When the primary channel for real estate messaging was physical newspaper having a relationship/ownership made total sense. Now, there is almost no nexus between the information, except for ludicrous amounts of 'house of the week' embedded content in a 'lifestyle' section of the news web, which I suspect does not raise revenue for a newsman. If he sold it, he can charge the suckers rent for the same gig!

And thats the thing: Rupert is a newsman first and foremost. Sure, he moved into entertainment, and he's had all these side gigs like co-owning the editorial outsource company behind 'lets sack all our staff' but in the end, he has hot lead monotype in his veins, not blood. And lead is thicker than blood.

He must need the money more than the future increase in value, or believe the coming doom of declining house value translates to lower revenue in house sale web services, than he likes.

Would you honestly say it's worth $3b? I suspect a lot of that is outgoings on production side costs and running the engine, and feeding the super HDR photoshopped beast which is a modern 'walk through' photomontage. I don't know its worth that much.

Remember when "yellow pages" was big? How come those investors aren't owning Google? Or Yahoo? Did they miss read the market and got saddled with a lemon (sorry) product?

What if Rupert was a very smart, very evil, very venal man and he's read the room? What if real estate is going to a bad place for the related services market?

Oh yea: his shareholder cohort HATED his proposal to re-fuse Fox and News. So, it may well be he had a cunning plan to liberate .. lets say $3b of value somehow in that mashup and now finds he wants the money, but needs another mechanism to achieve it. (he walked back the proposal)

Almost as if they are trying to come up with some cash to pay for losing a big lawsuit.