This post has been republished with permission from Mike DelPrete.
Top U.S. portals Zillow and realtor.com recently released their latest financial results. Historically, Zillow has maintained a consistent 2.5x agent revenue lead over realtor.com, but in the past quarter that lead has slipped, as realtor.com grew its agent revenues much more than Zillow.
Since the last quarter, Zillow increased its premier agent revenues by $14 million, or 4 percent, compared to an increase in realtor.com’s real estate revenues of $24 million, or 18 percent. These are each company’s agent lead gen programs and don’t include adjacencies such as iBuying and mortgage.
That’s a big jump and an outsize increase in realtor.com’s agent lead gen revenues. The growth is potentially driven by the expansion of the Opcity referral program, which now makes up 30 percent of total revenues.
Strategic implications
The decline in Zillow’s revenue lead might be the start of a trend, or it might be a temporary blip (which has happened before). Quarterly results from the past three years show that the companies are still within the normal bounds of fluctuations.
Although the revenue dominance between Zillow and realtor.com has remained relatively static, the total spend from agents has not. Combined, Zillow and realtor.com have managed to increase agent revenues 55 percent over the past two years, from $327 million to $507 million — seemingly fueled by the hot market.
So though Zillow and realtor.com have yet to consistently outperform each other, they’re still managing to extract more revenue than ever before from their best customers: real estate agents.
Mike DelPrete is a strategic adviser and global expert in real estate tech, including Zavvie, an iBuyer offer aggregator. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
