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Although much of 2024’s headlines focused on Realtor.com’s fierce battle with CoStar, CEO Damian Eales said the rivalry is toward the bottom of his priorities — especially as an intensifying housing shortage threatens the livelihoods of millions of Realtors.
Damian Eales | Credit: AJ Canaria Creative Services
“On election day last November, we ran ads in some of the major newspapers in this country where we congratulated future leaders who would be elected overnight,” he told the Inman Connect New York crowd on Wednesday. “But we put a challenge to them — we urge you in your new roles of responsibility to face the real challenge of our time, which is housing affordability. I would say that the last administration really made Realtors the villain of housing affordability by focusing on commissions.”
“And even if they only reduced commissions by, let’s say, a percentage point, which was probably their goal, that pales into insignificance with the real issue, which is housing supply,” he added. “So what you’ll see from us in the year ahead is a real focus on shining a light on the issue that America is short 7.2 million homes and it gets worse every year because we’re not building enough stock to deal with the supply.”
Eales said tackling housing supply constraints is a “win-win” for agents and consumers; however, the industry has to do a better job communicating with consumers and decision-makers about the policies that would supercharge housing starts and slow home price growth to a more sustainable level.
“I wish we’d spend more time talking outside of the bubble to all of the community leaders that the people in this room influence and certainly who we can influence as Realtor.com and who we can influence as News Corp,” he said. “[We need] to start challenging politicians to deal with the issue of reducing red tape, freeing up land, dealing with [the ‘Not in My Backyard’ movement] and building more homes because we as an industry will be more successful, but more importantly, society will be more successful as a result.”
Eales said Realtor.com is committed to lobbying for progressive housing policies and objectively educating consumers about those policies through the portal’s journalism arm, which is the top publisher of consumer-facing real estate news in the U.S.
“Ten years ago when News Corp purchased Realtor.com, we didn’t have a single journalist in Realtor.com. Today we have many journalists,” he said. “We’re the number one portal for consumer real estate news. And, in fact, if you add up all of the real estate articles that appear across News Corp, including Realtor.com, we’re the number one publisher of consumer real estate news in this country.”
The CEO said the brand’s strong focus on housing advocacy and producing consumer news doesn’t detract from the company’s greater goals of reclaiming its title as the number one portal in the industry. If anything, he said, it puts them in the best position to connect with consumers and build trust — an important puzzle piece to pulling a greater share of agents back to the Realtor.com platform.
“If we’re seriously going to take on Zillow, we need to challenge ourselves. We’re the number one most trusted brand by consumers in this country. We want to be the number one largest portal in this country,” he said. “It’s going to take us some time to get there. And if we’re going to do it, we’re going to have to be a better alternative for consumers. We’re going to have to grow our audience. And we’re going to have to be a better alternative for customers.”
Echoing his competitors, Eales said part of becoming better for homebuyers, homesellers, and agents will undoubtedly include leveraging artificial intelligence to improve the Realtor.com platform. The company’s tech team has already used AI to overhaul search functions on the site, which enables consumers to use natural language and color-coded maps to easily find their preferred listings.
“Artificial intelligence allows you to create a completely different search experience for every individual consumer. Imagine going to the Realtor.com app and my experience is entirely different from your experience because I know not only your past behavior, but I know your past behavior on all of the brands that News Corp has across North America,” he said. “If you’re a Wall Street Journal customer, you’re probably going to have a different experience than a New York Post customer for instance.”
On the agent side, Eales said Realtor.com is deploying AI to increase productivity and help them maximize results from Realtor.com’s portfolio of lead-gen products.
“We’re partnering with companies like Ylopo, for instance, to help us vet leads, to ensure that leads are of higher value, and help us to nurture leads to take some of the burden off agents so that they can be more productive in their role,” he said. “I think that there are going to be enormous advances in AI’s ability to help train agents to identify good agent performance, poor agent performance, and we’ll be at the forefront of those developments.”
As for what 2025 holds, Eales said he’s ready for the next wave of competition as AI and market headwinds challenge portals to up their value proposition.
“We love competition at Realtor.com. We think it’s our role to become better for our customers and for consumers through competing really aggressively and last year was a very aggressive playing field,” he said. “I’d like to think, though, that despite all of the investments that CoStar made in the industry, we fended them off… And today, we’re very focused on Zillow.”
“They’re to be admired in many respects, but they’re very much a consumer-centric organization. In every speech that I ever hear from representatives from their company, they start first and foremost with the consumer,” he added. “I think, not to say that consumers are unimportant, we spend a lot of time talking to consumers and agonizing over our consumer experience. But I think we’re a different company. You know, we say that we’re building for the industry.”
Email Marian McPherson
