Yet Oppenheim has faith in management, suggesting Chief Executive Ara Hovnanian has a good nose for making acquisitions among the privately held home builders that still comprise 70% of the industry.
In the case of Airbnb, the gray area plays out like this: hosts on the site use privately held resources – their homes – to generate money.
In January and February alone, Amazon.com took stakes in Audible.com, a public company that delivers entertainment and information audio on the Internet; Greenlight.com, a private company that sells automobiles on the Web; and Living.com, a privately held retailer of home furnishings.
There may be even more expensive homes that are privately held and are not for sale, or homes with higher asking prices that are privately shopped around.
Blockbuster Inc., the video rental giant, said today that it would join with the privately held Food.com to offer home delivery of food and videos through Takeout Taxi, a restaurant delivery service that has agreed to be acquired by Food.com.
Vision Forum Inc. is a privately held business that sells home schooling materials and Vision Forum Ministries,a tax exempt charitable enterprise; a 501(c)(3).
The medical supplier, the privately held AssuraMed, supplies products for home use to aid treatment of diabetes, wounds, incontinence and other conditions.
Matching patients with their medical charts and medicines was more time-consuming than expected, and Green Oaks could have had a better understanding of Arlington's emergency response system, said Mark McKenzie, president of Senior Care Centers, a privately held company that owns the home.
Cisco Systems, the No. 1 maker of equipment that directs Internet traffic, said it'll buy privately held Linksys Group, a provider of home networking products for consumers and small offices, for about $500 million in stock.
