Press Release:

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., May 18 /PRNewswire/ — A federal antitrust complaint was filed by BanxCorp against LendingTree LLC, a subsidiary of Tree.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: TREE), for engaging in an unlawful per se horizontal market division and customer allocation agreement, and a per se horizontal price fixing agreement with competitors.

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This is a part of an email conversation that took place between myself and a prominent player in the lead-gen space back  in November of ’09. We were going back and forth on the future of lead-gen and I just wanted to take a moment and elaborate on a specific portion of the exchange.

I wrote:

“…I think 2010 is going to be a big year of change and increased evolution in the lead gen space. I think we are going to see more non-traditional companies like Google enter into the lead gen space. The evolution of the short form lead to a referral based model (i.e. Mint or BillShrink) and the re-emergence of of comparison shopping (i.e. Comparison Ads) is going to continue with the traditional companies like LendingTree. Will this evolution continue? How should the mid level lead gen guys react? Should there be concern? Is lead gen going to be completely voluntary by the consumer. Meaning, will they take full control over their data and choose who contacts them?”

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Last week at LeadsCon Tree announced their new plans for the Tree.com website. Doug Lebda, CEO of Tree took 15 minutes and briefly described the revamped site.

The goal is to provide quality content to the consumer regardless of what service they are interested in. No longer will Tree only focus on just a few large categories, but rather a whole host categories ranging from Attorneys to travel.  Tree aims to gain market share by taking a bite out of the “web 2.0″ strategy book. By allowing businesses and consumers to create their own pages and also allowing them to manage and create their own content Tree hopes to build a highly organic web presence. This strategy is nothing new for most companies and whether or not Tree will be able to pull it off will remain to be unseen, and likely for a while. This organic strategy takes time, a lot of time.

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LendingTree rumorville has been making some recent noise.

First, lets start with items that are not rumors. This Monday marked the last days at Tree.com for both the CMO and CTO. Both apparently resigned from their positions at Tree.com two weeks and are now on to bigger and better things. Good luck to them both.

These resignations are fairly strange in my opinion, though. To have two key positions resign on the same day leads people to make a number of speculations. Did they really resign or were they asked to leave? Is the company simply cutting employees with high salaries, regardless of the persons contributions? This would seem strange, in light of LT renewing its PGA partnership in a year where PGA viewership will be way down with the absence of Tiger Woods on tour. Who knows, maybe they received a significant discount for the sponsorship this year.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LendingTree, LLC and Mortech, Inc. have resolved their lawsuit to the mutual satisfaction of both parties, and the lawsuit has been dismissed.

More details to come.

I don’t have the privilege of attending the LendingTree Summits, but this year I was able to follow the daily happenings via good’ol Twitter! So here is a ValleyWag type twitter summation of what went down at this years event in Las Vegas courtesy of these twitterers:

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It was all over the Internet today that LendingTree has filed a lawsuit against service provider and 2008 “Innovator of the Year” , Mortech. The suit accuses Mortech of contract infringement and breaking their confidentiality agreement.

About two years ago LendingTree partnered with Mortech and recently became aware of their communications and possible partnership with the Google, whom over the past year has been quietly figuring out the real estate and mortgage lead generation industry. This suit may have inadvertently leaked the launch of a Google’s rate table application and lead generation process. This project has been rumored for a while and is an interesting topic on its own, but clearly is a threat to the mortgage lead gen world and more specifically LendingTree. This suit, while directed at Mortech, could be a foot in the door for LT to stall the launch of the new Google service. The reality is that there are a number of Mortech like companies and the actual pricing engine technology is not proprietary to just Mortech. If LendingTree can somehow prove that Mortech leaked information about LendingTree developments and future plans or have possibly used their knowledge learned from LendingTree to benefit Google, they may be able to throw a wrench into Google’s plans indefinitely.

“We will vigorously protect our contractual rights, our company, our customers and our clients in this matter,” CEO Doug Lebda said in a statement.

Regardless of the motives, LT seems to think they have a strong enough case to take this past the initial, “please, stop doing that” requests.

So what do you think? Is this all to disrupt Google’s plan to enter into the lead gen business or is this only a Mortech and LendingTree contract infringement case and that’s it?

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Tree.com continues its goal of interstellar domination with yet another acquisition. These very calculated acquisitions, while on the surface are not the biggest moves you will see by a company the size of Tree.com, but should be considered Chess moves. These acquisitions are pieces to the big puzzle that Doug Lebda touched on at last years Targus Lead Quality Summit, (which is a must attend) about providing a single source for all life’s biggest decisions. And in these times continuing education is an important decision people are making everyday.

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Today LendingTree launched their new logo and website.

The new logo, which uses the same font and image of the Tree.com logo, is a far cry from the traditional looking logo of the past. A logo that used to conjure up thoughts of tradition, quality and trust as been swapped out for a cool, young and techie logo.  Currently, it appears as though they have even ditched the “When banks compete, you win” slogan, however I am sure a new slogan will appear over time.

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This post is a few days past due, however still worth a delayed mention. Last Thursday Tree.com announced the acquisition of Done Right!, a directory for Contractors and Home Improvement professionals based in Pasadena California. We have been watching the moves of Tree.com and this acquisition falls right inline with their past moves and goals of being the sole resource for life’s biggest decisions.

Press Release:

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Insiders at Tree.com were informed recently that a key member of the team will be moving on to the next step in his career. Keith Moore, Senior Vice President at Tree.com and long time Lead-Gen industry member, who was the reason for the positive quality and growth of the LendingTree’s short form product, has chosen to take a stab at a new venture.

Where Moore will officially land next is unknown at the moment, but he will be missed at Tree.com and will be a huge asset to the his next destination.
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