Infoseek Corp. announced today that it teamed up with HomeShark Inc. and HouseNet in a multi-million dollar deal to augment the portal’s Real Estate Channel.
The partnership follows a busy week on the real estate front with Microsoft, Excite, and AOL all making real estate-related announcements.
Under today’s agreement, HomeShark becomes the anchor partner for Infoseek’s new Real Estate Loan Center. Users will be able to access rate quotes, calculate their purchasing power, and apply online for a discounted mortgage.
HouseNet will act as a content provider, giving homeowners ideas and resources for home improvement as well as household and gardening tips, the
firms said.
“On the Internet, people can discover tremendous time and money savings ideas,” said Lynn Forbes, executive producer of Infoseek. “Making HouseNet and HomeShark accessible to our millions of users throughout the site gives Infoseek the opportunity to build a broader and more valuable real estate service network that just makes life easier for our users.”
According to the companies, Infoseek will receive media revenue (financial specifics were not disclosed) as well as payment per click for directing consumers to HomeShark.
With the addition of these latest agreements, Infoseek reported that its Real Estate Channel is now generating an estimated $5 million in total sponsorship revenue per year with an additional $2 million in potential commerce revenue annually.
Infoseek already has agreements with real estate partners including Realtor.com, GetSmart, and Apartments.com to provide services such as home and apartment listings, virtual tours, realtor references, mortgage loan finders, moving resources, insurance quotes, home improvement resources and lawn and garden ideas.
Earlier this week Microsoft announced
plans to launch a real estate-related Web site, Excite expanded its real
estate resource in a deal with REALTOR.com, and AOL unveiled its Mortgage
section in the online service’s Personal Finance Channel featuring financial software provider Intuit.
Yahoo! recently jumped on the real estate bandwagon as well with the launch of Yahoo! Real Estate.
