Special offer

Zillow Group Announces Sale of ActiveRain to the Ben Kinney Companies

By
Real Estate Technology with ActiveRain

Today is another big day for ActiveRain, as Zillow Group just announced the pending sale of ActiveRain to the Ben Kinney family of companies. The sale is expected to close June 30, 2015. 

Here’s the word directly from Zillow Group CEO Spencer Rascoff:

“Ben Kinney taking on the ownership of ActiveRain is a positive step forward in the stewardship of this important and influential community of real estate professionals. As part of Ben’s organization, ActiveRain will be a major focus, benefiting from Ben’s leadership and oversight as it continues to flourish within the agent community. We look forward to watching ActiveRain grow and evolve.”

Read the full press release here

It’s only natural to have lots of questions, and we have answers.  

First- what’s ahead for ActiveRain?  We suggest you start by reading this blog post from Ben Kinney.  It’s also a great place to offer your valuable comments and suggestions for the future. 

Let’s also tackle some other questions you might have:

 

Q.  When will all of this take place?

As the press release states, the sale is expected to close on June 30.

 

Q.  Anything I should be aware of between now and June 30th?  

Simply put, the aim of Zillow Group and Ben Kinney’s organization is to make the transfer as seamless as possible. There are a few things you probably want to know:

  • To prepare for the June 30th date, late in the evening on Monday, June 22nd, ActiveRain will be moving away from the activerain.trulia.com subdomain to live independently on www.activerain.com.
  • We anticipate no issues relating to links, content and SEO.
  • From June 23-30, we’ll have a few periods of downtime on the site as our engineers move all of the technology over to its future new home. We’ll do our best to alert members to any outages.
  • No other changes are anticipated before the actual June 30th transition.

 

Q.   Tell me more about the domain shift: why the change?

Moving off of the Trulia domain will occur as obviously Trulia (now part of Zillow Group) will no longer have an ownership stake in ActiveRain.  Current and future leadership of ActiveRain have been working together to make  sure there is no impact to members.  In the past year, ActiveRain has made many SEO enhancements to help Google crawl the site and discover member content.  In addition, there will be automatic redirects set up to make sure your ActiveRain links continue to work as expected.

 

Q.  During this transition period before Ben’s group takes over, will there be any changes to billing or technical support?

There is no change to billing or customer/technical support during the transition period.  In fact, there are no changes to any products or services. We are all here keeping things humming along.

 

Important links:

Press release

Ben Kinney blog post

Posted by

---

Keep Up In the Rain!
ActiveRain FacebookActiveRain TwitterActiveRain YouTubeActiveRain Google+ActiveRain LinkedIn

 

Comments (178)

Dorte Engel
RE/MAX Leading Edge - Bowie, MD
ABC - Annapolis, Bowie, Crofton & rest of Maryland

Looking forward to seeing, what transpires after the holiday.

Jun 20, 2015 12:13 PM
Joan Whitebook
BHG The Masiello Group - Nashua, NH
Consumer Focused Real Estate Services

Looking forward to the new developments.

Jun 20, 2015 01:26 PM
Inna Ivchenko
Barcode Properties - Encino, CA
Realtor® • GRI • HAFA • PSC Calabasas CA

Congrats to all.

I wonder with will happen with those links. All the links we shared will be useless?

Jun 20, 2015 06:15 PM
Frank Castaldini
Compass - San Francisco, CA
Realtor - Homes for Sale in San Francisco

Z and T see little value in AR because AR member see little value in them and are often vocal abou it.  Almost gave up on AR because I was by the back door funding T and hence Z.  Glad that's coming to an end.

Jun 20, 2015 10:16 PM
Randy L. Prothero
eXp Realty - Hollister, MO
Missouri REALTOR, (808) 384-5645

It is exciting especially in light of Bob Stewart coming back and the announcement that there would be new renewed energy placed on Active Rain University.  Does that mean Brad Andersohn will be making an appearance?

Jun 21, 2015 12:03 AM
Steve Clay
Keller Williams Cape Cod and the Islands - Falmouth, MA

Ben Kinney is an extraordinary entrepreneur. I can't wait to see what he has in store for Active Rain. 

Jun 21, 2015 01:15 AM
Anonymous
Anti-NAR

Why didn't he just start a blog? I see no value in Active Rain aside from hearing Agents complain about their job...

Jun 21, 2015 01:52 AM
#165
Kimo Stowell
HI Pro Realty LLC RB-21531 - Honolulu, HI
REALTOR Associate® RS-76763 - Honolulu Hawai'i

Hopefully the blogging platform will be restored to it's former effectiveness. This is indeed a inspiring development. Looking forward to the change. Ho'omaikai ana mai kakou - Congratulations everyone!

Jun 21, 2015 06:13 AM
Eva Erdmann
Lion International Inc. - Holiday, FL
interior decorator

I hope this will be change for good.

 

Jun 22, 2015 03:05 AM
Maria Morton
Platinum Realty - Kansas City, MO
Kansas City Real Estate 816-560-3758

Ben Kinney's plan for Active Rain sounds good and I'm delighted to hear that Bob Stewart will be re-joining us!

Jun 22, 2015 04:06 AM
Paula Hathaway, REALTOR, LBA
Douglas Elliman Real Estate - Southampton, NY
...A Local Expert in all The Hamptons

I am so excited that I can hardly contain myself--well you know what I mean! I have begun to blog again and started about a week before the news broke about the purchase....must be in the air!!!

Jun 22, 2015 07:59 AM
Connie Rathke
US PREFERRED REALTY, INC - Phoenix, AZ

I have been trying to upgrade my account to Rainmaker since last Wednesday the 17th. I just attempted to upgrade again with no success.  This is the response I received on Friday to my Wednesday's support ticket:  "I do apologize, we actually just discovered there is an issue with our upgrade process and it is not fully processing upgrades at this time. I will let you know once this is fixed so we can get you upgraded."  Is there an aticipated time that the upgrade process will be working?  Thank You. 

Jun 22, 2015 08:51 AM
Emerald Coast Realty
Emerald Coast Realty - Pensacola, FL
Realtors

How exciting!

ActiveRain is no longer hosted using the Trulia subdomain!

There is a 301 redirect in place that takes you to activerain.com

So, if you enter activerain.trulia.com you are automatically redirected to activerain.com

Now, I guess we are just waiting for the deal to close on June 30.

Jun 22, 2015 09:39 PM
Chris and Dick Dovorany
Homes for Sale in Naples, Bonita Springs and Estero, Florida - Naples, FL
Broker/Associate at Premiere Plus Realty

Congratulations to Ben to Bob and to all of us who really believe in the power of  ActiveRain.

Jun 23, 2015 09:22 AM
Shanna Day Team Leader AZ & UT - Call 480-415-7616
Keller Williams Realty EV (AZ) & Keller Williams SLC (UT) - Mesa, AZ
Top 0.33 of 1% of 79,000 AZ Realtors

I LOVE BEN KINNEY and his TEAM!   I'm very excited about this move.   I do hope that we don't lose the links though that we have posted everywhere!  

Jun 24, 2015 02:02 AM
Inna Ivchenko
Barcode Properties - Encino, CA
Realtor® • GRI • HAFA • PSC Calabasas CA

I just stopped by to see how are you doing. No recent blog post for a few months in here.

Oct 05, 2015 04:44 PM
Jack Gerbehy
Egg Harbor Township, NJ

Follow

Nov 27, 2015 12:47 AM
Lynn FISCHER Phoenix, AZ West Valley, Sun City, Active Adult, Sun City Grand
HomeSmart - Sun City, AZ

Follow

Jan 03, 2016 06:35 PM
Robert May
Robert W May - Lethbridge Real Estate - Lethbridge, AB
Real estate consulting

has anyone noticed if their backlinks from activerain have been affected since there was a change in ownership and consequently servers?  has there been a positive or negative seo movement that has been identifiable?

Jan 31, 2016 05:35 PM
Jack Gerbehy
Egg Harbor Township, NJ

As a rainer I dont have the option

Jan 31, 2016 07:18 PM