Welcome back to The Deep Dive. You know, I want
to start today by talking about a habit I think
almost everyone has. That late night, maybe I
should move to Vermont habit. Oh, the real estate
voyeurism. I know it well. Exactly. Just scrolling
and scrolling through these incredible houses
you have absolutely no intention of buying. It's
a form of entertainment. And for millions of
people, that experience happens on one specific
platform. But we're not just talking about the
app you scroll on. Today, we're looking at the
absolute machinery behind it, the corporate strategy,
the tech, the 30 -year history. Who are? We're
talking about Realtor .com. And what's fascinating
to me is that if you look at the landscape, they
had everything. A 10 -year head start on Zillow,
a complete monopoly on the industry's official
data feed. And the backing of the National Association
of Realtors, the NAR, the biggest trade association
in the country. Yet for so long. they were seen
as the i don't know the uncool one the runner
-up it's the classic incumbents dilemma isn't
it and you're so right to frame it that way on
the surface yeah it's a property search site
but when you dig into the source material we've
pulled for this We're talking corporate filings
from moving the big acquisition records from
News Corp, all the strategic documents leading
up to early 2026. You see, it's really a story
about a decades long identity crisis. An identity
crisis. How so? Well, what is it? Is it a tech
company, morning bread in Silicon Valley? Is
it a media company, which is what News Corp tried
to make it? Right. Or is it just a, you know,
a member service for a trade association? And
for 30 years, it's been trying to be all three
at once. And that tension just defines their
entire history. It's wild. We're looking at a
company that started in, what, 1995? The absolute
dawn of the public Internet. It survived the
dotcom crash, got bought by Rupert Murdoch's
global media empire. And today it's deploying,
I mean, actual artificial intelligence to. change
the fundamental economics of being a real estate
agent. So that's the mission for this deep dive.
We're not just reviewing features on an app.
We're using realtor .com as a case study. Exactly.
A case study in platform economics, how a completely
closed protectionist network, which is what it
was, was basically forced open by the Web and
how it's now desperately trying to pivot from
just being a digital billboard for agents to
something more like a matchmaker for the entire
transaction. And the scale is just staggering.
I was looking at the numbers. We're talking 68
million monthly users. Billions. with a B in
valuation swings, and a tech stack that's gone
from grainy JPEG photos to predictive climate
risk modeling. So yeah, it's a story of digital
transformation, but it's also a story of huge
missed opportunities and some incredibly aggressive
and expensive catch -up strategies. Okay, so
let's go all the way back. So understand the
DNA of this company. You have to put yourself
in 1995. A different world. Totally. Windows
95 is just launching. Most people are hearing
a dial -up modem for the first time. And the
real estate industry is sitting on this absolute
goldmine of data. But they are, and I think this
is the right word, they are terrified of sharing
it. Terrified is exactly the right word. You
have to understand the power dynamic back then.
The real estate agent was a gatekeeper, a guardian
of information. Right. If you wanted to know
what houses were for sale in your town, what
did you do? You had to physically go to an office.
A real estate office. The agent would pull out
this huge, thick book, the MLS book, or maybe
log into a green screen terminal that only they
had access to. The information asymmetry. That
was their value. It was the entire basis of their
value proposition. You need me because I have
the information you can't get. So along comes
the Internet. This force of radical openness
and the National Association of Realtors, the
NAR, they see it as an existential threat. A
massive threat. So their first move is a defensive
one. They launched something in 1995 called the
Realtor Information Network, RIN. But this wasn't
a website for you and me, was it? No. And this
is the critical point. This really shows you
their mindset at the time. RIN was a private
closed network. Think of it as an intranet, not
the internet. So it was a tool for realtors to
talk to other realtors. That's all it was. It
used the new internet infrastructure, sure. But
the goal was to help an agent in Chicago send
listing data to an agent in Miami. It was purely
business to business. They explicitly, I mean,
their founding documents say this, they did not
want the public to see the raw data. Because
if the consumer has all the data. Then the consumer
doesn't need the realtor. That was the fear that
drove the entire strategy. It's the walled guardian
approach. Build the walls as high as you can.
100 percent. It was a digital country club. You
had to be a member of the NAR to get in. But
here's the problem with building a walled garden
in 1995. The Internet is basically a giant bulldozer
designed to knock down walls. Exactly. You already
had these little third party websites starting
to pop up. You had individual brokers in, say,
California who are tech savvy realizing, wait
a minute, if I put my listings on this new World
Wide Web thing, my phone rings more. The dam
was already breaking. So this private network,
this RIN concept. It's obsolete almost the day
it launches. Almost immediately. They were trying
to hold back the ocean. So by 1996, less than
a year later, they're forced to pivot hard. They
relaunch. And this time it's a public facing
website. And this 1996 pivot, that's really the
birth of the modern real estate portal as we
know it. It is. And the numbers, I mean, the
numbers from their own reports, they just tell
the whole story. In December of 1995, inside
the private RAN network, they had about 32 ,000
listings. By October of 1996, after they opened
the gates to the public, nearly 400 ,000 listings.
Wait, say that again. From 32 ,000 to 400 ,000.
In 10 months. That's more than a 10x increase.
That's not growth. That's an explosion. It was
an absolute... Data explosion. The second they
gave the regional MLSs, the multiple listing
services, a pipeline to feed directly into a
public site, the content just flooded in. It
showed how much pent -up supply and demand there
was. But they had some issues with the branding
at first, right? I saw this in the notes and
I couldn't believe it. Oh, the branding mess,
yes. Before they settled on Realtor .com, they
briefly called it SpotRealtor .com. SpotRealtor
.com. What does that even mean? It sounds like
a website for buying Dalmatians. I think. I think
the idea was like X marks the spot, you know,
like you found the spot for real estate. It was
a very, very 90s Web 1 .0 attempt to be friendly
and cute. That was amateurish. Deeply amateurish.
Thankfully, someone with some sense prevailed
and they dropped the spot by the end of 1996.
But this whole transition from private network
to massive public website, it created a huge
operational problem for them. Which was? The
NAR is a trade association. They're lobbyists.
They organize conferences and set professional
standards. They are not a tech startup. They
had absolutely no idea how to run a high -traffic,
consumer -facing website in the middle of the
dot -com boom. Ah, so this is where the corporate
structure gets complicated, a complication that,
frankly, still defines the company today. It
really does. They realized they couldn't run
it themselves, so they outsourced it. They handed
over the operational keys to a tech company called
Real Select. And Real Select later rebrands as
HomeStore. Right. And HomeStore eventually becomes
Move Inc. But the core arrangement was set right
there in the 90s. And this is the nuance that
most people miss. Realtor .com is not owned by
the realtors. It is operated by a for -profit,
publicly traded tech company under an exclusive
license from the realtors. That sounds like a
golden handcuff situation. Explain that. Well,
the tech company, HomeStore, gets this incredible
deal. They get the official brand -realtor .com
-esh. And more importantly, they get the guaranteed
exclusive data stream from the NAR. That's the
gold. But the handcuff is that they are forever
beholden to the rules and the politics of this
massive trade group. That is the perfect analogy
for their entire existence. But in the late 90s,
it felt more gold than handcuff because the money
was just flowing so freely. Right. The dot -com
bubble. Peak bubble. HomeStore goes public in
August of 1999. They raise an incredible $140
million. And their strategy at the time was fascinating.
It wasn't about product innovation. It was about
pure brute force distribution. This was the era
of the portal wars. The portal wars, exactly.
Today, if you want traffic, you focus on Google
SEO or TikTok or whatever. In 1997, the Internet
was smaller. The on -ramps were the big portals.
AOL, Yahoo, NBC, USA Today. And if you could
control the little real estate button on the
AOL homepage. You controlled the entire market.
It was digital beachfront property. And HomeStore,
running realtor .com, went out and... bought
all of it. They bought it all. They signed an
exclusive deal with USA Today in 97. Then they
got NBC. Then came the massive multimillion dollar
deal to be the exclusive real estate provider
for AOL. They paid a fortune for these placements.
The strategy was basically there will be no other
door to real estate on the Internet. All roads
lead through us. And for a while, it absolutely
worked. It created this huge, deep moat around
their business. By 1999, they had something like
1 .3 million listings. They were the undisputed
king of online real estate. No one was even close.
And to give them some credit, I saw in the source
material they weren't just sitting on the data.
They were trying to innovate even back then.
They were. They were experimenting with virtual
tours in 1999. I have to stop you there. A virtual
tour in 1999. Most of us were on screeching 56K
dial -up modems. Yeah. What did that even look
like? Was it just a picture that took 10 minutes
to load? It was probably a series of still photos
stitched together into a kind of clunky 360 -degree
panorama that, yes, probably took five minutes
to load and was incredibly grainy. But the intent
was there. Even back then, they understood the
core user need. I want to feel like I'm walking
through this house, but I don't want to leave
my chair. It was visionary, even if the tech
wasn't quite ready. They enter the 2000s as the
dominant player. Unbeatable. But then the world
changes. The bubble bursts. The dot -com bubble
bursts. Home store stock collapses. There's a
huge accounting scandal. It was a mess. And then
after that, new competitors start to emerge from
the ashes. Competitors who learned from Realtor
.com's mistakes. Exactly. Zillow launches in
2006. Trulia launches around the same time. And
suddenly, just having the official data isn't
enough of a selling point. Right, because now
you need a good user experience. You need something
to keep people coming back. You need the Zestimate.
And that's the killer. The Zestimate was this
addictive, controversial, but brilliant tool
that gave consumers a number. An automated valuation.
And Realtor .com couldn't do that. They couldn't
because of those golden handcuffs. Their partner,
the NAR, is made up of agents who believe they
are the ones who should tell you what your house
is worth. They hate automated valuations. They
see it as a threat. So while Zillow is giving
consumers this fun new toy, Realtor .com is stuck.
They can't innovate in the same way without angering
their partners. They completely lost the cool
war. Zillow became the fun place to dream. Realtor
.com was seen as the boring utilitarian tool.
Which brings us to the next major chapter, the
rescue operation, or I guess the acquisition.
Let's fast forward to 2014. Right. So the company
has survived the 2008 housing crash. It's treading
water, but it's clearly losing mindshare to Zillow,
which had just bought Trulia. They were falling
behind. Enter News Corp. September 2014, Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp announces it's acquiring
Move Inc., the parent company of Realtor .com,
for $950 million. Nearly a billion dollars. Now,
my first thought is, why? News Corp is the Wall
Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Post,
HarperCollins Books. They're a media and publishing
empire. Why buy a real estate listing website?
It's a great question. And the answer is that
the single most profitable part of old school
newspapers was the classified section. Ah, the
ads for jobs, cars, and houses. The rivers of
gold. As the newspaper business died, all that
revenue moved online. News Corp understood that
business model better than anyone, and they weren't
new to it. They already owned a company called
REA Group in Australia, which is the dominant
real estate portal there. They knew the playbook.
So they looked at Realtor .com in the U .S. and
saw what? An undervalued asset. A sleeping giant.
It had the audience at the time around 34 million
unique monthly visitors. But it was, in their
view... seriously under -monetized. They believe
they could apply their media savvy and their
ad tech knowledge to make it much more profitable.
And there's another angle too, right? The data
angle. If you're a news corp and you want to
sell targeted ads for, say, the Wall Street Journal's
real estate section, or for Barron's. Knowing
exactly who is in the market for a $2 million
home and a specific zip code is incredibly valuable
data. It's a high intent signal. What do you
mean by that? Well, if someone is browsing on
Realtor .com, they're not just passively killing
time. They are signaling their intent to make
the biggest purchase of their life. That means
they're also about to spend a ton of money on
mortgages, insurance, moving trucks, furniture,
appliances, you name it. News Corp wanted to
own that signal and build an advertising ecosystem
around it. And based on the financial analysis
from that time. Wall Street completely bought
the story. By 2016, just two years after News
Corp bought it for $950 million, Morgan Stanley
valued the company at $2 .5 billion. It's a staggering
jump in value. How do you do that? How do you
more than double the value of a company in just
24 months? What did they actually do? They went
on the offensive. For years, they had been playing
defense against Zillow. Under News Corp, they
found a new message. They stopped trying to be
cool and started hammering the idea of accuracy.
Leaning into the one big advantage. Exactly.
Zillow and Trulio were fun, but their data could
be messy. You'd see a house listed for sale that
had actually sold two weeks ago. So Realtor .com's
marketing became all about its direct connection
to the MLSs. They started running ads saying,
we have the most accurate up -to -the -minute
data. By 2016, they were claiming to display
97 % of all listed residential properties in
the U .S. So the new pitch to the consumer was
essentially, Zillow is for dreaming, but Realtor
.com is for buying. That's a perfect way to put
it. When you're serious, you come to us. That
positioning resonated with serious buyers and
agents and it helped them claw back a lot of
ground. And behind the scenes, they were revamping
the ad technology, optimizing the monetization
engine, which is just corporate speak for getting
more money out of agents for leads. You know,
during this period of intense change, the leadership
seems to be a revolving door. Yeah. Which feels
telling. It does. You had Ryan O 'Hara as CEO
of MoveInRealtor .com until 2019, then an acting
CEO, Tracy Fellows. Then in 2020, David Doctorow
comes in. Then he's replaced in mid -2023 by
Damian Eels. That's four leaders in about four
years. That signals a lot of instability, or
at least a lot of searching for the right strategy.
I think so. And each leader brought a very different
background. Dr. Rowe came from consumer tech
eBay Expedia. He was all about improving the
user experience on the app. Eels, the current
CEO, came up through the News Corp side in Australia.
He's much more focused on the industry relationships
and the business to business side of things.
And it wasn't just the leadership that moved.
The company itself physically relocated. Yeah.
They started in San Jose. Right. The heart of
Silicon Valley. Right. Then moved to a bigger
campus in Santa Clara in 2016. But the big symbolic
move was the recent one. In early 2025, it was
reported they were officially moving the corporate
headquarters to Austin, Texas. From Silicon Valley
to the Silicon Hills. It's symbolic on so many
levels. One, it's obviously cheaper, a big trend
in tech. Two, it gets them out of that competitive,
insular Silicon Valley bubble. But the third
reason is the most important strategically. Their
single biggest acquisition, a company called
Opsity, is based in Austin. Moving the headquarters
there was a massive signal to the market and
to their employees that the Op City business
model isn't just a part of the company. It is
the future of the company. OK, we have to get
to Op City. But before we get to the business
model, let's talk about the product itself, the
tech stack. Because if you open the Realtor .com
app today versus, say, 10 years ago, the sheer
depth of information is almost overwhelming.
It's become a risk assessment engine. That's
one of the most fundamental shifts in the entire
prop tech industry. It's so much. more than just
beds, baths, and square feet now. I mean, let's
go through some of these features. In 2019, they
added the commute time filter. Okay, that's practical.
I get it. Useful, for sure. But then in 2020,
they roll out the noise overlay map. The noise
map is just fascinating to me. It's not just
a guess. It aggregates real data from traffic
sensors, from airport flight paths, from business
density, and it creates this literal heat map
of sound levels across a neighborhood. So I can
see block by block. If my dream house is going
to be quiet or if it's right next to a highway,
I didn't notice on the map. Exactly. It's addressing
a very specific and very common buyer anxiety.
What if I move in and I can't sleep because it's
too loud? It's a quality of life metric that
an agent might, you know. conveniently forget
to mention. But then it gets even more intense.
This is what I call the liability layer. In 2020,
they add a flood risk tool and in 2022, a wildfire
risk tool. And this is where that tension we
talked about between serving the consumer and
serving the agent. gets white hot. These tools
weren't developed in -house, were they? No. And
that's important. They partnered with a nonprofit
research group called the First Street Foundation.
These aren't just simple ratings. They use complex
climate models to project the risk of a flood
or a wildfire over the lifetime of a 30 -year
mortgage. That's a frankly terrifying timeline
to consider when you're looking at a house. It
is. The tool will literally show you that a house
might be perfectly dry today, but has a, say,
40 percent chance of being a severe flood zone
by the year 2045 or that its wildfire risk is
rated extreme. So here's the billion dollar question.
Why would a platform whose entire business model
depends on agents successfully selling houses
put a giant, scary red warning label on half
of their inventory? Doesn't that just kill deals?
Oh, it absolutely kills some deals. I guarantee
you there are thousands of real estate agents
who loathe these features, who see a sale fall
apart because a buyer gets spooked by a flood
factor score of 8 out of 10. Why do it? Because
Realtor .com, under News Corp, made a very deliberate
strategic calculation. They decided... that in
an era of increasing climate risk, not showing
the data was a bigger long -term liability than
showing it. A liability in what sense? Legal?
Partly legal, maybe, but mostly a liability of
trust. Think about it. If you buy a house through
their platform and it floods a year later and
you find out that they had access to that risk
data but chose to hide it from you to help the
agent make a sale, you will never trust that
brand again. So they chose long -term consumer
trust over short -term sales velocity. Precisely.
It fundamentally shifts the psychology of the
user. You go from browsing and thinking, oh,
look at that beautiful breakfast nook, to, hmm.
Look at that flip factor score. It forces a much
more sober, rational financial decision. It turns
the platform from what was basically a marketing
brochure into more of a due diligence tool. That's
the perfect description. And in the long run,
that's a much more defensible and valuable position
to be in. OK, so on the flip side of all that
scary data, they also invested heavily in the,
you know, the fund immersive tech. Right. It
wasn't all doom and gloom. Starting around 2017,
they really pushed into things like augmented
reality. and integrating Matterport 3D tour technology.
The 3D walkthroughs, I feel like those became
ubiquitous overnight. They were around before,
but the pandemic in 2020 was the huge accelerator.
Suddenly, you couldn't do in -person open houses.
The 3D tour went from a cool, nice -to -have
feature to an absolute essential. And Realtor
.com was well -positioned because they had already
done the work to integrate that tech into their
iOS and Android apps. It's all about engagement,
right? The longer I spend walking through a virtual
house on their app... The more likely you are
to contact an agent through their system, the
more data they have on what you like. Matterport
scans are more than just a video. It's spatial
data. You can digitally measure rooms, see the
floor plan in a new way. It just removes a layer
of uncertainty before you even bother to visit
in person. So we've got the history, we've got
the tech, but let's follow the money. This is
the part I think most users completely misunderstand.
The app feels free to use. But this is a multi
-billion dollar business. Yeah. How does the
cash actually flow? Right. First and most important
thing to clarify, Realtor .com is not a brokerage.
They don't employ Realtor .com agents in the
same way a company like Redfin has its own agents.
They're a middleman, a marketplace. They are
a lead generation platform. And historically,
the business model was very simple. It was basically
pay to play. You mean an agent would literally
just buy a zip code? Essentially, yes. It was
a subscription advertising model. An agent would
pay Realtor .com, say, $500 a month. And in return,
their face and phone number would be featured
next to all the listings in the 90210 zip code.
And realtor .com got paid whether that agent
ever sold a house or not. Exactly. They got paid
for the advertising space, for the exposure.
It didn't matter if the leads they sent were
any good. That sounds like a great deal for realtor
.com. But maybe not so great for the agent who's
paying $500 for a bunch of junk leads from people
just daydreaming. That was the problem. That
was why the model started to break down as the
market got more competitive. Agents were complaining
constantly that they were paying for click kickers
or looky -loos, people who aren't serious buyers.
And consumers were complaining that they'd click
the contact agent button and either never hear
back or get a call from an agent who knew nothing
about the specific property. The system was broken.
The incentives were misaligned. Totally. So they
had to pivot the entire business model. And this
is where that Austin based acquisition, Opsity,
becomes the absolute center of the universe for
them. OK, so this is the big one. They bought
Opsity in 2018 for $210 million. You said it
wasn't an ad platform, but a lead conversion
platform. Break that down for us. Right. So lead
generation, the old model, is just here's a name
and a phone number. Good luck. Lead conversion
is what Opsity does. Now, when you're on Realtor
.com and you click that contact agent button.
Your request doesn't just go to some random agent
who paid for the zip code. Where does it go?
It's intercepted by Opsity's system. They use
a combination of AI and a human call center to
contact you, often within seconds. They call
you and they ask qualifying questions. Hi, are
you working with an agent already? Have you been
pre -approved for a mortgage? Are you ready to
tour homes this week? They scrub the lead. They
qualify it. They scrub and qualify the lead until
it's red hot. Only then, once they've confirmed
you are a serious ready to transact buyer, do
they pass you on to an agent. But here's the
revolutionary part. They don't just pass it to
any agent. They use an algorithm. They use a
matching algorithm. It looks at all the agents
in their network and gives the lead to the one
who has the best track record for closing deals
on that type of property in that specific neighborhood
at that price point. So it's performance based.
And how does Realtor .com get paid in this new
model? This is the crucial part. They get paid
with a referral fee. They've completely changed
the economics. They tell the agent, we are not
going to charge you a single dollar up front
for this lead. We are giving you this highly
qualified, ready to buy customer for free. But
T, if and when you close the deal with this client,
you owe us a percentage of your commission. What
kind of percentage are we talking about? It can
be 30, 35, sometimes even 40 percent of the agent's
commission on that sale. Wow. That is a massive
shift. They've gone from selling billboard ads
to taking a direct cut of the actual transaction.
It completely realigns the incentives. Now, Realtor
.com only makes the big money if the agent is
successful and the house actually sells. It forces
them to focus on the quality of the match, not
just the quantity of clicks. And I imagine it
also terrified a lot of traditional real estate
brokers. It sent shockwaves through the industry
because it effectively turns real estate agents
into on -demand gig economy workers for the Realtor
.com platform. So Op City was about capturing
the buyer's side of the deal. But then they kept
buying companies. It looks like they're trying
to capture the entire life cycle of a property.
That's the ecosystem play. In 2020, they bought
a company called Avail. And what does Avail do?
Avail makes software for landlords, specifically
for smaller independent landlords. It's a platform
for listing rentals, screening tenants, collecting
rent online, managing maintenance requests. Why
would a company focused on home sales buy a tool
for renters and landlords? Because today's renter
is tomorrow's first -time homebuyer. If you own
the platform where they pay their rent every
month, you have a relationship with them. You
know when their lease is up. You can target them
with marketing that says, hey, your lease is
ending in six months. Did you know rents in your
area are up 10 percent? Maybe it's time to think
about buying. It's about building a future pipeline
of customers. Smart. And then in 2022, another
acquisition, Upnest. Upnest attacks the other
side of the transaction. The seller. Most real
estate portals are very buyer focused. Upnest
is a marketplace where home sellers can have
agents compete for their business. How does that
work? A seller goes on Upnest, describes their
property, and then multiple vetted agents submit
proposals to that seller, often competing on
their commission rates and their marketing plans.
It brings transparency to the process of choosing
a listing agent. So now, with these acquisitions,
Realtor .com is monetizing the buyer through
OpCity, the renter and landlord through Avail,
and the seller through UpNest. They're trying
to be the operating system for all of it. That's
the goal. But there was one acquisition that
didn't fit this pattern. One that they actually
got rid of. Remodelista. and gardenista ah the
lifestyle content experiment yes in 2016 in the
early news core days they bought these two very
popular very high -end design and lifestyle blogs
and the thinking was What? We need to be more
like a magazine. The thinking was, we need to
capture people earlier in the funnel. We need
to be the place they go for inspiration, for
dreaming about their perfect kitchen. They wanted
that lifestyle brand cachet. But it didn't work
out? It didn't. By 2019, they sold the blogs
back to their original founders. What does that
strategic U -turn tell us? It tells us they had
a moment of clarity. They realized they are not
a media lifestyle brand like Architectural Digest.
They are a heart -nosed, data -driven, transactional
technology company. They don't want people casually
browsing pretty pictures of throw pillows. They
want people who are ready to sign a contract.
They divested the fluff to double down on the
core mechanics of the deal. Okay, so let's talk
about how they communicate all of this to us,
the public, the marketing. Because for a company
that is, at its core, a giant database, they
have spent an absolute fortune on big -name celebrity
endorsements. They had to. They were in a street
fight with Zillow for Mindshare. Zillow had become
a verb. People would say, I'm Zillowing houses.
Nobody has ever said, I'm realtor .coming. They
had to find a way to break through the cultural
noise. And their strategy for that began in 2015
with Elizabeth Banks. And those ads, which were
surprisingly directed by Fred. Savage from The
Wonder Years were really clever. They were. They
didn't just have her talking about listings.
She was playing a character. She's playing the
voice inside your head, the anxious, competitive
voice you have when you're house hunting. She
would joke about the not -yous, the other buyers
who are out there being faster and smarter than
you. The message was almost gamified. This is
a competition, and Realtor .com is the tool you
need to win. Don't let the other guy get your
dream house. It was perfectly tuned for the hyper
-competitive seller's market of 2015 and 2016.
It tapped into that very real buyer anxiety.
But as the market and the culture shifted, so
did their marketing tone. Massively. Fast forward
to 2021 and their big campaign features. Big
boy from OutKast. Ah, a huge pivot. The campaign
was called To Each Their Home, and the most memorable
ad was our first big boy house. And the tone
there wasn't about competition at all. Not at
all. It was about inclusion. It was a joyful
celebration of a young black couple buying their
first home. It was about showing a huge diversity
of housing types, family structures and buyers.
It was Realtor .com planting a flag and saying,
we are the democratic platform. Home ownership
is for everyone and we serve everyone. And then
just when you think you have their strategy figured
out, they pivot again. The campaign reported
for 2025 features Reba McEntire. The Nearly Home
campaign, Reba is just fascinating casting. It's
a completely different demographic target. Right.
If Big Boy appeals to a younger, more urban,
Gen X and millennial audience, Reba appeals to
boomers, to the American heartland. It feels
like they are deliberately trying to cover every
single base. They had... Elizabeth Banks for
the anxious millennial first -time buyer. They
had Big Boy for the diverse modern homebuyer.
Now they have Reba for the boomer who might be
downsizing or for buyers in more rural or suburban
markets. Yeah, they are trying to slice up the
total addressable market and have a specific
message for each piece of it. It's incredibly
sophisticated. They know that home buying isn't
just a 30 somethings game anymore. It's retirees,
it's investors, it's multigenerational families.
Reba signals trust, stability and comfort in
what has become a very chaotic and stressful
market. And it works. I mean, these aren't just
cheesy local ads. They win Webby's. They win
Adweek and OMA awards for their marketing. They're
producing high quality entertainment. They realize
that because the average person only buys a home
once every seven or eight years, they need to
find a way to stay relevant and top of mind during
all the years you aren't in the market. And a
memorable ad campaign is how you do that. So
let's try to put all these pieces back together.
We've pulled apart the 30 year history, the tech
stack, the business model, the marketing. When
we reassemble it. What is the big picture of
Realtor .com today? I think the big picture is
we are looking at a survivor. This is a company
that was born in the dial -up era, that survived
the dot -com implosion, that made it through
the 2008 financial crisis, navigated this huge
corporate marriage with News Corp, and is now
trying to pivot its entire business model toward
AI and referral fees. It's constantly had to
reinvent itself. But there is this lingering
question that's been in the back of my mind through
this whole deep dive. We have all this incredible
technology now. We have the obsidy algorithm
matching us to the perfect agent. We have the
flood data scaring us away from bad decisions.
We have Reba McEntire's ads comforting us. But
has all of this actually made the process of
buying a house? any easier or better for us.
That is the great paradox of the modern real
estate market, isn't it? We have successfully
moved from an era of information scarcity where
you couldn't get the data to an era of information
abundance. Maybe even information overload. I
think so. You can now know too much. You know
the noise level. You know the projected flood
risk in 2050. You know the detailed sales history
for the last 40 years. You know what all the
neighbors' houses are estimated at. It sounds
like a recipe for analysis paralysis. That's
exactly what it is. The fundamental friction
in the process has moved. The friction used to
be finding the right house. Now the friction
is committing to a decision when you are armed
with an overwhelming amount of data, much of
it negative. So here's the final thought then.
When you're using the app and you see that perfect
house, the one with the dream kitchen and the
big backyard, but right next to the beautiful
photos, there's a bright red badge that says
wildfire risk. Nine out of ten. Does that abundance
of data make you a more confident, empowered
buyer? Or does it paralyze you and maybe stop
you from buying a home you would have been perfectly
happy in? It definitely changes the emotional
calculus of the decision. The mystery, maybe
some of the romance of finding a home, is gone.
It's been replaced by an actuarial table. It
has. It's a transaction now, backed by data and
risk modeling. Which is probably safer in the
long run. Probably. But you're right, it's a
lot less fun than just falling in love with a
house. Still, I think I'd rather know about the
wildfire risk before I sign on the darted line.
Fair point. So next time you find yourself scrolling
at 11 p .m., just remember, you're not just looking
at pictures of houses. You are interacting with
a very complex, very expensive 30 -year -old
machine that is trying to predict your next move.
Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. Thanks
for having me.