Bankrate & Move: Cheaper To Partner Than Merge (RATE, MOVE)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Bankrate, Inc. (NASDAQ:RATE) And Move, Inc. (NASDAQ:MOVE) have announced a distribution agreement for Bankrate to be the provider of mortgage and home equity rate data on the Move network of Web sites. Move will also make select content in the form of Bankrate articles and features available to the millions of monthly users on its network.

Just a year ago these companies would have (or maybe could have) likelyjust considered an outright merger.  But with Move being so much moretied specifically to real estate you can’t blame Bankrate for justwanting to partner with them.  In uncertain times for key aspects ofeach company’s operations, for now at least, it is cheaper to partnerthan it is to actually acquire.  This effort costs basically nothing,while merging two companies like this could be more than complicated inan environment where online financial companies have to watch theirbottom line closer than ever.

Bankrates’s market cap is $724 million and Move’s market cap is $441 million. Bankrate shares closed Wednesday at $39.37, and its 52-week trading range is $25.16 to $53.14.  Move shares closed Wednesday at $2.84, and its 52-week trading range is $2.36 to $6.69.

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he produces the 24/7 Wall St. SPECIAL SITUATION INVESTING NEWSLETTER and he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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