Endurance Business Media has acquired Prince Communications, publishers of Homes & Land Magazine, Rental Guide, Home Guide, and Estates & Homes magazines. Tallahassee, Fla.-based Homes & Land is a franchise company publishing 203 magazines in the United States and Canada. It also operates the Web site HomesAndLand.com.
   Included in the acquisition were the firm’s two printing plants: The Printing House in Quincy, Fla., and Century Publishing Co. of Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.
   Endurance partners Blair Schmidt-Fellner and Gerry Hogan formed their Atlanta-based company in 2001 after selling their prior firm, Cygnus Business Media, which published 60 business-to-business publications generating annual revenue of approximately $100 million.
   Locally, the two franchises serving Kitsap, Mason, and Pierce Counties are owned by Kirkland-based Woolsey Publishing. Woolsey is the largest Homes & Land franchisee in the nation and also owns the Bellevue/Kirkland/Eastside, South King County, and Bend, Ore. magazines as well as several others.
   Bob Prince, prior owner and chairman of the board, has left the company to, “pursue other opportunities.” Frances Casey Lowe, the firm’s one-time in-house attorney, will act as COO and continue running the day-to-day operations as she has for the past five years. The company will remain headquartered in Tallahassee.
   Under Prince’s ownership, 35-year old Homes & Land endured a decade of turmoil marked by litigation between it and a number of its oldest and largest franchisees — people that helped establish it as the nation’s one-time leader in real estate publishing.
   An ever-evolving franchise agreement that continually eroded franchisee’s rights became a major source of distrust between the company and its associate publishers. Some elected not to renew when their agreements expired, risking litigation by doing so, while others, simply weary of the constant upheaval within the system, opted to sell their magazines rather than sign another franchise agreement with Prince.
   Prince also cost the firm its original Web address, Homes.com — the very first viable Internet site for real estate. He spun it off as a separate company, but lost it to investors who were later forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Prince attempted to use Homes.com to bypass and directly compete with his own franchisees — using content generated by them. After promising franchisees a percentage of revenue generated by the site, Prince reneged on the agreement.
   While Prince was busy battling his franchisees, The Real Estate Book (TREB), Homes & Land’s largest competitor nationwide, quietly experienced it’s greatest period of growth nationwide and overtook the company in the total number of markets where it published. Ironically, after the Homes.com bankruptcy fiasco, TREB ended up owning the domain and operates it today as part of its own network.