Businessweek

Market Leader, Inc. provides online technology and marketing solutions for real estate professionals across the United States and Canada. The company serves 125,000 real estate agents, brokerages, and franchisors. The company’s subscription-based real estate marketing software and services help customers generate a steady stream of prospects, plus provide the systems and training they need to convert those prospects into clients. In addition, its national consumer real estate sites, including www.realestate.com, give its customers access to various future home buyers and sellers, while providing consumers with free access to the information they seek. The company offers its services to real estate professionals, both directly and through marketing relationships with major franchise networks. The company provides a personalized, customer-branded Website, with multiple listing service integration, which is optimized to generate consumer response. It also enables real estate professionals to utilize a library of sales and marketing materials in order to design, create, publish, and manage their own personalized marketing campaigns. And the company provides tools to generate traffic and leads, and engages with all of their contacts and clients through its proprietary customer relationship management (CRM) tool. All of these services are delivered as one integrated solution. The company’s software-as-a-service based products are delivered primarily through a single software platform that could be configured and integrated with other services to create customized solutions for its enterprise customers. Its traditional lead-generation products, HouseValues and JustListed, delivered home seller or buyer leads to customers. Services for Customers — Real Estate Professionals The company provides the majority of its real estate professional customers with software-as-a-service-based marketing services, a bundle of services that might include some or all of the following: Software-as-a-service, including CRM tools, personalized Websites, marketing tools, and content designed to help the company’s customers build online relationships with prospective home buyers and sellers. Its cloud-based system helps its real estate professional customers manage and cultivate prospects. By automating majority of the repetitive tasks that are required in order to follow up and communicate with clients, these tools allow its customers to focus on transacting their business while marketing their services to clients, maintaining a pipeline of business opportunities. The company’s CRM tools also include proprietary real estate content and consumer email campaigns that its customers use to position themselves as technology-savvy neighborhood experts. Marketplace products utilize the company’s advertising expertise and utilize its national real estate Websites to produce leads in the local neighborhoods where its customers do business. Community and training services enable the company’s customers to share and learn practices to help them close business with Internet consumers. The company’s customers are invited to participate in company-hosted group coaching calls and peer-to-peer ‘best practices’ training conference calls. These community and training services also include social media and networking through its ActiveRain network. With approximately 330,000 members, this network is identified as a professional and social media site focused on the real-estate industry identified by the National Association of Realtors 2010 REALTOR Technology Survey Report. The company uses direct-response advertising to drive prospective home buyers and sellers to it real estate-oriented Websites. It advertises on major Internet search engines and other Websites, and sometimes supplements this advertising with national and local television advertising and other media to help manage and geographically target consumer traffic and lead volume. Strategy The company’s strategy is to utilize the resulting broad access to sell recurring subscriptions to its premium services, including both software upgrades and marketing services. Intellectual Property The company has 36 trademarks registered in the United States and 5 trademarks registered in Canada. It has four patents registered in the United States and one pending patent application. The company has also registered various Internet domain names related to its business in order to protect its proprietary interests. History Market Leader, Inc. was founded in 1999.