Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
14 Oct 2016 Acquired Zillow + Trulia (with Zillow Group CFO Kathleen Philips)
“You know, one stat about that is what I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation which is we think we touch about 4% of transactions and we think we have a small percentage of advertising spend by real estate agents.”
— Speaker unverified
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
- Attribution
- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 14 Oct 2016
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…And we have never had a story like that. It’s pretty awesome. He seems like quite a cool guy in character as you would imagine from that. So, that was sort of all the pre-close challenges, well, the pre-announce challenges. Then the post-announcement challenges start. So, this deal underwent a serious amount of FTC and government regulatory scrutiny, right? There were two requests for information which is uncommon. Typically the FTC will make one request for information in reviewing coming to decision which they ultimately decided that Trulia and Zillow was not, but whether this merger would create a monopoly in the market, which obviously would be illegal. So typically they’ll do one request but in this case, they did two and that’s usually taken as a bad sign by the market and indeed when that happened, the share prices reacted negatively. What was all that drama like? I mean, you guys must have been on knife’s edge. Yeah. It was a pretty nerve-racking period for all of us. I essentially spent four months in DC full-time trying to get the deal pushed through. For those out there who aren’t familiar with the FTC approach in this kind of case, what they’re trying to determine is what is the correct definition of a market and once they have defined that market, then whether there is monopoly of pricing power in the market based upon the combination. The FTC was having fits and starts about is the online real estate portal market in market onto itself? Our view was no, I mean most of the activity that takes place in this market takes place way outside of where we are. You know, one stat about that is what I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation which is we think we touch about 4% of transactions and we think we have a small percentage of advertising spend by real estate agents. That being said, if you look solely at consumer transaction to real estate portals only, we're pretty big. So, tons of back and forth and economic analysis, hours and hours and hours of depositions, and ultimately we think they reached the right decision, but I had a lot of sleepless nights, I can tell you that. And for me personally, I felt like the weight of the deal was on me running this process that we had. Not only corp dev but also general counsel, right?…
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