Who’s winning resi’s platform wars? Depends who you ask

CoStar Group says traffic to Homes.com began closing in on Zillow’s lead last quarter, leaving its other competitors firmly in the dust.

The residential listing platform touted 148 million average monthly unique visitors in the second quarter, an annual increase of 73 percent. The gains followed the company’s launch of a $1 billion advertising campaign earlier this year, which included four commercials during the Super Bowl. 

While its traffic numbers are still trailing behind the 230 million Zillow reported last quarter, CoStar CEO Andy Florance said on the firm’s earnings call that the network’s traffic had “solidly lapped” Redfin and Realtor.com, echoing his year-ago claims that Homes.com was the second most visited listing platform. 

Redfin reported 52 million average monthly users across its website and mobile apps in the second quarter, on par with its results from the same period last year. Realtor.com logged 74 million average monthly unique users in the last period. 

But the true holder of the No. 2 spot remains a point of contention between CoStar and the parent company of Realtor.com, Move Inc, which is also laying claim to the runner-up spot. 

“Realtor.com is losing the portal wars, and losing big,” CoStar general counsel Gene Boxer told Inman last month, adding the platform was “now sliding into obscurity.”

The two firms are locked in a court battle over accusations that CoStar stole trade secrets when a former Realtor.com employee joined the company and allegedly illegally accessed the platform’s proprietary information. 

Move also took aim at some of CoStar’s traffic claims about Homes.com in the lawsuit and in a complaint the firm’s CEO Damien Earles brought to the Better Business Bureau’s advertising division. The executive told Inman that some of the claims in Homes.com’s advertising were “deceptive and misleading.”

The nonprofit watchdog group urged the platform to remove two claims, including reported traffic data and a statement alleging Homes.com’s traffic was double that of Realtor.com. 

Move has pushed back against Homes.com’s use of Google Analytics to measure traffic to its network instead of third-party independent companies like Comscore, Nielsen and Similar Web, which it claims show Realtor.com’s traffic exceeds that of Homes.com. 

But Florance fired back on the company’s earnings call, arguing Google Analytics is “more accurate than user-centric panel estimate counts.”

“Tools like Google Analytics are like an election result, whereas a tool like SEMRush or comScore is more like an election poll,” Florence said on the earnings call. “If I have the election results, I choose to report those rather than the sample poll result.”

While Move and CoStar are duking it out, Redfin has refrained from declaring all-out war on its competitors.

“We’ve competed effectively for traffic even as our largest competitors have been able to quintuple our mass-media advertising budget,” Kelman said on Redfin’s second quarter earnings call. “When consumer interest in home buying rises from its current low, we’ll hit back with larger ad campaigns of our own.”

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