My name is Steve Jarrell, and I'm CEO of VisualTour.com (www.VisualTour.com). There's another side of this story that needs to be considered. While on the surface it would appear that HomeStore has "opened the door" for other virtual tour vendors, consider the possibility that this is simply an attempt for HomeStore to charge brokers and agents for a service that should be provided at no cost. The author of this article states: "Homestore.com will charge a service fee to process, host, display and distribute virtual tours on Realtor.com, and that may or may not upset some agents, but one thing is certain. The age of free is over on the Internet, with some rare exceptions." In the press release on Homestore's site dated January 16th, Stuart Wolff says "Based on research and consumer feedback, it is clear that home buyers are requesting virtual tours..." REALTOR.com, like the other major portals, rely on one thing, and one thing only to drive traffic to their sites.... CONTENT!!! Virtual tours are extremely valuable content. The idea of charging the agent to provide valuable content to the portal is ludicrous! I have a simple question... if Homestore / REALTOR.com should be charging agents to display their virtual tours, why shouldn't they also charge them to display the textual listing information? The fact is that without listing information Homestore doesn't have a business. Are agents and brokers getting a "free ride" when the textual listing information is shown on REALTOR.com??? Of course not. REALTOR.com is using the listing information to attract "eyeballs" to their site, and virtual tours are equally (if not more) valuable. We have literally thousands of customers, and we have discussed this matter with them repeatedly over the past year. They don't feel, and neither do we, that they should be asked to PAY ANY portal for providing that portal with extremely valuable content that drives traffic to their site. Saying that you have a freedom of choice in virtual tours, but the virtual tour vendor must host their tours on Homestore's servers, and must pay Homestore a per tour fee is a joke. It's like saying that you have a choice of cars, but all of the automobile manufacturers have to use Ford engines and transmissions, and they have to pay Ford a royalty on each car sold. Ridiculous??? You bet it is! The results would be much higher prices and limited innovation which leads to inferior products... the customer loses. Of course, it's a great deal for Ford. We have made numerous automatic linking deals in the last few months with portals that previously had exclusionary linking agreements in place with iPIX / Homestore (including our automatic linking with Yahoo! announced yesterday). There will be many more forthcoming in the next few months. These portals have decided to give agents TRUE freedom of choice. I wonder how long it will take the portal that supposedly has the closest ties to the REALTOR community via their agreement with NAR to do the same thing? Steve Jarrell CEO sjarrell@VisualTour.com www.VisualTour.com

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