Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales has taken his gloves off.
Eales, usually more subdued in his on-stage commentary, took direct hits at CoStar founder and CEO Andy Florance, who has taunted Realtor.com throughout his quest to make Homes.com the heir apparent to portal behemoth Zillow.
Damian Eales | Credit: AJ Canaria Creative Services
“I’m entirely committed to the role,” he said, dispelling rumors that he’s leaving Realtor to join REA Group. “I’m very confident. I mean, Realtor.com has enormous momentum. We are gaining audience share against Zillow, and we’re extending our audience lead against Redfin and the smaller one. And by the way, it’s so much fun watching CoStar torch billions of dollars to get $17 million worth of revenue per quarter.”
CoStar rivalry aside, Eales said the portal landscape is going through a significant shift driven by changing agent and consumer needs, evolving National Association of Realtors (NAR) and multiple listing service (MLS) policies, and the overall ebb and flow of market activity.
The most meaningful change of the year, session moderator Clelia Peters noted, is NAR’s Multiple Listing Options for Sellers (MLOS) policy, which includes an exemption that enables sellers and brokers to enter a listing into the MLS, per Clear Cooperation Policy (CCP) rules, while delaying its syndication through an Internet Data Exchange (IDX) feed.
Eales acknowledged agents are tired of the CCP debate. However, he said, MLS systems and policies have a large role in making the U.S. real estate industry the most efficient market in the world. In Australia, homesellers can spend four to five figures to have their listings syndicated, he said, and in Europe, listings are often siloed in various private listing networks, making it impossible to achieve full market transparency.
“A lot of global markets look at the American market and contemplate, how can they have a system whereby real estate listings are broadcast for free and transparently in an open marketplace at no cost to the seller,” he said. “This industry in America really serves the buyer as well. It doesn’t create opportunities for steering. The MLS, as a sector, has had a pretty tough time over the past 12 months.”
“But we should thank our MLS CEOs and boards of directors every day of the week, because what they do is extraordinary in the American system of ensuring that real estate is broadcast for free and we have full transparency in the market,” he added.
NAR’s CCP changes have added another layer to the portal wars, with each major player reacting differently to the heightened opportunity for sellers and brokers to choose private listing networks over broad syndication to their sites.
Zillow and Redfin took the hardest stance, deciding to ban listings that aren’t added to the MLS within 24 hours of being publicly marketed. Meanwhile, Homes.com joined Compass in lambasting Zillow and Redfin, calling the companies’ bans anti-competitive and self-serving.
Realtor.com, however, has been an outlier of sorts, deciding to defend the transparency created through CCP but declining to ban listings that don’t follow the rules. That decision and others, Eales said, reflect the company’s dedication to fostering an open marketplace and “standing up for the broader interests of the industry.”
“I think this is really important in a competitive context, and I’m not criticizing the Zillow, the Rockets and the Redfin of the world. They’re just attacking it differently. They are closing their marketplaces,” he explained. “You know the reality is that Zillow is selling their leads, their audience, to fewer and fewer customers. They’re closing it down. The reality is that they’re selling more and more of those customers their mortgage [product].”
“I think we’ve already seen it with Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin. It’s one broker and it’s one mortgage … And by the way, Homes.com is also closing because they’re saying we’re only interested in the listing agent. In fact, if you want to know their DNA, they call buyer agents ‘fake agents.’ They only want one side of the market,” he said.
“It’s a different business strategy. But my business strategy is to be a genuinely open marketplace. We want to support buyers and sellers, buyer agents and listing agents. We want to be the open marketplace for mortgage, for title, for other services. That’s what differentiates us.”
As the portal industry moves through the current inflection point, Eales said he’s focused on educating consumers through Realtor.com’s news arm, lobbying for housing policies to increase affordability and investing in technology that creates a better transaction process for consumers and agents.
“If this industry can get behind one issue, it’s housing supply,” he said. “Let’s turn off this conversation about Clear Cooperation. It can be refined. But [housing inventory] is a bipartisan issue where even my staunchest competitors in the industry would agree that we should have more homes built in this country. And I think that genuinely, we can make a difference in our local communities if we start talking more about it.”
