One of the coolest and catchiest domains in real estate – cyberhomes.com – has just changed hands … again.
This successful national real estate website providing property data and valuations is in many regards one of the best real estate websites around. Yet somehow it has remained a step child in our industry, floating from one foster home to another.
Let’s explore its unique journey and the reasons why, at the age of 15, this time it may be different.
The Inside Story
Cyberhomes was launched in 1995 by Moore Data Management Services, which was the largest real estate and MLS provider in North America at the time. This came as a surprise to most of the industry allowing Cyberhomes to move into the lead as one of the first meaningful initiatives providing the Web with MLS properties for sale. Other dominant players at the time included Homes.com, HomeSeekers.com, HomeScape.com, HomeAdvisor.com and of course, Realtor.com.
This launch in 1995 was a very bold move by a MLS provider. At that stage the Internet was still a strange and threatening phenomenon and I ranked Cyberhomes in 1999 as one of the Top 75 most exciting companies to watch in the new online world of real estate. For a detailed list read Real Estate Confronts the eConsumer (page 305, RealSure, Inc. 2000 www.swanepoel.com).
In 1999 San Diego-based VISTAinfo acquired cyberhomes.com making them the largest supplier of MLS information management systems in the country at the time — serving over 100 MLS organizations and 350,000 real estate professionals.
In 2001 Fidelity National Financial and VistaInfo completed a merger forming a new company called Fidelity National Information Solutions (FNIS), but in 2002 FNIS pulled the plug on Cyberhomes only to rebirth it in November 2006 under Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions (FNRES) with a whole new look and feel.
FNRES allocated $50 million to repositioning of cyberhomes.com as a consumer portal to serve home buyers and sellers. They moved fast and quickly concluded some significant strategic partnerships that included snatching away the AOL contract from Realtor.com to become AOL’s exclusive real estate provider.
The site’s journey took yet another sharp turn when Fidelity National Financial (NYSE: FNF) sold off its interest in FNIS, FNRES and Cyberhomes to Lender Processing Services (LPS) in February 2009.
The high profile 10-year agreement involving the creation of the Realtor® Property Resource (RPR) between the National Association of Realtors® and LPS was strategized by Dale Stinton, Dale Ross and Marty Frame and included among other things cyberhomes.com. (For extensive details on RPR read the latest edition of the Swanepoel TRENDS Report (pages 165, RealSure, Inc. 2010 www.retrends.com).
Now in the latest move LPS (www.lpsvcs.com) is selling cyberhomes.com to North Carolina-based Listingbook (www.listingbook.com); agreement signed but not yet final.
Listingbook LLC, was founded by Bob and Joan Milman in 1999 and an investment in 2007 placed the company on a national expansion track. Listingbook connects real estate agents and their clients through an integrated platform of client management, sales productivity and direct marketing tools usually offered in association with MLS providers and local Realtor® Boards.
Keeping them Honest
Listingbook chief operating officer Todd John says, “The acquisition of cyberhomes.com will enable Listingbook to generate more leads for our broker and agent clients and help them generate higher profits.” I am sure that is the case.
The cyberhomes.com website, once an industry leader, is still a popular and unique domain even though there has been a significant decline in traffic over the last year from about 1.1 million to about 160,000 unique visitors per month according to compete.com. Today the real estate industry is dominated by a few super sites such as Realtor.com (Move), Zillow, Trulia and Homes.com that boast three to seven million unique visitors per month.
It is interesting that John went to work for AOL in 2000 and later served as the Director of e-commerce and Advertising at Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner division before joining Listingbook in January 2008.
John says “Listingbook is very committed to staying true to the value proposition of making agents more productive.” This stems from founder Robert Milman, who foresaw that the Web could change the real estate industry and believed that the Internet would be the medium for an interactive, agent-centric community. Today Listingbook.com is a growing consumer-facing website that generates an undisclosed number of leads that is distributed at no cost to some 150,000 Listingbook users.
Maybe the marriage of cyberhomes.com with Listingbook is a good long term fit and the website can once again make a comeback. It already has “pre-dotcom crash” (yikes, that was 10 years ago) brand awareness; perhaps that doesn’t mean anything anymore, but then again maybe it does.
Let’s hope so – cyberhomes.com deserves a permanent home.
About the Author
During the last fourteen years, nineteen-time author Stefan Swanepoel has widely become regarded as the leading researcher on the business and technology trends impacting the real estate industry. For more information on his annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report and the annual Swanepoel SOCIAL MEDIA Report visit www.RETrends.com
