From Main St. to Wall St.

NEW YORK–HouseValues CEO Ian Morris has spent many months explaining to investors the deep change the real estate industry is about to undergo: the massive shift of marketing spend from print classifieds to online media. The transformation involves the $11 billion spent on real estate advertising annually. Morris and his team have been successful in getting the point across, as evidenced by the company's extraordinarily successful IPO last month. HouseValues has a market cap of $352 million, Morris pointed out today. In defining winners in the online real estate space, Morris this morning during Real Estate Connect NYC highlighted three key points: that there would be a big shift from print to online advertising, that any solution introduced in this space would need to be complementary to existing players, and that solutions would need to solve real problems for real people. Services like HouseValues have long touched sensitive issues with the traditional industry. The company s...