The Ten: The portal wars, and how the gloves came off in 2024
For CoStar and Move, the battle for dominance escalated from civil competition to full-scale attacks. Zillow and other players, meanwhile, stayed out of it.
Editor's note: In this year of evolution — much of it mandated by legal challenges — a handful of people and themes have emerged as defining forces. Real Estate News has selected the top newsmakers of 2024, based on their industry impact and influence. They are The Ten.
The major real estate search portals have long competed for consumer attention, with Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin generally retaining their positions as the three leaders. They report their performance each quarter and employ their marketing engines to try and capture more visitors, but the rivalry has remained professional, with little drama.
And then Homes.com entered the race.
Over the past year, CoStar's search portal, which the company has heavily invested in, and Move's Realtor.com have set their sights on each other, turning the competition into a war of words — and litigation.
A dispute over numbers, and insinuations of foul play
"All public companies, we all report our information publicly, and you know if you're a public company CEO, that you don't make stuff up because you go to prison for a long time," CoStar CEO Andy Florance told an audience of residential real estate execs back in April.
Florance — who had recently announced an ambitious $1 billion marketing campaign for Homes.com — was pushing back against comments made by Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales. The previous day, from the same stage, Eales insinuated that Florance and CoStar had been misrepresenting Homes.com's web traffic by including data from over a dozen different URLs and CoStar brands.
"If I were to apply their logic, I'll start aggregating all of the News Corp sites that I'm linked to and will declare here today on your stage that the Realtor.com network has an audience which is greater than every man, woman and child in this country. I can do that. But I wouldn't do it," Eales said at the time.
Eales, a longtime News Corp exec, had only been heading Move, Inc. and Realtor.com for ten months at the time of the conference — but it was clear to the audience that the gloves had come off. Florance and Eales appeared to be escalating the portal wars to the level of a full-blown corporate feud.
Throughout the summer, the two CEOs made brazen claims about the competition and fought to defend their own web traffic stats and rank on the leaderboard. The fighting continued via competing complaints from both companies to the National Advertising Division of BBB National Programs (NAD) and then eventually, moved into the courtroom.
Raising the stakes with legal action
In July, Move, Inc. filed a lawsuit against CoStar and a former Realtor.com editor who Move lawyers accused of accessing sensitive information and trade secrets after starting a position at Homes.com. Florance fired back, alleging that the suit was purely a "PR stunt" and that Move's claims were "laughable" — pointing the finger directly at Eales for using the former Realtor.com employee to get back at CoStar.
"Shame on Damian for taking this poor guy and using him as a pawn in a PR war. This guy has a right to earn a living, and he's not doing anything wrong," Florance told Real Estate News after the lawsuit was filed.
In the first hearing for the dispute, the U.S. District Judge overseeing the case urged the companies to resolve the issue outside of court. But the litigation continued, with each player notching small wins along the way.
While it's too early to know who will be victorious — or even declare a stalemate or truce — in the ongoing battle between CoStar and Move, the legal wrangling between the fierce home search rivals is poised to spill over into the new year.
Meanwhile, the leaders of Zillow — which remains comfortably at the head of the pack — and third-place Redfin appear content to stay out of the fray.