Cendant Corp. and Homestore have reached an agreement to settle their litigation.

Homestore will issue 250,000 shares of its stock to Cendant, a settlement valued at about $9.4 million. Although the amount is somewhat short of the $300 million in damages originally sought by Cendant it is actually almost $2.4 million more than the amount that Cendant would have received had Homestore honored its agreement in the first place.

In its original agreement, Cendant was to give Homestore's Realtor.com access to its real estate listing data in exchange for a cash fee and a letter saying Homestore would make a good faith effort to issue Cendant $7 million of private stock before it went public.

Homestore failed to issue Cendant any stock before its August IPO which prompted the retalitory lawsuit by Cendant.

All bad blood is washing under the bridge as both companies reaffirm their previous business arrangement which will allow Homestore to use Cendant brand's real estate listings culled from Century 21, ERA, and Coldwell Banker. In addition, Cendant will continue to endorse Homestore's Web page design and hosting services to its real estate brokers and agents.

The prize for Homestore is Cendant's exclusive third-party license to use Cendant's 400,000 electronic listings. The agreement does not preclude Cendant's posting of its brand's listings on its upcoming site CompleteHome.com, scheduled to debut in December.

The reason, explained by a Cendant spokesperson, is that CompleteHome.com is part of the Cendant family and not a third-party aggregator.

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Published: October 23, 1999

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