Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include additional comments from TigerLead Solutions and Move Inc.
Realtor.com operator Move Inc. has acquired real estate lead generation and management company TigerLead Solutions LLC for $22 million.
The co-founders of the Los Angeles-based company — Howard Tager, Art Sawyer and Adam Ingersoll — will continue to run TigerLead, supported by their experienced management team, the companies said today. The companies entered into a purchase agreement on Sept. 1.
TigerLead claims its platform is used by thousands of agents nationwide, combining search engine marketing expertise with branded Internet Data Exchange (IDX) listing websites and a lead management system to help real estate agents generate "Smarter Leads."
By adding an agent-branded website and search solution that "richly complements the leads generated by Realtor.com, this acquisition further enables Move to deliver the best suite of solutions to both consumers and real estate professionals," said Move CEO Steve Berkowitz in a statement.
Move generates leads for brokers and agents through Realtor.com, and also provides customer relationship management (CRM) tools to Realtors through its Top Producer division.
Provided as a "software-as-a-service," the Top Producer platform accounted for 14 percent of Move’s overall revenues in the first half of this year, down from 16 percent at the same point in 2011, the company said in its most recent quarterly report to investors.
TigerLead will complement Top Producer by providing more immediate lead-to-close services, Tager said in an interview with Inman News. Top Producer is great for long-term customer contact, but TigerLead is focused on lead services with active buyers and sellers, he said.
The service provides a 360-degree view of a client, Tager said. Agents can see the number of times a client has searched, the price range of the homes they’ve searched, in real time, he said. The service also has been developed for team managers to monitor how their agents are handling their leads.
Pricing for the technology, which the company licenses to clients, depends on the number of leads a client expects to use the service for, Tager said. The price can range from $1,000 per month up to $10,000 a month, he said.
Founded in 2007, TigerLead will retain its 30 employees and will continue to run its business as it has been, said Scott Boecker, Move’s chief product officer. Move was attracted to TigerLead’s people and its technology, he said.
According to the company’s website, TigerLead manages a database of 1 million keywords, attempting "to balance the trade-offs between ad position, cost-per-click and visitor conversion rate while taking advantage of less experienced marketers’ costly mistakes — vanity bidding, poor keyword selection and inefficient budgeting."
The company builds "intuitive and user-friendly" IDX home search websites for agents, with a lead management system that allows them to "see everything (consumers are) viewing and searching for in real time," helping agents understand what potential clients are interested in before contacting them.
To "cultivate" leads, TigerLead sends automated listing alerts through email and "on banner ads that follow your prospects around the Web," the company promises. "Our cutting-edge lead management tools such as the priority dashboard help you identify the hottest leads in your database."
Tager said the acquisition presents "a tremendous opportunity" for TigerLead Solutions to enhance its existing product "by leveraging Move’s industry-leading online consumer traffic and engagement as well as capitalizing on its strength in mobile technology, an area where TigerLead’s customers have expressed a very strong interest."
He also said TigerLead was attracted to the high-quality leads generated from Realtor.com.
The deal follows Move’s acquisition of social media search platform SocialBios in July 2011. Terms of that deal were not disclosed. In 2010, Move entered the listing syndication business by acquiring ListHub parent company Threewide Corp. for $13.1 million.
Realtor.com rival Zillow has also been on a buying spree, spending $7.8 million last fall to acquire Diverse Solutions, a listings content provider that powers property searches for real estate agents’ websites and mobile platforms. In May, Zillow announced it was buying rental relationship management software provider RentJuice Corp. for $40 million.