CoStar Group

Despite fewer real estate transactions occurring year over year, listing giant CoStar still managed to grow during the second quarter of 2023. And more importantly, it leapfrogged Realtor.com to become the second most visited residential listing site.

CoStar, best known for its commercial listing platform, recorded a 13% overall annual increase in revenue to $606 million, and a 20% yearly jump in net income to $100.52 million.

“We achieved another great quarter of very strong results in terms of revenue, sales and traffic to our websites,” Andy Florance, the founder and CEO of CoStar Group, said in a statement. “Achieving these results despite commercial property transactions plummeting 63% in the second quarter, demonstrates the resilience of our platforms.”

While the overall firm reported an annual increase in revenue, CoStar’s residential brands saw revenue fall to $12.7 million in Q2 2023, compared to $20.2 million in Q2 2022.

CoStar attributed much of its growth this quarter to the rapid increase in traffic it has seen on its sites over the past year. According to Google Analytics data cited during CoStar’s second quarter 2023 earnings call with investors and analysts Tuesday night, the firm saw 105 million unique visitors to its various websites in June — a new record for the company.

Homes.com, the firm’s flagship residential website, reported 38 million unique visitors in June, up 130% year over year. Overall, CoStar’s various residential websites recorded 84 million average monthly unique visitors during the second quarter.

Based on the self-reported metrics of other major listing sites, including Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow, this makes CoStar the second most visited residential listing site, only falling short of listing behemoth Zillow and now ahead of Realtor.com.

In addition, Florance noted on the call that, “according to comScore, Homes.com unique visitors are up 224% in the second quarter over the same quarter last year, while Zillow’s traffic is down 5%, Realtor.com is down 13% and Redfin is up 4%.”

On the call, Florance said consumers were visiting Homes.com because they can easily contact the listing agents.

“Competing sites are sending that lead into a call center and often syndicating that lead out to multiple unrelated agents that don’t know that listing at all,” he said, taking a shot at Zillow. “So consumers are reasonably smart sometimes and I think they’re onto that.”

Florance also added that he believes the firm has a lot of runway ahead for future growth.

“This is a marathon and not a sprint. We are clear that we have more and bigger traffic levers to pull to grow traffic over the quarters to come,” he said. “Our future growth in traffic will come in waves. Any period where traffic lulls, it may just be the trough before a monster wave comes. I’m very confident that 18 months from now, we will have very impressive rankings.”

CoStar made waves earlier this year earlier this year when news broke that it was in talks with News Corp to acquire Move Inc., the parent company of Realtor.com, for a rumored $3 billion. The deal was called off in late February when CoStar told investors and analysts in its fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call that “at this point, CoStar Group is not acquiring Realtor.com.”

Source: housingwire.com