Realtor.com and Homes.com neck-and-neck in traffic race
September data from web traffic aggregator Comscore shows Realtor.com in second place and Homes.com coming in a close third.
Key points:
- Comscore estimates that Realtor.com had 51 million total unique visitors in September and Homes.com captured 47.7 million.
- While Zillow remains in the front of the pack, this would place Homes.com ahead of Redfin and just behind Realtor.com.
- The companies’ upcoming quarterly earnings reports — which include internal traffic data — may shed more light on their relative positions.
Though real estate sales have had a sluggish summer, the contest among home search sites for consumer traffic and agent engagement is about as intense as ever.
So where have the top contenders landed?
According to independent web traffic and data company Comscore, Zillow logged nearly 103 million total unique visitors in September, Realtor.com saw just over 51 million, Homes.com had 47.7 million, and Redfin took fourth place with 36.6 million uniques for the month.
The data, which is aggregated from Comscore's own panel of internet users as well as third-party data providers, shows Realtor.com and Homes.com nearly neck-and-neck for second place.
However, CoStar made a big splash earlier this month when it announced that Homes.com logged 100 million unique visitors in September, which the company said catapulted its residential search platform into second place — ahead of Realtor.com.
Competitors argued that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison pitting Homes.com's unique monthly numbers against quarterly traffic figures that others had released during earnings. But there is no doubt when reviewing independent data — such as recent estimates from SimilarWeb — that Homes.com is well ahead of its rivals in audience growth.
Nevertheless, after announcing its 100 million visitor milestone, Homes.com president Dave Mele told Real Estate News that the company won't rest on its laurels and is aiming to take the top spot away from Zillow.
"Historically, there have been players who may have been satisfied with being number two or number three. We aren't," Mele said. "We are very clearly going for number one. It's our goal to be number one."
As the publicly traded companies release their earnings and search portal traffic data in the coming weeks, their relative positions should become even clearer.