Enough people who were at the Inman Real Estate Connect show have come forward or made comments now that this needs to be clarified: “Google to Scoop Up Real Estate Sites.” I wasn’t there and was writing based on vicarious information.
Here was the quote, from Google’s Sam Sebastian, as it was reported:
“We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.”
Apparently that’s a misquote. Rather, he said something more like this: “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two companies a month.”
In the context of a real estate conference and discussion about the Google-Trulia acquisition rumor it’s easy to see how this could be taken as a statement that Google will be acquiring real estate companies specifically.
Here’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during the Q3 earnings call about acquisitions:
The way we think about acquisitions is we have historically done an acquisition, perhaps one a month or so. And those are typically small and they are typically complete an offering, they are typically technology intensive, they’re not very expensive in the scheme of things and they bring some specific technology.
Sebastian may have been repeating this “generic” comment about Google’s policy and attitude toward acquisitions in general rather than commenting on real estate acquisitions in particular.
Yet I would still bet that Google is going to do some real estate acquisitions because it’s a local-vertical that’s very lucrative and important to consumers.
January 17th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
[...] original here: Correcting the Google Real Estate Story « Screenwerk Share and [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
[...] acquire one to two companies a month.” (Note: This is a corrected quote, per an investigation by Greg Sterling. A previous version suggested he had specifically said “real estate companies.”) The [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Hi there -
Here is the actual video from Inman Connect NYC
http://www.inman.com/news/2010/01/20/google-rpr-and-future
Thank you!
Katie Lance
Marketing Manager, Inman News
January 21st, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Great. Thanks
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:36 am
[...] Correcting the Google Real Estate Story « Screenwerk [...]
July 16th, 2010 at 6:00 am
[...] the past there had been rumors of Google wanting to make a destination site acquisition in real estate (e.g., Trulia). So far [...]