eBay Inc.®, (NASDAQ: EBAY), has announced that it has acquired HomesDirect, the leading provider of online foreclosure-related auction services. The HomesDirect acquisition will significantly expand eBay's real estate category on the web and offer more choices to home buyers and sellers than ever before.
"HomesDirect is a natural fit for eBay," said Doug Galen, General Manager of eBay Real Estate. "They have demonstrated that online auctions are a viable model for buying and selling real estate, with a unique platform that helps homes sell more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional methods. In so doing, they bring tremendous benefit to their government partners, lenders, agents, brokers and homebuyers."
Galen said that eBay Real Estate has focused on "what has made eBay great and how it translates to real estate." The lessons learned are predominately two-fold:
- building a marketplace where none existed or they were scattered, and
- reducing the unnecessarily high transaction costs by making it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other.
Pasadena-based HomesDirect, which will continue to operate under its own name as an "eBay Company," is an efficient online marketplace for the buying and selling of foreclosed properties. They were responsible for the sale of over 116,000 homes in 2000, all of which were sold on the Internet via auction.
Realtors remain as an integral part of the home buying process and are key to completing the transaction in the HomesDirect business model. HomesDirect will continue to operate its own web site and eBay will add a foreclosure link to their site.
Tower Communications, a wholly owned subsidiary of HomesDirect, handles all of the Housing and Urban Development foreclosure properties and the majority of Veterans Administration properties.
They recently began expanding their market position by forging relationships with Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corporation, Option One Mortgage Corporation and Bank of America's Equicredit division.
HomesDirect President Todd Coyle believes the acquisition will strengthen the company's efforts to serve the lending community, saying, "This relationship gives us more credibility than ever, not only with our government partners, but also in our continued expansion into relationships with leading lending institutions."
eBay, founded in 1995, created a powerful platform for the sale of goods and services by a passionate community of individuals and businesses. On any given day, there are
millions of items across thousands of categories for sale on eBay, as well as on Half.com, eBay's site dedicated to fixed price trading. eBay enables trade on a local, national and international basis with customized sites in markets around the world.
Pat Rioux
