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Another home shopping network: LendingTree Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina, has been on a buying spree in the last year, snapping up online lending and real estate operations. Its acquisitions include GetSmart, Home Loan Center Inc., ServiceMagic Inc. and iNest Realty Inc.

Article Excerpt
OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF Executive Officer Barry Diller has turned New York-based IAC/InterActiveCorp into an Internet conglomerate through a dizzying series of eCommerce acquisitions, including Ticketmaster and the Home Shopping Network. Last year Diller took a crack at the financial services market when he acquired LendingTree Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina, a successful online home mortgage exchange.

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Hanging out with Barry Diller must be contagious, because over the last 12 months LendingTree founder and Chief Executive Officer Doug Lebda has gone on a buying spree of his own--using Diller's money to broaden his online mortgage lending and realty platform. Lebda's acquisitions have included GetSmart, an electronic marketplace also headquartered in Charlotte, which provides consumer access to a variety of credit products and complements LendingTree's loan business; Home Loan Center Inc., Irvine, California, an online mortgage originator that is LendingTree's first venture into the direct-lending market; and Bloomingdale, Illinois-based iNest Realty Inc., a new-home builder referral network.

IAC also bought Golden, Colorado-based ServiceMagic Inc., an online service that connects home-owners with home-service professionals, and gave its lending and Realtor businesses to LendingTree to run.

His objective, Lebda says, is to "create the dominant lending and realty service exchange." Lebda doesn't qualify that statement with either "mortgage" or "online," but clearly this is a pure eCommerce play in the mortgage space that he and Diller are making here.

With less than 1 percent of the origination market nationwide, LendingTree has a very long way to go. And it remains to be seen whether significant numbers of homebuyers--as distinct from homeowners, who are merely refinancing an existing mortgage--will ever be comfortable using the Internet to execute what, for many, is the biggest financial decision of their lives.

The jury is still out, but Lebda and Diller are betting big on the verdict, and in the meantime have assembled--online--nearly every product or service a prospective homebuyer might need.

LendingTree is IAC's smallest operating company as measured by revenue, and Lebda says his bosses in New York believe that acquisitions can be used to drive revenue. The goal is for LendingTree to become more profitable so it can afford to continue spending heavily on marketing to raise consumer awareness even higher. Now, with IAC's capital behind him, Lebda has the capital to...

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