Mediaboss Marketing

By Ari Levy and Serena Saitto Print Article

(BloombergBusinessweek)Trulia Inc., an Internet startup focused on residential real estate, hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) to manage its initial public offering, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The San Francisco-based company is likely to go public in the second half of this year and will be valued at less than $1 billion, said the people, who declined to be named because the talks are private. Trulia is also working with Class V Groups Lise Buyer, who advises startups on IPOs, the people said.

Trulia, a rival to Zillow (Z) Inc., provides a search engine used by over 20 million people a month to look for homes in specific neighborhoods. It also offers reviews on local schools and crime rates. The company makes money through ads on the site and subscriptions that let real estate agents target users and get their listings featured prominently.

Trulia is capitalizing on the best stretch of Internet IPOs in more than a decade, with LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), Groupon Inc. and Zynga Inc. all going public in the past year. Trulia is following the lead of fellow real estate website Zillow, which went public in July and has since jumped 77 percent to a valuation of almost $1 billion. While Zillow has more revenue, Trulia is growing faster, the people said.

Ken Shuman, a spokesman for Trulia, declined to comment, as did JPMorgan representative Jennifer Zuccarelli and Deutsche Banks Duncan King. Buyer said she doesnt disclose which companies shes working with.

Staffing Up

Trulia has been bolstering its executive ranks. In December, it hired Sean Aggarwal, former vice president of finance at EBay Inc.s PayPal unit, as chief financial officer. The company also named former Imperva Inc. executive Scott Darling as general counsel. Early last year, it hired former Yahoo! Inc. executive Paul Levine as its operating chief.

Chief Executive Officer Pete Flint co-founded the company in 2005 with Sami Inkinen, Trulias president. Trulia has raised $33 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co.

Trulia hasnt disclosed its revenue or profit. Sales at Seattle-based Zillow, meanwhile, more than doubled last year to $66.1 million. It reported net income of $1.1 million, following a loss of $6.77 million the prior year.

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Trulia Is Said to Pick JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank to Manage Its IPO

With Chinese accounting scandals back in the news , emerging market investors are looking for security. Real estate internet and home furnishings portal SouFun Holdings ( SFUN , quote ) offers security plus a few other good reasons to invest.

SouFun Holdings offers marketing, listing and other services and products for China's real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors, and as such is a play on China's fast growing middle class.

Paying responsible dividends is one of the best indicators of an honest company , and SouFun Holdings has a dividend yield of 11.09%. That compares extremely favorably with the average 2% dividend yield for a stock on the S&P 500 Index ( SPY , quote ).

SouFun's other financials are equally attractive. It has a healthy profit margin of 29.55%, and an unusually strong return-on-investment of 77.18%. Institutional investors own almost 40% of the company's shares, an indication of confidence on their part.

SFUN has a high level of debt, but that's not necessarily bad news. It indicates the company has been vetted by local lenders, who can do more due diligence than an investor thousands of miles away. It's telling that many Chinese companies proven to be fraudulent had no debt at all.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

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Looking for security – and high dividends? Check out SouFun Holdings

NEW YORK, April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- AllianceBernstein L.P. today announced the closing of its first private equity real estate fund, AllianceBernstein U.S. Real Estate Partners, L.P., (the "Fund") with capital commitments of $680 million. Commitments to the Fund were received from several large, global institutional investors, including Temasek, the Singapore-based investment company, Alberta Teachers Retirement Fund, as well as institutions from the U.S., Hong Kong and Japan. In addition, numerous AllianceBernstein private clients and employees made commitments to the Fund. With additional co-investment capital from key strategic investors, the Fund could have approximately $900 million of available equity.

The Fund represents an important milestone for AllianceBernstein, which formed the Real Estate Group in September 2009 in order to build out a preeminent private equity real estate platform by leveraging the firm's current resources and existing infrastructure. The Real Estate Group is led by co-CIO's Brahm Cramer and Jay Nydick as well as managing director, Adam Brooks. Mr. Cramer and Mr. Brooks each spent their careers prior to joining AllianceBernstein with Goldman Sachs. Mr. Cramer co-headed the firm's Real Estate Principal Investment Area and Mr. Brooks built and led the firm's real estate mezzanine investing businesses. Mr. Nydick had most recently been the President of iStar Financial, the NYSE listed real estate specialty finance company, where he built several innovative new credit-based businesses.

"As a first time fund, we are thrilled with the success of our capital raise within a very difficult fundraising environment," said Brahm Cramer, co-CIO of the AllianceBernstein Real Estate Group. "We believe this is a credit to the AllianceBernstein network, the favorable investment environment for real estate and the early investments we have made. We are excited to partner with investors who share our strategic vision of creating value through the resolution of complex restructurings and recapitalizations of distressed real estate assets across the U.S."

To date, the Fund has committed more than $200 million of equity across six separate transactions. These investments include recapitalizations of distressed loans secured by office buildings in San Jose, California and suburban Seattle, a limited service hospitality portfolio and a residential land site in New Jersey. The Fund has also made direct real estate acquisitions including multifamily portfolios in Manhattan and in the Southeast U.S.

"We are pleased with the pace of investments and the make-up of the current portfolio," said Jay Nydick, the Real Estate Group's co-CIO. "We believe the current investments confirm our ability to execute our strategy and to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns through the resolution of situational distress."

The Fund is actively seeking debt and equity investment opportunities across all property types and geographic locations throughout the United States with a current focus on the recapitalization of distressed assets. The Fund is looking to make investments of $20-100 million per transaction and expects to invest in partnership with talented local market operators, existing owners of assets and in conjunction with borrowers seeking to recapitalize assets or entities.

About AllianceBernstein

AllianceBernstein is a leading global investment management firm that offers high-quality research and diversified investment services to institutional investors, individuals and private clients in major world markets.

At March 31, 2012, AllianceBernstein Holding L.P. (NYSE: AB - News) owned approximately37.9% of the issued and outstanding AllianceBernstein Units and AXA, one of the largest global financial services organizations, owned an approximate63.5% economic interest in AllianceBernstein.

Additional information about AllianceBernstein may be found on our internet site, http://www.alliancebernstein.com.

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AllianceBernstein Closes Its First Private Equity Real Estate Fund

By Mark Toppenberg Print Article

In 2012, online real estate marketing promises to be more challenging than ever before for real estate agents and brokers. This is largely due to the sheer number of competitors that have been, or are finally becoming Internet savvy in their marketing efforts. While being an expert on search engines isnt attractive to many people, developing an overall strategy to win search engine placement on the web is now critical and should be a cornerstone in promoting your personal or professional brand and generating a steady source of ongoing leads. Organic search engine placement is a powerful way to gain dominance over your competitors in the single largest area where your customers are initiating the process of which home to buy or sell and deciding which agent to hire.

Understanding the basic principles behind how search engines work today can take you a long way in your online marketing efforts, primarily because you wont be chasing trends that have already been debunked or devalued. People who work in the search engine optimization industry basically have a place in business, because search engine algorithms change frequently and have a direct impact on how your web pages rank for money making keywords. Being proactive and making changes in how you optimize, design and create content around a web page in alignment with algorithm changes can really make a difference between transactions and no transactions.

In the past year, Google has made some changes that have a far reaching impact on search. Lets take a look at some of the most critical of these and go over some of the steps you can take to make the most of new opportunities and changes that can be made to mitigate negative results.

April 11, 2011 Global release of site quality algorithm known as Panda. If you havent heard about this, you really need to read on. This algorithm change was meant to weed out the overabundance of low quality, low content web pages in Googles index and a ton of sites took a big hit on this, even those whose webmasters perceived their content to be high quality and high value for the public.

This first rollout just blew up the search community. Industry blogs were on fire and SEOs were frantically watching their analytic reports to see what, if any impact the rollout would have on their clients sites. What was quickly discovered is that sites that were low on content and high on links and advertisements lost their ranking and therefore quite a bit of their traffic. Some sites were hit by friendly fire, but since this was an algorithm change, there was no possibility of appeal.

What this meant to a lot of owners of real estate websites was that a re-evaluation of their online content was in order. What many real estate marketers dont understand about this new update is all of the copied content (even from authority sources or library content made available to them by their website provider) was hurting them, badly. If you have analytics installed on your site, you can see if you were affected by analyzing your traffic graph since last April. If you do see a measurable drop in traffic, you can take steps to repair the damage by removing any content that is available across other websites or moving this material to a sub domain or another domain entirely, if you think its really valuable to your consumer.

SEOs have been preaching about quality content for years, but this algorithm update and its subsequent post rollout updates require that your content truly be something of value, not just the bare minimum to get by. You may consider providing a lot of Q&A focused content thats truly in depth. It should be content that cannot be easily found on any other real estate agents website. If you really want to help yourself, make sure to either write your own high quality, themed and valuable content or contract it out to a skilled writer. Either way, its no guarantee that youll be back ranking in the SERPs. The Panda algorithm update is an ongoing roll out so Google is tweaking it along the way to ensure their users have the best search experience possible.

November 3, 2011 Freshness Update announced. This is an extension of an earlier algorithm update to take advantage of trending topics and focus on how recent information is. What you can do to capitalize on this is to write content on your pages about trending real estate topics. There is a huge opportunity to have pages rank that might not otherwise if you write an article about a hot button issue that is getting a lot of attention. While a blog post may only rank for a short time, you could theoretically get a new subscriber and nice bump in traffic for a short while, and all the little mentions and social shares on Google add up.

January 19, 2012 - Google Page Layout Algorithm. This dictates that content should be above the fold. This essentially means that when a user first accesses your website, value added content should be visible immediately. Dont make your consumer scroll down or fight through advertisements or pictures or links to get to something that tells them about the purpose of the page on which theyve landed. This is a gigantic hint to agents and brokers that rely on a big, pretty picture to capture consumer interest or junk up their pages with advertisers. If Google doesnt like it, youre never going to have the chance to dazzle consumers with your take on an aesthetically pleasing landing page and you will lose your hard-won advertisers.

Continued here:
Google’s Top Four Search Engine Changes: Why Every Real Estate Agent Should Care

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Akron and Cleveland aren't known for their warm and fuzzy relationship.

Yet two real estate boards, representing 4,500 professionals in Northeast Ohio, are considering a merger that might blur lines between the cities and build a stronger, unified voice to highlight housing issues in the region.

Across the country, nonprofit groups that represent real estate brokers and agents are talking about consolidation. Faced with changing technology and a challenging housing market, these local boards are fighting to stay relevant, effective and affordable for their members. Now the Cleveland Area Board of Realtors and the Akron Area Board of Realtors could become one large organization, in an effort to combat the loss of dues-paying members.

Leaders of both boards say the discussions are still in their infancy. But they're hoping to know this year whether they can pull off a smooth marriage between two major metropolitan real estate boards. As local governments and other nonprofits groups talk up regionalism, proponents point to an Akron-Cleveland real estate board as a model that can work -- and one that might encourage other, smaller boards to join.

"There are a lot of agencies in Northeast Ohio, and there are a lot of organizations that are doing great things," said Howard "Hoby" Hanna, president of Howard Hanna Ohio and a member of a task force discussing the potential Cleveland-Akron deal. "But sometimes, they're doing the same thing. ... If there was a little bit more consolidation, we might get more done."

Chartered by the 1 million-member National Association of Realtors, local real estate boards represent the interests of members, including residential and commercial real estate brokers, agents and appraisers.

Put simply, these boards aim to make the profession professional, through a code of ethics, common practices, education and shared market information accessible through private real estate listing services.

Nearly 1,400 Realtor boards and associations are scattered across the United States. Seventy-two percent of them have 300 or fewer members. Eight, in cities including Miami and Houston, are super-sized, with more than 10,000 members. AABOR and CABOR fall in the middle, with 1,367 and 3,147 members, respectively, according to the Ohio Association of Realtors.

A more regional board would provide the same services and support, with greater efficiency, said Joanne Zettl, chairwoman-elect of the Cleveland board and a Realtor with Street Sotheby's International Realty.

For consumers, she said, a merger could mean that real estate agents in the region will be better informed, with access to national speakers and higher-quality education on housing issues.

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Cleveland, Akron real estate boards may merge their houses, reflecting a consolidation trend