A couple of days ago, when Realty Times checked, eBay had 1027 residential listings, hardly making it the real estate juggernaut that it was feared to become back in 2001.

In 2001, the real estate exposure field was narrowing. Realtor.com still operated "gold alliance" MLS contracts preventing competitors like Homeseekers, Classified Ventures, and MSN's Homeadvisor from getting aggregated MLS listings from most MLSs. Realestate.com and Cyberhomes were already memories, although Realestate.com would be resurrected in 2004 by LendingTree. AOL had partnered with Homestore to get Realtor.com listings, and Yahoo!, the only other large player in searches, had yet to come up with a viable strategy to monetize real estate advertising or get consumers through its real estate channel.

With 29 million consumers, eBay was poised for success in the real estate market, or so many thought. The real estate channel debuted with an advertising fee structure for Realtors - a $50 up-front fee for brokers and a fixed back-end fee of $150 when the house sold. For individual agents, the advertising fee was a flat $50.

eBay couldn't make agents and brokers bite at those modest fees, not with major players importuning them to provide their listings for free for free exposure. A few months later, eBay bought HomesDirect, a provider of foreclosure-related auction services, but nothing was heard about that relationship again.

Today, there isn't even a channel manager for eBay real estate. It rocks along on autopilot.

Peter M. Zollman, editor of Classified Intelligence, reports that when he attended the eBay Live conference recently in New Orleans, the eBay real estate channel wasn't part of the agenda.

"Real estate as a category is not a high priority for the moment at eBay," admitted Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesperson to Zollman. "Real estate is an insignificant part of eBay. It's not something we pay a lot of attention to. Real estate as a category is not a high priority for the moment at eBay. "

As Zollman points out in his Classified Intelligence Report, eBay used to pay a lot of attention. What happened? In 2001, notes Zollman, "eBay bought HomesDirect, an online auction house that specialized in selling foreclosure properties. But it hasn't had a head of its real estate business for a while, and nothing about real estate was on the eBay Live agenda."

Zollman says that Durzy explained, "eBay is great at making inefficient markets efficient. Residential real estate is a very efficient market," he conceded. "You'll find people are using the ad format on eBay to promote their real estate. And we're doing some selling of things where the marketplace is less efficient, such as timeshares."

With no press relations listed on its site, and public relations personnel carefully wiped from its announcements, it's next to impossible to confirm what Zollman says happened. And see what happens when you visit investor relations. Your questions have been thought of for you except the very one you might have - "May I speak to someone in investor relations?" You can't put in your own questions, and there isn't a help desk.

So I contacted a name that has been in my database for years - Mitch Gross, who used to be in charge of the eBay real estate channel. His phone still works, and an email I sent wasn't returned.

He just wrote back saying he would forward my request to the PR group.

So far, they haven't contacted me. That was three days ago.

And at a high and mighty $83 a share, why would they want to discuss the channel that isn't a priority?

Published: July 15, 2004

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