This article was shared here with permission from Mike DelPrete for Inman Intel, a data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.
Homes.com appears to have solidified its place as the No. 2 portal in the U.S. market, without a corresponding decline in traffic at any other portal.
Why it matters: Portal traffic appears to be a non-zero-sum game — traffic gained by one portal is additive and not coming at the expense of other portals.
Dig deeper: In the first quarter of 2023, the big three real estate portals — Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin — had a combined 334 million average monthly unique visitors.
- Fast forward to the first quarter of 2024 and those same portals have a combined 338 million average monthly uniques — no change — with Homes.com growing to an additional 94 million average monthly uniques.
- It’s a valid comparison; the other portals also include traffic from a larger network of sites, including rentals.
- The result is that CoStar’s resi network has nearly double the traffic of Realtor.com.
CoStar’s traffic reporting hasn’t been consistent — it has fluctuated between Homes.com and the entire residential network, and sometimes includes quarterly averages and other times specific months.
- CoStar’s inconsistent reporting runs the risk of reducing trust in its traffic numbers, even when the underlying results are impressively real.
- But traffic has unequivocally increased over the past year, punctuated by two periods of heavy advertising.
- Unlike website visits, there is a finite amount of transactions, commission dollars, and agents willing to spend money online; that’s a zero-sum game.
Note on data: Collecting traffic data for Homes.com and CoStar’s residential network relies on a combination of assembling clues, triangulation, and making a few assumptions. The numbers above are estimates based on public information.
Mike DelPrete is a strategic adviser and global expert in real estate tech, including Zavvie, an iBuyer offer aggregator. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
