Homes.com retains No. 2 ranking among US real estate portals

For the second year running, CoStar Group‘s Richmond-based Homes.com division is the nation’s No. 2-ranked portal for residential real estate listings based on monthly unique visitors, CoStar CEO Andy Florance said during an earnings call last week.

Zillow continues to retain its crown as the largest real estate website in the United States, ranked by visitor traffic.

CoStar, a real estate data and analytics company with headquarters in Arlington County, previously announced Homes.com’s No. 2 ranking in April 2024.

Homes.com, which is based out of CoStar’s Richmond campus, averaged 104 million monthly unique visitors for the first quarter of 2025, according to the company.

In 2024, CoStar announced it had invested $1 billion in Homes.com since purchasing the platform in 2021.

“The new Homes.com offers a completely different business model than do competing U.S. residential portals,” Florance said during Tuesday’s earnings call. “The new Homes.com is based on the premise that the most important thing a portal can do is to market a property for sale. This is in harmony with all the most successful and highly profitable portals around the world outside the U.S., which are all based upon this market the property, not an agent lead gen business model.”

CoStar Group’s investment in Homes.com includes a substantial, star-studded advertising budget via California ad agency RPA. “We recruited talent like Dan Levy, Heidi Gardner, Morgan Freeman, Lil Wayne and Jeff Goldblum to create memorable and effective spots for the new Homes.com,” Florance said. “We have run 32,000 commercials and digital placements.”

Before launching a marketing campaign in early 2024, only 4% of Homes.com’s “target audience of several hundred million home shoppers” identified Homes.com as a home shopping online brand. Now, it has 36% brand recognition, according to Florance.

“Early last year, our unaided awareness surpassed Trulia,” he said Tuesday. “Last summer, we surpassed Redfin’s unaided awareness. And last month, we crossed Realtor.com. When we began, Zillow was 64 points above our unaided awareness. We’ve closed the gap to 24 points and are still improving.”

In July, CoStar Group plans to launch a new marketing offering for homebuilders. New construction, Florance said during the earnings call, represents 20% of all homes sold in a year.

“Building a site with full inventory of available new homes would be a very valuable option for both consumers and the industry, and it would allow Homes.com to capture a piece of the estimated $3 billion annual marketing spend by America’s homebuilders,” he said.

CoStar has more than 6,800 employees across 72 offices in 13 countries. The company established a global operations center in Richmond in 2016 and has since grown that office to over 2,350 employees, becoming one of the area’s larger employers. CoStar announced it will complete a 1 million-square-foot Richmond campus redevelopment project along the James River in May 2026 that will house 3,500 employees. This year, the company moved its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Arlington.