EBay is suing Craigslist, an online classified advertising network in which the Internet auction company owns a minority interest, news sources reported Tuesday.

San Jose, Calif.-based eBay alleged in a lawsuit filed in Delaware that Craigslist's directors -- founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster -- took actions that unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest in the company, according to news sources.

In 2004, eBay bought a 28 percent minority interest in Craigslist from an unnamed former executive.

EBay is asking Delaware's Court of Chancery to negate the Craigslist board's actions, but failed to disclose to news sources the specifics of those actions.

For now, the lawsuit is under seal, according to the AP, because of confidentiality restrictions, but eBay says that Craigslist could ask the court to make the complaint publicly available.

The AP further reports that a Craigslist spokeswoman said the company would likely post a response to the lawsuit later Tuesday on its Web site.

Craigslist has become a powerhouse site for advertising real estate listings, with more and more agents turning to the site for added exposure to buyers looking online. Property listings are free to list on Craigslist in all markets except New York, where brokers must pay $10 per listing.

The classifieds site recently put forth a proposal to limit the HTML that can be used in listings as a way to help ward off spam. Some real estate folks have been discussing the proposal and how it would impact various real estate listings services should it go through. Join the discussion at this link.

The National Association of Realtors today announced approval of a draft standard for real estate data exchange, with buy-in from a long list of industry representatives.

The effort builds on the Real Estate Transaction Standard, or RETS, an effort that NAR sparked in 1999.

Some big players are a part of this standardization effort: Google, Move Inc., RealEstate.com, Trulia, Yahoo, Zillow, and some big MLSs and industry vendors. RETS adoption will become mandatory for all Realtor-affiliated MLSs by the middle of next year, and earlier this year a group of online companies announced a collaborative push for adoption of data standards.

The concept is simple: to make it easier for brokers, MLSs, vendors and others to exchange property data across a variety of different platforms.

The Virginia Association of Realtors has launched IdealRoute.com, an online tool that allows users to identify the most efficient travel route for a group of selected addresses anywhere in the United States. Sounds like a good way for real estate agents to potentially cut down their fuel costs while taking clients to see several properties. Or maybe just a useful tool to plan business or personal errands.

Users can click on the interactive map to select travel points, and can also type in addresses. Once all of the addresses are entered, the tool calculates the most efficient route to visit all of the selected addresses and provides driving directions.

The routing tool was developed by Daniel R. Odio, the founder of Alexandria, Va.-based DROdio Real Estate Inc., and licensed to the association. A regional version of the tool is available at DROdio's TheBestHomeSearchEver.com and TBHSE.com Web sites (see previous blog post).

Read more about the tool at the VARBuzz.com site.

BlueRoof, a Salt Lake City brokerage company with a slick Web site that launched in 2006, has spawned a new company that focuses on Web design, lead management, networking and consulting: BlueRoof360.

Greg Tracy, a real estate industry veteran who founded BlueRoof, is now devoted to this new venture that allows real estate professionals to customize their real estate Web sites using a series of pre-built components.

Tracy told Inman News this week that there are now about 700 agents on the BlueRoof360 system. He said "agents (and brokers) want a better option than templates and don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a custom site."

Among the Web site functions available through the new company: map-based search, instant chat and online video.

A shareholder group representing about 6.6 percent of stock in Realtor.com operator Move Inc. wants the company's board to boot CEO Mike Long and CFO Lewis R. Belote III based on a multi-million-dollar investment that the company said last week is currently illiquid (see Inman News report).

The company has about $130 million wrapped up in auction-rate securities issued by student loan financing organizations, according to an earnings announcement last week, and the market for those securities is in a troubled state.

Real estate brokerage and franchise company Realogy Corp. is casting a very wide net on the 'Net these days, pumping its property listings out to many online sites. The company last year announced distribution agreements to share online property listings information with Google and Trulia, and more recently announced similar agreements to bring hundreds of thousands of property listings to Cyberhomes.com, Zillow.com, AOL, Homescape and FrontDoor, a real estate search site launched by HGTV operator Scripps Networks Interactive. Realogy brands include Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby's International Realty, among others.

The Internet is considered by some to be a great equalizer, with big and small companies competing side by side in cyberspace for the same consumers. And there is a movement to create data standards to assist brokers of all sizes in sending out real estate listings content to multiple sites, with online players such as Trulia, Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate on board with the effort. Some third-party companies are already serving as the go-between to assist brokers in dishing out content to a range of online sites.

But do all small real estate companies have the time and resources to supply updated data feeds to these various online sites -- or is this an easier feat for super-sized national brokerage companies? Are smaller companies at any disadvantage here as the larger companies push their real estate listings content out to any and all takers in massive data feeds?

(photo by wchien)

The National Association of Realtors wants you (if you are a Realtor) to add your face to its 100th anniversary mosaics, which are made up of a bunch of tiny Realtor mugs that collectively appear as an image of the giant Realtor "R" logo (you can scroll over to view bigger individual pictures). It's part of the association's 100th anniversary celebration. (And hey, it's Oscar weekend -- couldn't resist a reference to a famous Charlton Heston one-liner.)

Did you know there's an official NAR blog, Voices of Real Estate? Did you know there's a blog called NAR Wisdom, "created out of frustration ... with the NAR"?

BloodHoundBlog points to what will undoubtedly be an endless number of snipes by the latter at the former.

Can't say either blog looks that intriguing. On the NAR blog, the style is formal and it's hard to get past the constant use of

(See Inman News article.)

A new real estate search site rivaling the likes of Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow, has pounced on the scene. Roost.com launched its public beta today.

The site appears to mirror Trulia in the way that property listings search results show photos, price and other basics, then lead consumers over to the brokers' Web sites for additional details.

The company is gathering listings via partnerships with brokers who have IDX data feeds in place, according to Roost's Web site.

The real estate listings aggregation space is quite crowded these days, but as Joel Burslem points out over at FOREM, it's never too late for a company to eye a space and think they can do it better. His case in point: Kayak.com, a search site in the travel vertical. Kayak launched much later than Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and others, but ask anyone who's used it and they often say they are fanatics (among my sphere anyway).

An interesting connection between Kayak, Roost and the "latecomer" approach is that Greg Slyngstad, director of Kayak, sits on the board of Roost.

More later on how the site works with brokers and agents.