MOVE Inc. announces a series of disappointments

Today Move Inc. announced their first quarter. They carefully highlighted whatever positive things they could find such as sales being up 3%. If you ask us they were reaching. This company is missing what is happening on the web completely. This is 2 quarters in a row of disappointing results in a time when many other internet real estate businesses are thriving.

The table below illustrates the slow deterioration of their business:

	Q3 2006	Q4 2006	Q1 2007
Sales	75,672	71,842	71,030
Income (from operations)	170	-122	-1,589

Note that the red ink seems to be the only thing going up at this company. OK they offset it with interest income and when you factor that in there was a miniscule profit. We prefer to ignore interest income, we feel income from operations is really all that matters.

To illustrate that their is no excuse for this poor performance we will show you how Loopnet (NASDAQ:LOOP) fared in the same period.

	Q3 2006	Q4 2006	Q1 2007
Sales	12,708	13,846	15,515
Income (from operations)	5,217	6,035	6,517

And of course the chart below shows an overlay of the performance of the two stocks.


They also announced that they hired some woman named Lorna Borenstein as President. Her credentials look OK. She came from Yahoo. She was the GM of Yahoo! Personals. Before that she was at Ebay, and it appears she headed up Ebay's successful expansion into Canada.

Meet the new President, here is a photo of her:


Mike Long did a fantastic job preventing this company from shutting its doors a few years ago. That is great, but our question to Mike is: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR US LATELY?

They just relaunched their website, they finally got mapping integrated in their search but they are quite late. MOVE is facing increasing competition on the web from new companies such as Zillow, Trulia, etc. They have some ridiculous no growth old world real estate businesses that we would love to see them dump and focus on Web ops. Hopefully Lorna will take the company in that direction.