Has the real estate portal landscape changed after all the M&A?

At first glance, the real estate portal landscape looks much like it did a year ago. The same power players, the same products, the same strategies — at least on the surface.

“My initial snarky reply is that the space hasn’t changed,” Mike DelPrete, a real estate industry technology strategist, said. “If you look at the landscape of the business, who the power players are and what products they have and what they are doing — there’s nothing. It is just the same as it was.”

But dig a little deeper, and the status quo starts to show cracks. A new wave of mergers and acquisitions is quietly reshaping the portal space, and one of housing’s biggest names made the loudest move of all with its March 2025 acquisition of Redfin.

“The big thing with Rocket is the idea of building an end-to-end ecosystem and that is not new, even Zillow has been trying to do this with their super app strategy, but what is new about this with Rocket is that it has the executional firepower at a scale we haven’t seen before,” DelPrete said. “Rocket is a very large company, they have very deep pockets and they are willing to invest a lot of money in this ecosystem. Rocket is willing to allow consumers to bundle and save, which again isn’t unique, but Rocket is promising to do it at a scale no one else is doing.” 

The entrance of Rocket into the portal space through the Redfin acquisition has injected a variable of the unknown that was not there previously. 

“I think we are really waiting to get more color from Rocket around what their strategy will look like integrating Redfin into the Rocket platform and how they intend to leverage the Redfin brand as part of the Rocket complex,” Ryan Tomasello, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods, said. 

If Rocket decides to cut agent commissions to win more market share, Tomasello wonders how this would impact the competitive landscape, especially if this strategy enables Rocket to offer a lower cost alternative to using a Zillow Premier agent for consumers.

Although the Rocket-Redfin deal is certainly the industry’s most noteworthy, plenty of other companies are getting in on the portal M&A action. 

It’s not just Rocket and Redfin

Another mortgage firm, Lower, also entered the portal space in recent months through its acquisition of Movoto. 

Through the deal, Lower’s retail network — comprised of roughly 480 sponsored loan officers — has access to Movoto’s nationwide footprint and a platform that connects consumers with top local real estate agents. 

“At the end of the day, none of the real estate platforms or portals can succeed either financially or in delivery to the consumer unless they help people buy and sell homes and to do that, the main two things you need are real estate agents and loan officers,” John Berkowitz, the CEO of Movoto, said of the deal.

In addition to Lower and Movoto, Realtor.com parent company Move, has also gotten in on the M&A fun, acquiring real estate technology company Zenlist. Realtor.com said it is looking to improve the offerings it provides agents through this acquisition.  

Analysts like Tomasello don’t see the Realtor.com-Zenlist deal and the Lower-Movoto deal as all that meaningful.

“I think it is really all about Zillow and Homes.com at this point,” Tomasello said. “Among industry chatter Redfin-Rocket is certainly very top of mind, but it doesn’t seem to be front and center with the investment community. I think they are focusing on the incumbents of Zillow and CoStar and writing the Redfin-Rocket deal off as a longer term play for Rocket.”

Pushing the service boundaries

In addition to the portal space gaining some new players through M&A, the portals themselves have also begun more explicitly pushing the boundaries of the services they provide both agents and consumers. 

“Getting outside of their lane is something real estate portals have been doing and trying to figure out for over a decade,” DelPrete said. “One of the big reasons why is that a lot of these companies are publicly listed and they need to keep growing. They all eventually hit this glass ceiling of how much they can raise their prices or how big of a cut they can take from an agent’s commission for a referral.” 

So far, DelPrete doesn’t feel like any of the companies in the space have cracked the code on successfully diverging from their core offerings. But there is no denying that Zillow, which pivoted to its “Housing Super App” strategy in early 2022 in the wake of its abrupt exit from iBuying, is making waves through its big push into mortgage through Zillow Home Loans. 

In Q1 2025, Zillow reported 32% annual increase in mortgage revenue, which came in at $41 million for the quarter, as origination volume jumped 32% annually to $791 million. 

Still DelPrete is skeptical. 

“Mortgage is a very difficult business and I think consumers want their real estate portals to stay in their lane,” he said. “They go to Zillow to search for a home, but the idea of going to Zillow to get a mortgage is something that sounds good in a strategy deck, but for the consumer that is a huge leap.” 

Despite his skepticism, DelPrete acknowledges that if Rocket and Redfin continue their strong direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns, consumers may become less skeptical of going to a portal to find both their house and their mortgage. But while industry super powers like Rocket and Zillow are pushing toward the holy grail of the end-to-end ecosystem, others, like Homes.com, are still trying to gain traction among consumers and agents. 

The Homes.com story continues to evolve

“The Homes.com story so far has shown us how hard it is to break the existing status quo of real estate portals,” DelPrete said. “Now, with this end-to-end ecosystem play, that is a backwards looking battle. Not only does Homes.com need to continue to spend to maintain relevancy in the market, but like everyone else who doesn’t have an ecosystem, they have to look at themselves in the mirror and ask, ‘What do we do?’”

While Stephen Sheldon of William Blair & Associates acknowledges that Homes.com and CoStar will eventually have to diverge from their lane as a strict real estate portal in order to continue growing, he doesn’t see the Andy Florance-helmed firm going the ancillary services route.

“CoStar is a data and analytics company at its heart — they’ve shown this in a lot of their other markets,” Sheldon said. “They first start to gather data, then they buy these marketplaces so that they can supplement that data, so people pay them to upload their data to advertise. I think a big part of that data play has been the Matterport acquisition and there is a lot they can do with that data over time.” 

Although Homes.com may have struggled after its initial entrance into the market in late 2023 and early 2024, despite these challenges, analysts are seeing a brighter future for the CoStar portal. 

While other portals may be looking to venture into other parts of the housing ecosystem, Sheldon sees a world where Homes.com provides the best search experience amongst the portals because it was to focus its resources on this one function. 

Both Sheldon and Tomasello also highlighted CoStar’s improving financial performance when it comes to CoStar. 

“The pendulum is shifting back into the positive direction for that business,” Tomasello said. “For the balance of the year last year, the tone around Homes.com shifted much more negative in the investment community as CoStar fumbled the ball on the go-to-market strategy, but now you’ve seen them regain their footing in that business and sales of the product have been trending pretty positively over the last several months.” 

Looking ahead, for the space as a whole, analysts don’t see any further waves hitting the portal space, but there are some things they are keeping an eye on. For Sheldon, one point of focus is buy-side agent commissions and if the commission lawsuits will have any impact. 

“If commission rates come down over time, I think the propensity for agents to pay for leads could drop, so the buy-side lead portals like Zillow would be hit worse than Homes.com, which is kind of the outlier in that it is going after seller agents,” Sheldon said.

He is also keeping a close eye on the battle going on over private listing networks, which Homes.com is fine with, but the other portals are not, as whoever wins that fight could gain an edge over the competition. 

Additionally, analysts are keeping an eye on M&A action, as given the shock of Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin, they acknowledge that anything is possible. 

“Agency consolidation and adject consolidation are the things I could see making an impact,” DelPrete said. “So I’m talking about two top-10 brokerages merge or a deal like Rocket-Redfin — something like that would be very big.”