Barclays downgrades Zillow over fears of falling web traffic

Financial services firm warns of “drastic” year-over-year decline

Zillow's Spencer Rascoff and Trulia's Paul Levine
Zillow's Spencer Rascoff and Trulia's Paul Levine

Barclays has downgraded Zillow Group amid fears of slowing web traffic for Zillow and Trulia.

The British financial services firm downgraded Zillow Group to Equal-Weight from Overweight on April 6, warning of a “drastic” year-over-year decline in traffic growth for Zillow and Trulia and indicating the company’s market is saturated, according to HousingWire.

Analysts expressed concern over Zillow’s recent move to cease reporting monthly traffic trends as of March. Zillow’s numbers for January 2015 indicated a 24 percent increase in traffic growth from the previous year, compared to traffic growth of 52 percent in January 2014.

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“Due to the complexity involved with tracking metrics across newly acquired brands and multi-platform users across mobile apps, mobile web, and desktop, beginning in March 2015, Zillow will no longer release its monthly unique metrics on the Zillow Investor Relations page,” a Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire.

While Zillow and Trulia recently announced a “record-setting” number of listing agreements with services around the country – adding 33 new multiple listing services in total – Barclays said it expects the company is cutting deals at deep discounts with large brokerages, which could hurt near-term revenues. [HousingWire] — Rey Mashayekhi