A new face for the real estate industry

Barry Diller, CEO of InterActiveCorp, will speak at Real Estate Connect 2004, July 28-30 in San Francisco. A computer screen is not the silver screen, but to Barry Diller it's golden. Diller, a Hollywood mogul turned interactive emperor, has amassed a formidable group of online mortgage, real estate, travel, lodging and dating sites. Diller's InterActiveCorp owns LendingTree.com, RealEstate.com, Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Hotwire.com and Match.com, to name a handful of Internet destinations, and this month added ServiceMagic to the list. ServiceMagic links consumers with prescreened contractors, real estate agents and lenders via the Web. Home Shopping Network, HSN.com, Citysearch and Ticketmaster are also a part of InterActiveCorp's cross-media conglomerate. In May 2003, InterActiveCorp made a bold foray into the business of online lending with the purchase of LendingTree, which runs an online site that matches consumers with lenders and real estate agents. The deal was valued at about...