Online real estate play Homestore.com Inc., trying to battle back after
suffering staggering losses in an accounting fiasco, has renegotiated the
terms of its deal with a national Realtor’s group to save itself a little
money.
Westlake Village, Calif.-based Homestore , through its
RealSelect subsidiary, operates REALTOR.com, the official Web site of the
National Association of Realtors.
In its proxy statement filed recently with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Homestore said that the agreement had called for the company to
“make quarterly royalty payments of up to 15 percent of RealSelect’s
operating revenue in the aggregate…”
The new agreement calls for a fixed payment to the Realtor group for 2002 of
$1.175 million in two installments of $587,500 due on June 1, and Dec. 15.
Next year the payment will be $1.3 million in four installments, and the
schedule gradually increases through 2006.
Precisely how much will be saved is unclear but anything Homestore can do to
save a buck or a couple of hundred thousand will help, as the company
recently reported a
2001 loss of almost $1.5 billion and warned about the bills from its
lawyers.
The accounting bills will be pretty hefty, also – the proxy statement reveals
that for 2001, PricewaterhouseCoopers billed the company about $8.8 million
for auditing and related services, and another $3.2 million for “other fees
and tax matters.”
Homestore ran into
trouble when it began to account for bartered ads on a cash basis and was
forced to disclose that it had overstated revenues by millions of dollars.
The company has said that in the first nine months of 2001, certain
transactions resulting in the recognition of $81.6 million in revenue, were
improperly recorded as cash transactions. The company also determined that in
the same period, revenue from software products and services of $37.4 million
did not meet all revenue recognition requirements. For the year 2000 $36.4
million in ad revenue had been improperly recorded as independent cash
transactions.
Now, under
new management, the company apparently wants to shed the dot com part of
its name as well. A number of other Internet companies have moved to
de-dot-com their names as well in the wake of the Internet recession.
Homestore’s network of Web sites includes the flagship REALTOR.com;
HomeBuilder.com; Homestore Apartments & Rentals; and Homestore.com, a home
information resource.
