Has Classified Ventures been flying under the online real estate community's radar? Suddenly, it is emerging as a formidable competitor.

Classified Ventures, a company owned by seven leading news media companies, has just announced the launch of its new portal, HomeScape.com. HomeScape.com is a destination dotcom with a full scope of services relating to the buying, selling, renting, moving or financing of a home or apartment.

Now HomeScape.com's family of sites is under one roof. The site is composed of five nationally branded online services, which include HomeFinder.com, NewHomeNetwork.com, Apartments.com, MovingCenter.com and iOwn.com. HomeHunter™ is a local-only resale solution offered through the Web sites of select newspapers.

Well funded and with a slightly different take on how to grow its brands than its competitors, Classified Ventures is also into other online consumer goods. It is the owner of killer URLs such as auctions.com and cars.com, and Marketdrive Interactive, Inc., an e-customer relationship management company.

While the rest of the home buy/sell/rent sector competes over listings and loan/transaction management platforms, Classified Ventures has been quietly building the name recognition of its brands.

Apartments.com, its apartment search and rental subsidiary, and a member of the Homescape portal, is reaching more renters than any other site, according to a recent Media Metrix report for June 2000.

Boasting the highest number of unique visitors and page views, Apartments.com's traffic grew to more than 715,000 unique visitors in June, 9.15 million unique page views and a competitive reach of .9 percent, the highest in all three categories. Spokespersons for the site say that Apartments.com's unique visitors have consistently increased since November of last year until overtaking its competitors this month.

HomeScape's other offspring, NewHomeNetwork.com, also moved to the number one position in traffic in its category - new homes, according to the June Media Metrix report. Noteworthy is that both Apartments.com and NewHomeNetwork.com's victories came before the launch of parent Homespace.com.

So what is giving the company an edge? Nepotism at its best. Classified Ventures online children have to play nicely with the company's newspaper affiliates across the country - they buy ads from each other. The system is ingenious in its simplicity - ad revenues for the older siblings, exposure and cross-revenues for the new kids on the block. This amounts to significant exposure as Classified Ventures has a network of more than 130 newspapers.

Classified Ventures expects the traffic to only increase to HomeScape and its subsidiaries. Not only will the subsidiarires get individual ads, they will get a boost from HomeScape.com's ad presence in all of these markets, and vice versa.

Compounding the smart ad buys are the online Web sites of the 134 newspaper affiliates, including high-profile publications such as Chicago Tribune, Washington Post , Los Angeles Times, The New York Timesand USA Today.

If the site had a theme song, it would have to be "We are fam-i-ly."