Comstock, one of the few real estate-centric Web site companies to weather the dot-com fallout, has just been purchased by FNIS, according to sources. But Comstock president David Camp won't confirm the sale has taken place as of late yesterday afternoon.

But sources not affiliated with the two companies say the sale has indeed taken place and ownership will transfer possibly as soon as July 1, 2002.

According to an earlier interview with Camp, Comstock is a $5 million privately-owned company that provides Web site lead generation services directly to brokers. Brokers purchase Web sites and can offer profile pages to their agents so they have a Web presence, or the brokers can serve as resellers for Comstock Web sites. Personal sites range about $37.50 per agent.

Camp said the company has about 500 broker Web sites currently which touch as many as 22,000 agents, including 9,000 personal agent Web sites the company has sold separately. The remaining 11,000 agents have presences on their brokers' Web sites. The majority of Comstock's customers are RE/MAX agents, as many as 90 percent, with the remainder affiliated with Century 21 and other franchise and independent agents.

FNIS is the largest aggregator of public records in the country, and it is acquiring companies faster than you can say Homestore. What does it want with a Web site company?

It could be that FNIS needs a brilliant way to charge for those records besides notoriously cheap MLS fees. What if those records could be turned into lead generation packages for individual agents or brokers?

"Our business model has changed," said Camp. "To some extent, a Web site is at least a commodity. What we have tried to do is we have tried to build into a Web site effective lead capture tools like scheduling an appointment to visit a property."

Continues Camp, "The change has been our technology has been of no value if we don't teach our customers to leverage to work smarter and earn more money."

To that end, Comstock has a three-part program called "Touch."

1. Presence - promote your Web presence with lead generation tools
2. Productivity - turns lead generation into customer care via follow up technologies that build trust with consumers
3. Precision - Comstock has a product called Radius that has Internet listings and agent data that is being pushed to the Web. The technology creates a postcard with the agent's new listing, for example, and the agent's contact information, and the postcard is dropped by the system to a local farming area. Within a certain radius, the system can identify people by household income, whether they own or rent, and other demographics and then target them as prospects.

Now where would Comstock get such data to generate leads for agents? They need a friend - with most of the tax roll data in the nation. This friend happens to need a new sales channel for that data as much as Comstock needs to come up with new lead generation ideas. It makes perfect sense. When you have captured most of the market and still have large valuations to defend, you have to come up with blue soft drinks or potato chips to keep going. Except that mailer lists that the customer never gets to see but gets leads from makes a whole lot more sense than repackaging an old product with a crazy new color.

Is it any wonder that a deal between FNIS and Comstock might be a match made in heaven?

There are many questions to be asked of FNIS when it gets out of its quiet period - like why the same thing couldn't be done through its MLS partnerships, but that will have to come later. And there may be much more to this partnership than the scenario above, but it's a good place to start.

Stay tuned.

Published: June 28, 2002

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