David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, hey, I want to talk a little bit about the MLS’s and data feeds, but maybe let’s do that quick, and then I really want to talk about Zillow Group’s overall acquisition strategy and sort of how it fits in the landscape for the next few years and kind, Kathleen, give you a chance to talk about that. So, let’s talk about kind of what happened in those – Well, real quick and then we’ll wrap up the history. The final twist in the story here is right before– So the FTC finally approves the merger in February and then it goes through and you close the deal. But right before that happens, both Trulia and Zillow were getting, I believe, if a not a majority, a significant amount of your real estate listings from a company called ListHub which is a data provider, which is actually owned by a third competitor in the market, Move. com, which had I believe just been acquired by News Corp. And ListHub actually cuts off both Trulia and Zillow from these data feeds which are the lifeblood of your business. And so you had this other wrinkle of like now you have to go rebuild your supply essentially from the ground up by signing direct data deals with all the MLS or your multiple listing service. For people who aren’t familiar with the market, these are local organizations that aggregate real estate listings as they come on the market. You need each city, each geography kind of within the country and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them and so all of a sudden now you guys have to go do these dev deals with all these folks directly. Wow. Can you just talk about that process, what that was like?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.