potent closed-cycle system that combines strong Search Engine Marketing (SEM) expertise with a sophisticated IDX platform and lead management system to help agents generate “Smarter Leads,” leads that are delivered with unique insights such as how many times a user has returned to the site to search, price ranges and the amount of times homes are viewed.”
“This key information and analytical data can help real estate professionals take that next step in enhancing relationships and connections via a deep understanding of consumer wants and needs,” the company adds.
This analytical data is the missing piece of many lead management offerings, particularly because they are not tied to any of the original sources of data.
What’s next?
In the race to become the Realtors’ main tool, this puts Move, Inc. one step closer, but there are still some gaps that need to be filled in order to dominate the space. The company has no answer to real estate professionals’ most frequently used tools (the phone), so watch for them to acquire a voicemail management system like BetterVoicemail, and they also lack a full contract management suite that makes agents completely paperless, so look for an acquisition of a company like DotLoop.
No longer are consumers the target – the big three already have that on lock. Big moves like this are going to dominate the real estate news cycle for the rest of the year as the technology arms race is pieced together by acquisitions of companies like TigerLead.
