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Company Interview Excerpt
Market Leader, Inc. - Ian Morris


Full article published: 01/25/2010


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TWST: Please begin with a brief overview of your company's history.
Mr. Morris: Market Leader was founded about 10 years ago, in late 1999. Our mission then and today is to provide real estate professionals with innovative marketing and technology solutions to grow and manage their businesses. So we are definitely a B2B-focused company. Our customers are the real estate professionals, including real estate agents, real estate teams and real estate brokerage companies. We provide them lead generation services, helping them generate leads on their Web site to grow their businesses, as well as our lead management system. That lead management system is a marketing platform delivered as software as a service, which helps them turn those leads into closed transactions, and also helps them manage their businesses.

TWST: You are in the midst of shifting your strategic focus toward software-as-a-service products. Tell us about that shift in your strategy and the success it has yielded so far.
Mr. Morris: By way of background, the company was originally founded as HouseValues. We rebranded the company Market Leader in November 2008 because the original name was too consumer-focused for a company that has always been B2B-focused. We wanted a name that spoke to our customers - the real estate professional. As to your question on the strategic shift, the key thing here is that we've always done lead generation, and we've always provided some level of contact management and follow-up software. What we've done more recently was to acquire a small company in the real estate space known as RealtyGenerator. They had what we believe is the best lead management system we'd ever seen in the industry. That acquisition accomplished a couple of things for us. First, they had a customer base of about 175 real estate brokerage offices. At a time when our focus had been limited to real estate agents, this not only gave us a brokerage customer base but also a product to target more brokerage company customers. We decided at that point that their system for lead generation and lead management was frankly ahead of its time and ahead of ours, so we literally relaunched the company around these new products. We branded the RealtyGenerator lead management system as our Vision lead management system; we rolled out an agent version of that product called Growth Leader. We rolled out a team version of that product called Team Leader. And we expanded our sales effort, targeting brokerage companies with the RealtyGenerator offering. Those three products comprise what we call our Vision platform.
To put the shift to our Vision products in perspective, at the beginning of 2009 those products made up 19% of our revenue. I believe they're approaching half of our revenues and comprised 46% at the end of the third quarter. We have seen these products grow significantly over the course of 2009.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: LEDR

 

For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.