News and Events

Homescape, the online real estate venture operated by a group of five newspaper publishers, has inked a new partnership with a real estate brokerage company to add more for-sale property listings to its online portal.

The company today announced an agreement with Real Living, which covers 20 states with nearly 4,000 sales associates, that will add an additional 13,000 listings to the Homescape Web site.

More partnerships between online property search sites and real estate brokerage companies are springing up, a sign that brokers are hungry for more Internet exposure for their for-sale properties as housing markets continue to experience slow sales and softening prices.

Real estate valuation and marketing site Zillow.com this week announced a similar partnership with RE/MAX Allegiance in which the brokerage company will send bulk feeds of its property listings to Zillow. It was the second bulk listings partnership for Zillow since October.

Homescape last month announced that Keller Williams Realty would send about 75,000 listings for display at Homescape.com, which has more than 2.7 million listings.

The new partnerships for Homescape come after the company announced it was changing strategies to work directly with brokers and agents to gather property listings from markets around the country. The company formerly was a private brand that acquired listings via the more than 100 newspapers that comprised its network, which limited the company's coverage to only those markets where it had newspaper relationships.

Homescape says it aims to provide a comprehensive resource of property listings and real estate information to consumers online. In addition to listings, Homescape.com includes new construction, open house and other newspaper classifieds content, as well as home valuations, local market snapshots and the ability for sellers to add a single home listing.

The company in August said it already had formed partnerships with some regional brokerage companies, including Prudential Fox & Roach, Prudential California, ERA Masiello, GMAC Real Estate of Atlanta, and Prudential Gary Greene.

Homescape is a division of Chicago-based Classified Ventures, which is owned by five major media companies -- Belo Corp., Gannet Co., McClatchy Co., Tribune Co. and Washington Post Co.

Classified Ventures also operates national listing sites for rental units and autos at Apartments.com and Cars.com.