Average monthly unique users to Realtor.com sites fell 6.5 percent compared to the prior year as lead volume also slid 1 percent. Company said it had to 72 million average unique monthly users in the most recent quarter.
In the battle for audience share, Realtor.com took a step in the wrong direction in recent months as it watched the average number of monthly unique users fall 6.5 percent in the most recent quarter.
But leaders at the portal’s ownership group, News Corp., tried to strike a positive tone on Thursday, saying that those Realtor.com visitors are clicking on more links while visiting the platform.
While the total number of unique users fell, News Corp. Chief Financial Officer Lavanya Chandrashekar said that Realtor.com is actually gaining ground in the battle for consumers’ time and attention.
“Realtor has also gained audience share with total visits reaching over double that of Homes.com and that of Redfin, while narrowing the gap versus Zillow,” Chandrashekar said in a call with investors on Thursday.
Robert Thomson
Realtor.com is operated by the News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc. In recent months, it has beefed up its investment in a stable of journalists and writers who produce news stories as a way of generating traffic.
That investment is part of what CEO Robert Thomson said was a “holistic real estate experience,” where visitors to the site can read news, look up listings and connect with real estate agents.
“We have built in recent years the largest publisher of original real estate news in the United States, as measured by visits per unique user by Comscore, not by home-brewed metrics,” Thomson said.
The comment was an apparent reference to an ongoing battle between Realtor.com and CoStar, which owns and operates Homes.com, for audience awareness, engagement and revenue.
Realtor.com and CoStar have been battling for years over which truly has the bigger audience.
Turning views into leads into revenue
While attempting to capture a larger audience of consumers, Realtor.com then generates leads that can be sold to its real estate professional customers. But despite the stated growth in audience share, leads fell 1 percent in the most recent quarter.
News Corp leaders pointed out that this was an improvement from recent quarters: lead volume declined 13 percent in the previous quarter.
- 72 million: The average number of unique users per month to Realtor.com, a 6.5 percent decline in the quarter.
- Move, which includes Realtor.com and other international real estate service sites, grew revenue 9 percent, to $152 million.
- 22 percent: That’s the total share of revenue generated for Realtor.com by the sell-side, new homes and rental segments.
News Corp said it had 254 million total visits to Realtor.com in September alone, citing Comscore data. That would average just over 3.5 visits per unique user.
While Zillow didn’t break out its total visits by month, it said last week that it had 2.5 billion total visits in the third quarter. That would average to over 833 million visits per month from 250 million average unique monthly visitors, or an average of 3.33 visits per unique user.
Meanwhile, CoStar reported 115 million average unique monthly users combined between Homes.com and its assortment of other real estate sites. The company didn’t report total visits in its most recent earnings.
Ultimately, Realtor.com highlighted in its commentary Thursday that it grew revenue despite an ongoing slide in lead volume by focusing on what it called premium offerings to its paying customers.
“We are providing more reasons for potential buyers and sellers to come to our site, which is why our user metrics are patently superior to those of other sites,” Thomson said. “In September, we had the largest number of visits per user, clearly outstripping Zillow and other, lesser sites.”
