Realtor.com CEO on fighting ‘the right way,’ growth, and the CCP 

The portal wars heated up this year and spilled over into the courts via legal wrangling and complaints over competing ad campaigns. And while 2024 might be the year that Damian Eales and Realtor.com punched back at CoStar and Homes.com, Zillow remains the "number one competitor." 

But that's been a friendlier rivalry: The companies partnered up this year to share rental listings and interactive media, while Zillow's co-founder praised Eales' advocacy for buyer agency.

So how does one compete with an important partner? Eales discussed this theme with Real Estate News, as well as the ongoing changes in the home search space, the Realtor.com brand, and how portals could position themselves if Clear Cooperation went away.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Looking back at the year, what are you especially proud of?

The thing I'm most proud of is that we've really rediscovered our brand in the last 12 months, and the power of what that brand is. Second, of the many players in the real estate industry, I think Realtor.com did a great job of putting their head above the parapet and standing up for the great work that buyer agents do in America. 

And third, in the most competitive market in our 26-year history, I think we fought really well, and we did it the right way. We held our share in audience despite unprecedented competitive spend against us. And indeed, we've improved our relationship with our customers simultaneously. So I'm really proud of the work that our team, more broadly, has done to help us achieve that.

Speaking of competition — Realtor.com and Homes.com have been battling it out over traffic claims and allegations of trade secret theft. Will we see a truce one day? 

We're all for competition. I think it's one of the greatest forces in business, but if people compete in the wrong way, then we're going to call it out. When people make erroneous claims about their audience in comparison to our audience, I'm going to fight. If people do the wrong thing in terms of accessing proprietary information after the end of their employment, we're going to call that out. 

Look, our main objective is to grow market share. The market share leader is Zillow, and they are our primary competitor. The fact is that Homes.com still is the fourth portal on any independent audience measure, be it Comscore, Nielsen, Semrush or Similarweb, and we watched the revenue they declared in their earnings reports, and it's insignificant in comparison to Zillow. So Zillow is clearly our number one competitor. 

You compete with Zillow, but you've also partnered with them this year. How do you balance collaboration and competition?

Like every company, we've got to be very careful how we cut our cloth. To succeed, I've been determined to really focus our business on the core buy- and sell-sides, and the sell-side of our business is growing extraordinarily. Investing in that means investing less elsewhere, so we shouldn't be investing our scarce resources in building independent capabilities if we can leverage the scale of others. So that's where partnerships come in. 

The biggest partnership we announced in the last 12 months was a partnership with Zillow on rentals. They have an audience that exceeds that of our nearest competitor, Apartments.com, and there is a much bigger opportunity for revenue growth through partnering with Zillow. We were better to partner than to build a rental business on our own, and we're very happy with the outcome. We will compete vigorously with Zillow in every other aspect of our business, but that's an example where we're willing to partner. 

What happens if Clear Cooperation goes away? Could the major portals 'go full-blown brokerage' and monopolize listings?

Zillow has been very publicly pro-Clear Cooperation. You might argue actually, that if anybody was to be anti-Clear Cooperation it probably should be Zillow, because they would possibly be the greatest beneficiary in a world where they could aggregate the most listings. And then, when traffic falls off other portals because they don't have those listings, they could charge for those listings. That is the model that occurs elsewhere throughout the world. I don't think it's good for buyers and sellers, but I also don't think it's good for Realtors, who would end up having to pay more to participate in real estate. 

But in terms of going brokerage — Redfin is obviously already there, but it started from that position. I think there are many in the industry who would argue that Zillow's "super app" strategy is effectively owning the end-to-end technology infrastructure for an agent, and they could get to a place where their Flex customer is simply a Zillow broker. I don't know if that's their strategy. 

We've taken a position that we are not a broker and we're supportive of the MLSs. We think they generate a lot of value to American buyers and sellers that is unique to this market. And we feel that we are uniquely by and for the industry as a portal, and so our challenge is to find ways that we can do so profitably, such that we also genuinely help the industry.