Realtor.com revenue falls as the real estate portal wars heat up
NewsCorp attributed the decline in revenue to “higher mortgage rates and macroeconomic headwinds.” Most likely these headwinds are the ongoing shortage of affordable homes, the still high mortgage rates, and cost of owning a home, which in certain states can translate into 5-figues for both insurance and property taxes.
Zillow still ranks as the number one real estate portal, including its other portal, Trulia. Realtor.com comes in with less than half of the traffic, followed by CoStar’s Homes.com network. Homes.com had 110 million (as calculated by Google Analytics). Realtor.com reported only 66 million unique monthly users in the same period, measured by Adobe Analytics.
CoStar says Homes.com is ‘fast approaching Zillow’ in traffic with overall record 183 million monthly average unique visitors, and looks to target Zillow for first place in the real estate portal competition.
As the portal wars have heated up, Realtor.com’s revenue has cooled off. During the fiscal year fourth quarter Move, Inc., the parent company of Realtor.com, recorded a 2% annual decrease in revenue to $143 million, according to an announcement on Thursday.
Revenue from Move’s real estate segment, which makes up roughly 80% of Move’s total revenue, fell 2% year-over-year, as Realtor.com’s lead volume and website traffic growth remained flat annually.
Despite the drop in Move’s revenue, NewsCorp’s digital real estate segment still recorded strong results for the quarter, including a 21% yearly increase in revenue to $448 million.
As a whole, NewsCorp reported 2% annual growth in its revenue to $10.09 billion for the full fiscal year, while the digital real estate services sector reported an 8% jump in revenue to $1.6 billion for the full fiscal year, despite a 10% decline in Move’s full-year revenue to $544 million. Overall real estate revenues fell 11% annually for the full year as referrals and core lead generation output fell.
In 2024, Homes.com ran the biggest marketing campaign in real estate history to bring some competition to the market and drive hundreds of millions of visits back to Homes.com, where all agents benefit.
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