STOCKS TO WATCH: Avant!, Homestore.com and Verizon

The software developer should see some action Monday after meeting the Street estimate in its third quarter after the bell Friday.

In the quarter, Avant! made $18.5 million, or 45 cents a share, on sales of $90.5 million.

First Call Corp. consensus expected it to earn 45 cents a share in the quarter.

Its shares closed unchanged at 17 ahead of the earnings report.

The $90.5 million in sales marks a 20 percent improvement from the year-ago quarter when it earned $14.8 million, or 22 cents a share, on sales of $75.5 million.

Homestore.com will be active Monday after announcing late Friday that it had agreed to buy Cendant Corp.'s Move.com Internet real estate portal in a stock deal valued at $761 million, creating the nation's largest Web-based real estate service.

The two companies said they plan to merge several of Cendant's online real estate assets, including Move.com, its Rent Net apartment locator service, its Welcome Wagon direct marketing company and other Move.com Web sites, all of which will be integrated into Homestore's family of Web properties. Cendant will get 26.3 million Homestore.com common shares in exchnage for the sites.

Although the companies admit they have not ironed out all the details, they expect the deal to lead to leveraging more of Cendant's offline assets into the mix as well as a push to bring on board the 90 percent of Cendant's member real estate professionals who do not already use Move.com's services.

Homestore.com shares shot up 9, or 31 percent, to 38 Friday.

Verizon will be worth watching ahead of its third-quarter earnings report Monday.

First Call Corp. consensus expects it to earn 73 cents a share.

Verizon shares closed up 2.06 to 53.06 Friday.

The stock peaked at 67.25 in December before falling to a 52-week low of $39.06 in August.

Reuters contributed to this report.>