HomeShark Partners With Snap; Snap and HomeShark to Launch Co-Branded Real Estate Center

Business Wire, Nov 16, 1998

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 1998--HomeShark(TM), Inc. (www.homeshark.com), the online low-rate mortgage broker and national homes listings service, and Snap (www.snap.com), the Internet portal service from NBC and CNET, announced today a multi-year partnership to produce a new co-branded Real Estate Center on the Snap service.

HomeShark will become the anchor tenant in Snap's new Real Estate Center, which launches later this month, showcasing HomeShark's residential real estate and REALTOR(R) search tools and suite of mortgage services. Additionally, HomeShark's home listings search engine will be accessible in the classifieds sections of all Snap Local Centers.

HomeShark also becomes the preferred tenant in Snap's Lending Center, providing access to HomeShark's mortgage services, including Rate Shopper and free pre-qualifications and approvals.

"We were looking for a company with comprehensive content that would really benefit our users, and Homeshark was a perfect fit," said Edmond Sanctis, COO, Snap. "HomeShark provides so much information for consumers at all levels of understanding and has such a full spectrum of services, that we felt they were a perfect partner to anchor our new Real Estate Center."

"HomeShark provides extensive consumer-oriented home listings and mortgage services," said Ned Hoyt, CEO of HomeShark. "Our biggest challenge is to make sure that customers can easily find us, so they can take advantage of our time-saving, cost-efficient products. With the support of NBC and CNET's Snap, this partnership ensures that millions of Internet users will be able to access HomeShark to receive information and help for all of their real estate needs."

About HomeShark, Inc.

HomeShark, http://www.homeshark.com, is the best way for consumers to shop online for a low-rate mortgage and a new home. HomeShark's core offerings are low-rate mortgages from national lenders, at less than half of traditional mortgage fees, and the HomeScout search engine that delivers a large selection of online home listings from top real estate sites.

HomeShark, the most widely available mortgage service online, is accessible through major sites including Excite, NetCenter, Webcrawler, Excite Classifieds Network, HotBot, a Lycos Network site, Infoseek, InfoSpace, Snap, Lycos and Metacrawler. HomeShark, Inc. was founded in October 1996 and has offices in San Francisco and Concord, Calif.

About Snap

Snap, the free Internet portal service from NBC and CNET (Nasdaq:CNWK), offers the most powerful way to organize and find anything on the Internet. The service is logically arranged to give users the quickest route to the best of what they are looking for on the Web, providing efficient, high-quality search results and directory listings and the most often-used content.

At the heart of the Snap service is a directory of Web sites, built by a team of editors and reviewers to ensure its quality, freshness and usefulness. Users may either search the directory by using keywords, or browse through the directory's 16 topics: Arts & Humanities, Business & Money, Computing & Internet, Entertainment, Education, Health, Kids & Family, Living, Local, News & Media, Oddities, People & Society, Science & Technology, Shopping, Sports and Travel.

Snap also features content from over 75 leading Web publishers. For Internet searching, Snap offers users highly efficient and effective searching capability online, by tightly integrating a high-quality topical Internet directory with an advanced search engine. Snap is available to all Web users at http://www.snap.com and is also distributed by more than 60 leading Internet Service Providers, PC manufacturers and third-party marketers.