Sam walks through his method for researching wealthy people by tracking real estate purchases, using The Real Deal’s gossip-style “Yolanda” column as a discovery tool. He uses the example of Brian Carringer — who bought a $20M Malibu home in 2019 — to illustrate how real estate holdings reveal true wealth, and digs into Carringer’s backstory as the bootstrapped founder of dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, which he sold to IAC for $100M in 2005.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host), Shaan Puri (co-host)
Sam’s Research Method: Real Estate as a Wealth Signal [00:00:00]
Sam: One interesting thing that I found — so what I like to do is find out who is buying different parts of real estate. I go to therealdeal.com, and there’s this one segment called “Yolanda Says.” It’s like a fake author name — Yolanda. It goes, “I heard a rumor that this person is buying a house. The owner is this and this. Yolanda hears that they’re going to offer this much money.” I have no idea — Yolanda is a fake person. It’s just like a gossip blog, a blog website. Gossip blog.
Shaan: Yeah, for real estate.
Sam: Mostly New York and LA, so they’re covering kind of famous, famous upper-echelon people doing it. And what I love to do is find out who is buying real estate, and then I go research them.
The reason why: one of the best ways to figure out if someone is actually wealthy or not is by the real estate holdings they own. That’s one of the few things that’s really hard to fake. I mean, you could fake it, but if someone has bought a $20 million home, the likelihood that they’re worth $100 million or more is incredibly high. It’s hard to fake that, right? So real estate holdings is a great way to get an indicator of someone’s wealth — not the best way, but a great way.
Brian Carringer and the Dictionary.com Origin Story [00:02:00]
Sam: I found one that interested me a ton. This guy’s name was Brian Carringer, and he bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20 million. I hadn’t heard of Brian — I know a lot of internet entrepreneurs — so I researched him.
This is the guy who started dictionary.com. Kind of a crazy thing when you think about it, because who really thinks of dictionary.com?
So in 1995 he started a business called Lexico Publishing. Lexico Publishing owned thesaurus.com and dictionary.com. He bootstrapped it, grew it, and sold it in 2005 to IAC for $100 million.
Then two years ago, IAC sold dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert — you know Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans.
Shaan: Yep.
Sam: They sold dictionary.com for $100 million. So IAC didn’t do a very good job growing it. But dictionary.com and thesaurus.com get around 40 million uniques a month and do about $20 million in revenue, and they have barely any employees — I believe dozens of employees. It’s incredibly fascinating.
Shaan: Because this is the one I call “how do they make money?” — it’s just AdSense, or is there something else?
Sam: Just ads.