The National Association of REALTORS (NAR) launched a new commercial real estate listing service called Commercial Source yesterday. The new site can be found at www.commercialsource.com and should offer the commercial real estate leader LoopNet.com a run for their money. With the strong backing of NAR, Commercial Source already has a leg up on the competition.
Browsing the site I found it to be laid out well, with an attractive design. As an investor, though, one problem I came across was with the property searches. It doesn’t appear that they have any sort of advanced search, and their available options are a bit limited. If I’m trying to narrow down my search to a specific type of property, I'm going to have a more difficult time on this site than LoopNet, for example.
As this is a new site, though, I’m sure changes such as this will come with time. For a first release, I think NAR did a good job on this site and I will definitely be keeping my eye on Commercial Source. Other than LoopNet, I really haven’t been impressed with any of the other commercial real estate listing sites out there, so this new competition is welcome in my eyes. Hopefully this pushes both sites to make improvements and become even better.
Labels: NAR, real estate, Realtor.com
The D3 Family Funds (Camas, Wash.), a shareholder group of Realtor.com operator Move Inc. is seeking for the dismissal of Move’s CEO Mike Long and CFO Lewis R. Belote III over a $129.9 million securities investment from student loan financing groups that has not performed as anticipated.
The auction-rate securities market features investments in municipal or corporate bonds which have long-term maturity and interest rates established through an auction. Because of recent failures in the market, Move’s investment in federally supported student loan auction-rate securities has not performed as anticipated.
While D3 Family Funds are not concerned about the financial status of Move Inc. or their current business plans with Realtor.com, they are concerned with the company’s choice to invest about 74 percent of the company’s liquid assets in a riskier short term investment like auction-rate cash, because they claim that money could have been used to more safely build the company with long-term investments. Even after reporting over $5 million in revenue increases from 2007-2008, the company still reported a $4 million loss for all of 2007, and a $5.3 million fourth-quarter loss that same year.
In November of 2005, private equity group Elevation Partners (including team members Fred Anderson, former EVP and CFO for Apple and U2 front man, Bono) announced a stock investment of $100 million in Move Inc. As of this announcement in early March, Elevation Partners had no comment.Labels: Apple, auction-rate securities, Bono, D3 Family Funds, Elevation Partners, Fred Anderson, investors, Move Inc., Realtor.com, student loans, U2
A lawsuit filed by ActiveRain against Move Inc. has finally received clearance for a court date and jury trial that will take place in December. Move Inc. (formerly Homestore) is a public company that operates move.com and Realtor.com through a contract with the National Association of Realtors (NAR) trade group. ActiveRain is a social networking online community with close to 75,000 members who use the site for interest groups, blogging and online networking.Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that Move Inc. approached ActiveRain in hopes of purchasing their website, and then intentionally fell into breach of contract by engaging in fraudulent activity and unfair competition during the failed acquisition. Move has countered that they believe their actions were without malicious intent, and conducted in fairness.The lawsuit further alleges that officials at ActiveRain were misled when they were told that the acquisition was nearly complete. They believe this is further proof that Move was trying to acquire “highly sensitive material about its members and its network or platform in electronic format, in anticipation of the supposed impending closing.”Both parties are currently in the process of gathering data and depositions.
Labels: ActiveRain, lawsuits, Move Inc., NAR, real estate, Realtor, Realtor.com, technology
