This story was republished with permission from the author.

Across the globe, there are efforts underway to unseat leading real estate portals. In the U.S., commercial real estate behemoth CoStar has spent over $400 million to acquire residential listing portals Homes.com and Homesnap. And in the U.K., startup Boomin is raising an additional £25 million to directly compete with Rightmove.

The primary value a real estate portal provides its customers is exposure to the most potential homebuyers and homesellers. In the U.S., Zillow’s traffic lead over CoStar’s recent acquisitions is astronomical.

Through the years, the top portals have maintained their lead against billion-dollar, multinational media organizations (Zillow vs. realtor.com, IS24 vs. Immoweb), industry-backed, publicly listed upstarts (OnTheMarket vs. Rightmove), private-equity backed No. 2’s (Zoopla vs. Rightmove), and publicly listed competitors (Domain vs. REA Group).

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been thrown against the top portals for years with no effect on their dominant position whatsoever.

Past evidence shows that it is exceedingly unlikely that this new batch of challengers will dethrone the top portals. The smart challengers understand this game and how it’s played, not trying to overtake the leaders, but instead building a viable business on its own merits.

Mike DelPrete is a strategic adviser and global expert in real estate tech, including Zavvie, an iBuyer offer aggregator. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Realtor.com | Zillow
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