It’s a really interesting comparison. My first question would be how the airlines, if their true intention was to undercut non-airline companies’ public portals, could have structured Orbitz in a way that it could be simply purchased.

It seems like a strategic mistake. The only caveat is that they may have said, “If someone wants to buy this website for $1B, we’ll just sell it to them and then rebuild a new one. We are the airlines. We own the inventory. We know how to build it now, and we’ll just pull our listings from Orbitz as soon as we build Orbitz 2.” I doubt that’s what happened because investors who make these kinds of purchases aren’t dumb enough to miss that kind of risk.

The same could be said for a BPP. *IF* they could build a portal that garnered huge consumer traffic based on its proximity to the core/timely/accurate RE listing data, it would probably make sense to structure its ownership in a way that a big fish couldn’t simply buy it to make it go away as a competitor. Some sort of privately held partnership which had rights by every franchisor/big player to veto its sale would keep the strategic value of the brokers’ data in their hands no matter the size of the company that wants to purchase it.

Realtor.com’s website was owned/managed by Move, Inc 15 years ago and still is. News Corp bought Move, Inc. We didn’t “sell” a contender, it became a contender under management by an outside company and still is, under an NAR operating agreement.