Ep 50 | Homes.com vs. Zillow: The Battle of the Portals | Nick McLean & Suneet Agarwal

[00:00:00] Suneet: While the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl cl.com, CoStar definitely won the advertising by just the depths and

[00:00:10] Nick: creativity in their adver, in their ads. I'm scared to click the button because all of a sudden I'm gonna be having multiple agents calling me every time I click on it. Great.

[00:00:20] Suneet: You know that website, homes.com,

[00:00:22] Nick: you'll never guess.

[00:00:23] Nick: Own zero properties be the, be the portal. I mean, be the, the exchange.

[00:00:34] Nick: Welcome back to the Reside Platform podcast. I'm here with Sun Agarwal, and we're gonna be talking about the biggest news, I think, in the real estate industry in a while. And that's homes.com, the battle of the portals. Super Bowl just finished. Right. Sunni, you caught that right? Yes. Super Bowl just finished and it was a great game.

[00:00:55] Nick: Kansas City Chiefs over the 49 ERs went over time. I don't know what people are, I don't know what people are thinking In the, in the, in your neck of the woods in California. Probably a little upset.

[00:01:05] Suneet: You know what, I haven't heard that much. Like my whole family die hard night fans.

[00:01:10] Nick: I don't care. Yeah. Okay, good.

[00:01:12] Nick: 'cause Sunita's in Sacramento, but the game within the game is homes. homes.com. Kind of throwing down the gauntlet. Yeah. And buying $7 million per Spock commercials to drive the eyeballs. To their website, homes.com. They want buyers looking at their website for homes.

[00:01:38] Suneet: No doubt they saw a huge spike in traffic.

[00:01:41] Suneet: Huge

[00:01:41] Nick: spike, no doubt. Yeah, and I don't know if you have any analytics on that, so we're gonna dive deep into this. What are, what are the effects on the industry? How does that affect real estate teams, real estate brokerages, and the agents, and how are they gonna differentiate themselves? Zillow versus homes.com.

[00:01:55] Nick: I mean, it's not just $7 million per advertising, and I saw probably four. Spots or more, but they had Celebrity seven. Yeah, SE seven. They had Jeff, they had actors on there. Jeff Goldblum, Dan Levy, Heidi Gardner, plus the production value. So overall, you're probably looking at 40, $50 million in overall investment just on the Super Bowl.

[00:02:18] Nick: And what a Super Bowl to do it. I mean, it was the highest rating Super Bowl of all time. 122 million people. Well, dude, here's the thing,

[00:02:26] Suneet: like real quick before we dive into it, is. The media, the ad time on sports is the most valued thing now because everybody else is watching streaming all the commercials.

[00:02:40] Suneet: Like you don't see commercials on Netflix or Amazon Prime YouTube tv. Like because, so the commercial, and I was listening to Tony Robbins talk about this, the value of the commercials and sports has gone way up. Now let's go get into homes.com and their parent company CoStar. Two weeks ago, uh, I would, about two weeks ago I walked into the office and I say it 'cause I don't walk into the office that much.

[00:03:09] Suneet: So about two weeks ago, I walk into my office and my wonderful office manager, Ariana Wisco, shut out to Ariana. Um, she's like, Hey, we got a package here and I'm all great. So I open it and it's big. It's, they put a lot of, it is probably worth like a hundred bucks right from homes.com. I was like, wow. You know, this is interesting.

[00:03:33] Suneet: They send me like gourmet food and like a cutting board and like a bunch of sports stuff. Direct mail with value. Yes. Bunch of sports stuff. And I look at their old watch out for our commercials now. One of, so CoStar is the company. Um. They own apartments.com. They own LoopNet. What are all the things that they own?

[00:03:56] Suneet: They own homes.com. They own apartments.com. apartments.com, which is the big one. Homesnap. They own Homesnap.

[00:04:05] Nick: Homesnap. They own LoopNet. Let, let's look at this acquisition. Check out this acquisition. This isn't homes.com isn't like, Hey, I just bought a great domain name. This is like CoStar, big time company, publicly traded company on the Nasdaq, right?

[00:04:18] Nick: They, in 2012, they bought LoopNet 2012. $860 million. Yeah. In 2014, apartments.com, $585 million. 2016, they bought a, a company in Germany. This is not a, just a US company. They have, they're putting commercial properties globally. Right. Apartment find 2015, apartment finder, 170 million. Right. It keep keeps going.

[00:04:46] Nick: They then in 2018, they buy four rent.com from Dominion Enterprises for 300 million, 350 million cash plus stocks. 2019. They, um, acquire STR Inc for 450 million 2020. CoStar announces that they acquire 10 x, which is formerly auction.com, auction for 110 x for 190 million. You guys getting the point here to that April, 2021, CoStar requires homes.com.

[00:05:19] Nick: So this is just three years ago during COVID, they bought home.com, $156 million cash. Right. And they're, they're just continuing to acquire more properties, uh, assets, I would say. Right? And that's the global company. That's Andy. Florence is the, uh, CEO. And it was interesting, you know, he was saying something and he was asked a question on Inman.

[00:05:42] Nick: You know, you know this direct, this public, this campaign. You're going on this Super Bowl campaign with all driving traffic and how much are you investing? He said it would be easier just to say to round up to a billion. Yep. Yeah. Something like that. Right?

[00:06:01] Suneet: Dude, I mean, look at this. They have offices in 14 countries, dude.

[00:06:06] Suneet: Hmm. 1500 global employees like they are the real

[00:06:12] Nick: deal. Yeah. So Sun, I was asking that question to you off air. I was like, can they, can you actually buy your way into competition with Zillow? Can you really convert the consumer through advertising?

[00:06:25] Suneet: Yes. And I think a part of their strategy with homes.com, CoStar, part of CoStar strategy.

[00:06:34] Suneet: Is to provide more stuff to the agent and build that

[00:06:39] Nick: loyalty. Dude, this I, that's what we, I wanna talk about the strategy with CoStar because you look@homes.com and you nailed it. They're really pushing your listing, your lead, which is not a new concept. I remember, I remember your lead for free. Your listing your lead for free.

[00:06:59] Nick: So they're not going to, now things change. I know agents are a little skeptical probably after Zillow. 'cause that's the way Zillow was for a while. You could promote your listing, but right now your profile is gonna be on your listing. Yes. The only

[00:07:12] Suneet: one. And when you get a lead, there is no cost. You just get an email.

[00:07:17] Suneet: Here's lead from homes.com. You're all, what is this? Let me tell you, we have closed, lost

[00:07:24] Nick: them. I mean, sad. You're the, you're the go-to when it comes to getting free leads, free anything, referrals, business traffic leads. You're a lead. You're a lead magnet man. There's a reason why you became number one in California.

[00:07:41] Nick: Yeah, lead. Lead geek. Lead geek. Right. Lead geek. So it's gonna favor people, teams with market share. Market share, meaning listings, active listings.

[00:07:53] Suneet: Which makes sense, dude. Like if you are a portal trying to get business, doesn't it go into the people that control the inventory? Like that's what I would do.

[00:08:01] Nick: Ooh. Mm. And it's gonna encourage agents to not do coming Soons necessarily, because now they can get that exclusivity on the website, where a lot of times coming Soons, if you, if you're allowed to do it, it's like you, you wanna be able to pre-market that to generate some leads, some business. Before it's on Zillow and you can't control any of it.

[00:08:21] Nick: Now you can throw it on there and generate some leads. Can you guys do coming soon to Washington soon? We can't. We can't do come. Yeah, we can't do either. So I know nothing about em anymore. You got more experience with that? Yeah, but you know, you're listening to their leads. So, you know, I think what's gonna happen is we did look into this and they are coming out with an, you know, and they're very agent centric.

[00:08:43] Nick: Giving tools to the agents to work with the consumer. And, and is that kind of the, is that the opposite approach of Zillow or at least the, the mindset on how people view Zillow?

[00:08:57] Suneet: I mean, dude, Zillow's focus in my perspective is the Super app, right? Providing everything to the

[00:09:05] Nick: consumer. So, I don't know, homes dot com's app, what's their app like?

[00:09:10] Nick: I mean, that's really the battle, right? If, if Zillow has a killer app for the consumer, now the backend for homes.com. Is agent centric. When you get your agent Pro account, your Home Pro account, and I know this working, we, we've sold commercial, we've had commercial divisions in our company, right? Sun. Yeah.

[00:09:30] Nick: Yeah. So we're familiar with commercials. And for the people that are familiar with commercial, LoopNet is a big portal like LoopNet. Is it? It's like a national MLS for commercial properties. It is it And you get international investors. Yes. People from everywhere. I mean, I'm in, I'm in. Rural north, central, Washington state, and I had people from, you know, Japan, China, reaching out on my commercial properties if I have the right, the right one.

[00:09:58] Nick: And what they were, what they do really well is they have some tools in the back end where you can create a presentation of your listing. See, in the commercial world, you gotta present your commercial property like the location. The numbers matter, right? What's the cap rate? What's the income? What's the revenue?

[00:10:17] Nick: What's, and so they built out this nice presentation, like generation, you can generate your own brochure, right? For investors to look at. They're doing the same thing on homes.com on the backend, where you can create, generate your own CMA. And I get, I don't know what it's like, I haven't used the tool sydnee, but if I'm, if it's anything like.

[00:10:38] Nick: The LoopNet one is gonna look slick. It's gonna look clean. It's gonna look. Mm-hmm. Of course. How much money do they have? Of course it's gonna look good, right? Yeah. I don't know if agents are gonna use it, but it's there and I don't, you know, Zillow might have that, but they're not really pushing that. Nor will the agent trust.

[00:10:55] Nick: Oh, nor will the agent trust using it, because it's not their listing their lead. That's the problem, dude.

[00:11:02] Suneet: I think you nailed it. The trust is, am I gonna get this back? Am I gonna have to pay a referral fee on it? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So many. So the Super Bowl, probably the most, who was the most watched Super Bowl ever?

[00:11:18] Suneet: Most watched thing on TV internationally. Every consumer who was watching now, Elise has homes.com in their head. Right? Right. Redfin wasn't on there. realtor.com wasn't on there. Zillow wasn't on there. Zillow. Probably doesn't think that they need to be on there. Right. Um, but homes.com just put their stake in the ground.

[00:11:40] Suneet: I was telling you this off air, and my, my facts may be wrong, but I believe two years ago, the National National Association of Realtors Conference was at the San Diego Convention Center. Beautiful place. I love San Diego.

[00:11:56] Nick: Right. Um, man, I, I was looking at, I write, I, I, if you guys. People that know me, I ride bikes and I was looking at the weather, it's like 80 degrees.

[00:12:05] Nick: It was like the same all year. San Diego. Yeah. Yeah. San Diego is great.

[00:12:10] Suneet: So, and I, and I just got this secondhand, so if obs.com made a big push at, uh, at the NAR convention are the going away party, this is what I heard and saw on social media. They closed down the entire gas lamp district. Which is however many blocks of bars and restaurants, close it all down.

[00:12:36] Suneet: I believe, from what I heard, that it was open Mar all those bars and restaurants. Huge. And then they put Keith frigging urban, the country musician, Nicole Kidman's husband, in the middle of the street for a big free conference, uh, concert. And if you think about it, that was two, three years ago. They bought the homes.com in 2021.

[00:12:58] Suneet: Mm-hmm. That CEO has been on record saying that he's coming for Zillow, that CEO. There was some talks about them buying move, uh, you know, realtor dot com's, parent company from New, from World Corp, news Corp. Fox, Rupert Murdoch. Mm-hmm. So that's gonna be really interesting to see. And they went for it. They went by those commercials.

[00:13:26] Suneet: They have homes snap. I mean, they have homes stamp, they have a partners.com dude, like, where else can you look for apartments?

[00:13:34] Nick: So they're looking for, and you know, I just saw that Zillow, uh, Zillow reported that their, their revenues went up in Q4. I think it was Q4 compared to the previous Q4 or right. So their, their, their numbers improved year over year, but they're still losing money.

[00:13:50] Nick: And part of the reason they went up. They improved was the rental side, the Zillow rentals, the revenue, Zillow rentals actually went up. And so it's kind of interesting that Zillow's kind of, I, I have property management. You have property management. I, I, I, I pay, I pay Zillow every month for my exposure on my rentals.

[00:14:10] Nick: It's the number one source of leads, uh, for the people that don't have property management. There was a month last year and we, we probably managed 150 doors, 150 properties. So it's not massive, but it's single. How many rentals were in your town? They probably are the biggest. Yeah, it's pretty good. Lot, lot of single family homes which meet, which works really well with our sales business.

[00:14:34] Nick: Right? 'cause we, you know, that's what we want. So 200, 200 applicants, 200 tenants. Now those are leads. Those are leads that. How many of those 200 people in one month in May will eventually buy a home? Oh, you know, or want to buy a home? I think a portion of it, right? Oh, and uh, and more people are having to delay home ownership because of interest rates where normally they would buy.

[00:15:03] Nick: Maybe they sell their house and relocate to another area, and instead of getting locked into a higher interest rate, they're like, well, that's rent. So we're seeing that more that's rent. We're also seeing people saying, I'm not selling to hell with this. I'm, I'm gonna die with this interest rate. Right? So, so instead of listing their home, they turn it into a rental.

[00:15:24] Nick: So. Zillow seeing an increase in rental, uh, advertising and, and traffic apartments.com probably saw the same thing so that that website's probably been crushing it. Oh dude, it's gotta be buzzing, gotta be buzzing with the big apartment complexes. Imagine if you, you're like a. Imagine if you're a giant, you know, hedge fund or private equity fund and you have big assets, $30 million assets.

[00:15:48] Nick: $20 million assets, right? $10 million, whatever it is. Total. Total, you're gonna go to apartments.com and get advertising. Oh, 'cause you wanna lease, lease those things up maybe. So this is some big money going on. That makes so much sense. 'cause that's like the cheapest

[00:16:02] Suneet: leads in traffic. It's just early for the rentals.

[00:16:07] Suneet: Like if you put. If you put a list of rentals on a document and go to any homes group, any Facebook group, buy, sell, and say, Hey, I have these five rentals. Send me a dm. If you want more information, you could generate all the free

[00:16:28] Nick: leads you want, Nick? Totally, totally. Yeah. I mean, is the, you. Holding off on buying, but one great rental copywriting.

[00:16:38] Nick: Right now we're copywriting. Copywriting headlines, baby. It's like, yeah. 'cause you wanna, you want to talk to that person that is going to buy or has sold, but they want a nice single family home. You know, they want a rental for a year, you know, you know, rent for a year while until rates drop. Now I don't like talking about rates.

[00:16:56] Nick: I don't like that one. But rent for a year, right? Until you're ready to buy. You know, a lot of doctors and, and our, our, our marketplace has a big medical center for the center, and they're always trying to attract talented people, doctors, nurses, all the techs, all the specializations. And if they can't find housing, they don't.

[00:17:22] Nick: And a lot of those people don't wanna buy right away. 'cause it might be a one year, three year contract. They don't know. Yeah. Travel nurses too. Travel nurses, yeah. They don't know if they're gonna love it. They don't wanna know if they love it. So oftentimes they wanna find a nice rental and then guess what happens?

[00:17:36] Nick: We end up selling them a house in a year. Um, but back to the coast. Back to this holmes.com.

[00:17:43] Suneet: Well, I'm just like gonna go on Facebook and maybe later, because I think. We have four vacant properties right now in our portfolio of, uh, what we manage. So,

[00:17:57] Nick: yeah. Or you know, where you go, you go to your landlord or your client, the, the, the client, the landlord that owns the home, and you say, Hey, are you open to entertaining offers?

[00:18:06] Nick: And so then you can go, well, yeah, I don't know. It depends on the price. Everything has a price of course. Awesome. So, um, you, you can market, Hey, I have, I have Rent five rentals. That would also consider making an offer would also entertain offers bundle, bundle it and then you, you don't give them a prize, but they have to inquire to find out more and then you like, then you get that 'cause inventory's so low.

[00:18:33] Nick: Good one, too. Good one. That's not, that's like, yeah, it's a good one. Here's what we, you look at as masterminding. We haven't mastermind in like in like two weeks. Okay, this is a INE Nick Mastermind marketing direct response. Um, you know, I found this really interesting about, uh, homes.com and just the overall investment.

[00:18:52] Nick: And so I'm not put, we're not saying Zillow or homes.com. We're not saying choose. I don't think ine we're saying, we're saying explore both. I'm signing up on both. A hundred percent. A hundred percent I'm on. You'll stop there. Sign up on everything. Sign up on all and and so on. Homes, homes.com. I'm not promoting them at all.

[00:19:14] Nick: But you can go there and, and say, Hey, why do I love an agent? And you can apply for a membership. They have a membership, uh, formed you can fill out. My guess is when you get on a membership, you have the ability to advertise your listings at a higher impression rate, right? So you get to boost your listings.

[00:19:33] Nick: Which we'll theoretically generate more leads for you. Yeah, I'm

[00:19:37] Suneet: not sure. I mean, it could be trying to sell you onto Homesnap too. Okay. Which Homesnap, I believe was basically just GLS ran by them. Google local service

[00:19:52] Nick: apps. Mm. Homes Snapp and the consumer. Does a consumer download the Home Snap app to search for properties?

[00:20:01] Nick: I dunno. You know, I just went to homesnap.com and as soon as I go there, Cindy, this is interesting. Go there right now. Go to homesnap.com. As soon as you click that, a popup comes up and it says, homes.com is now a better solution to search for homes. So they're just driving traffic. Oh wow. Look at that popup.

[00:20:20] Nick: Yeah. Oh, so Homesnap say, okay, go to

[00:20:22] Suneet: homes.com

[00:20:24] Nick: there. Yeah. Yep. So, so they acquired homes now happen. They're basically now just forwarding it over. Forwarding it over to homes.com. Maybe they're using some of that technology, the app. Why when I go

[00:20:35] Suneet: to Homesnap, does it take me to Bothell, to your neighborhood?

[00:20:38] Suneet: I don't know. That's weird. They, they got

[00:20:41] Nick: some working to do, but you know, they, how far is that from you Bothell? Iss? Pretty far. Yeah. A couple hours. A couple hours. But, um, I'm definitely gonna look into that because we do a good job getting listings and I wanna promote those listings and those, you know, those are probably gonna be phone calls coming in.

[00:20:59] Nick: Right. Phone calls, scripts. Um, so, you know, uh, Andy Florence, the CEO said that I said they, in the, in 2023, they did 375,000 drone flights, 375,000 drone flights. They built out profiles for 21,000 US neighborhoods. They're really pushing profiles to learn more about schools and restaurants, nightlife area areas.

[00:21:33] Nick: Then the previous pod, you know, the previous podcast, sun, you know, I was talking with Joe Rodriguez, who's a reside client in Houston. In Houston, and building a big team, and he has a YouTube chain. If you reach out to the original. Houston Living, and you've heard about, and many of you probably listened to that episode, but he has living in Houston, the original YouTube channel.

[00:21:59] Nick: Yeah. And you know, FI 250 people called in in January, 2024. No, bro. Something crazy. 2 54. Why? Because they're watch they, people that are relocating or whoever wanna know more about the areas, he's not really pushing real estate much. I mean, he pushes new construction so you, you get a feel for what's out there.

[00:22:23] Nick: But I mean, I think homes dot com's taking that angle, you're, you know, they're gonna go there and want to get more about the information about the area. And

[00:22:34] Suneet: I'm just happy 'cause I looked@homes.com and I'm on page, so it's interesting. Page one is a bunch of agents I have never seen or heard of, and not a lot of big sales numbers.

[00:22:49] Suneet: Page two is where all the big ballers are. Oh wait, who's this guy? 2 2100 sales. Oh. Need that

[00:23:00] Nick: oral. So, so make, so profiles are probably important on there. Edit your book. Yeah. Make a profile. Yeah. Okay. Oh, dude, Maya is,

[00:23:16] Nick: yeah. Number. Yeah. Yeah. Highest rated schools, neighborhoods, you know, back in, back in 2014, 15 and 16. I was a co-owner of A MLS and it was a, it was a real estate website and IDX company. And I, and IDX is an internet data exchange. It's basically a, a home search website, right. So like, you know, we use Sierra and there's BoomTown and there's, you know, all these other companies, right?

[00:23:46] Nick: For agents to have a website. And we were really exploring points of interest. We call, you know, POIs because the mike. The co-owner of the company, she had a background in Chamber of Commerce websites, uh, neighbor Downtown associations, community websites. So people would hire her, like the city of Auburn would hire her to build out a website.

[00:24:12] Nick: For thing, top things to do, all these different things and I'll, oftentimes, these cities have some of the best domains, like they would have like bothell.com, you know, they would own sacramento.com. Sure. Right? So they would pay her like 50 grand to build a website. You would have amazing organic traffic.

[00:24:29] Nick: You'd have one of those top organic traffic in your neighborhood. You know, shout out to Justin Haver, who actually got calgary.com kind of understanding the the, and had paid good money for it, but. You did organic traffic's probably crushing it, probably made it back. And so the moral of the story is, and try to go get the, you know, you know, your, your city's name.com.

[00:24:50] Nick: But what we found was, and what she knew was she knew all the pages people search, she knew the top tabs, what people liked. And it was always, it was always points of interest, what to do. Where to go. Always. If you go to a chamber website, the top pages are things to do. Dude Owens always things to do, so you know, I don't know if homes.com is doing things to do.

[00:25:21] Nick: It looks like they're doing neighborhoods, which is kind of things to do and schools, but I think things to do. If you're doing a YouTube channel, if you're doing blogs on your website should be top Five things to do. Top five restaurants. Top five things. Top five Trails. Top five in your In your newsletter?

[00:25:39] Nick: Yes, in your newsletter. Well, we need to do a newsletter episode soon. 'cause might crushing your, oh, your newsletter's crushing it. Well, give us, give us a little tip like what is working, what's crushing about it?

[00:25:51] Suneet: Well, real quick though. Real quick by phones.com because I just looked, so I went to Google. In Sacramento there is the number one is another team in Sacramento who's obviously paying for the pay-per-click.

[00:26:07] Suneet: Number two is the cash. Number three is, this is something else. best.com for best realtors.

[00:26:20] Suneet: Here's somebody who's not even in, who's in Colorado, whose Google person should get fired. Okay. They're the sponsor or they're organic. Number one, Zillow. Number two, realtor number three. Dude. Interestingly enough, Nick, it's Twitter Holmes in Sacramento. This is on a Google search. Yes, Twitter, number four, Redfin number five.

[00:26:47] Suneet: homes.com. Number six, Julia. Number seven, mobo. Voto, then it becomes different brokerages, re max, et cetera. It's super fascinating.

[00:26:58] Nick: So homes.com is in the top five in that organic reach at right now? Yep. Yeah. And they're gonna be paid for pay per click. And I guarantee they have an advisor at Google, I guarantee, you know, they're optimizing.

[00:27:10] Nick: Oh, guarantee. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're, they're in it now. I, what I thought was, I wanted to point out too is the alignment with the strategy to align with agents. Give the impression they're aligned with agents, Egypt centric website agent first, and, and obviously if they're promoting huge events at NER, they must have relationships with people at NAR.

[00:27:34] Nick: Oh, you know, realtor associations spend the money mm-hmm. And which, which realtor.com went away from. Right. They didn't really, they, you would think they would be the most aligned with real estate agents because of the name. If you've ever had an experience with realtor.com with their sales team, I don't know if it was like mine, but they're trying to sell me.

[00:27:59] Nick: Yeah.

[00:28:01] Suneet: I have a great relationship with realtor. They just hired their new CEO, um, I forgot his name. I hung out with him a bunch. The, with ever punch the thing without like a trip with all those guys. And they're, they're trying, right, like wheelchair.com is saying that how they want to get more traffic is by leveraging more of News Corps, other assets have a ticker at the bottom of Fox have this and some, you know, news and some news publication and some newspaper right, online.

[00:28:41] Suneet: So, um, but yeah. wheelchair.com used to go hard at those events. I haven't seen them go hard lately. As a matter of fact, much of their staff that was responsible for the presence at the events have now moved on. You know, um, can't remember anybody's name right now, but a couple of them got laid off and it, I know Andrew went to follow Boss, and he's loving it.

[00:29:10] Suneet: He's thriving. I don't know who their advantage team is anymore, but,

[00:29:13] Nick: um, but they're, they're pivoting or, or re realigning with the agent, working with the agent. Team leaders.

[00:29:23] Suneet: Well, I think too, just a lot of people feel a way about Zillow. Mm-hmm. People always have, people are worried about them becoming brokerage, that people have power or taking away all their business.

[00:29:35] Suneet: I don't think they have any plans of becoming

[00:29:37] Nick: a broker. No, they, no, no, they don't. It would be, it would be mutually assured destruction. Oh, dude. You know, because if, if, if all your revenue is tied to the agent pretty much up, a good portion of it, you can't disrupt that to, because then your stock, they're publicly traded.

[00:29:53] Nick: Their stock would take, here's the thing is,

[00:29:57] Suneet: right now on the flex program, the referral fee is 40%. Zow has zero liability in the transaction and they're getting 40% and, and the rub bridge model, we give a lead and get 50% and have all the liability. True. Why would Zillow want thousands of agents, tens of thousands of agents liability, like they're already getting almost the same amount of money.

[00:30:30] Nick: Yeah. Yep. Yep. It's like Airbnb. Why own the property? Why own the property? Yeah. Own zero properties. Be the, be the portal. I mean, be the, the exchange. You know, Amazon doesn't really own the products.

[00:30:43] Suneet: No,

[00:30:43] Nick: I mean, they do have Amazon products, you know, they vertically integrate a little bit, but, but that's not where they're at.

[00:30:49] Nick: They're also, that's just traffic, bro. Like everyone's just the traffic, the attention, the eyeballs. Be the distributor, be the distributor, you know, and also on Amazon, uh, analogy, right? They have AWS, which is the cloud-based service on the backend that runs it. You know, looking at CoStar, they, they, their mission statement and a lot about who they are, analytics.

[00:31:14] Nick: Mm-hmm. Analytics. So it's like, why would you spend a billion dollars and then give all the leads away? There's something on, there's something on the analytics side they're, they're looking at, right? Because they obviously have clients that maybe, I don't know, but are buying single family homes. Maybe they have institutional level clients that are looking for marketplaces to invest in.

[00:31:40] Nick: I don't know. Yeah, they're paying for the data for, if you're paying for who, who would pay for that DA data? I would say for sure, like someone like. Black, black rock or something like that. Right? Because they want that data, they want that inside margin on there. Now I want the data, not that

[00:31:58] Suneet: I aren't it,

[00:31:59] Nick: but give me all the data more than data or data.

[00:32:03] Nick: Is the analytics what? The interpretation of it. The trends. Totally, totally. Yeah, totally. 'cause he, uh, if you get a, if you could just get all their the information, it's not gonna do anything. Now what I wanna bring us some about homes.com. I thought was, is genius if they can pull it off, this is genius. If they can pull it off, it's your listing your lead, and once you get the lead, you feel confident it's your lead that if that person goes back to homes.com, they're not gonna be then someone else's lead.

[00:32:35] Nick: I don't know. I don't know. But homes.com is saying, Hey, if Suneet signs up on my listing. He is now a lead in my, on my dashboard. I can now start sending him properties. You know, I can set up a property safe search for cite.

[00:32:57] Suneet: Yeah. The only thing that I think of there, dude, is let's say that Bob, the buyer, goes to homes.com and save on three different listings from three different brokerages.

[00:33:08] Nick: I don't know how they're gonna work. That is Bob the buyer now in three different agents, leads and whoever. Whoever does the best job acquiring him wins. Yeah. I mean, number one, it has to be at that lead is free. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, I think is it is then a battle of who can get ahold of Bob. Yep. Now provide the most value and have the most,

[00:33:31] Suneet: yeah.

[00:33:32] Nick: Now, here's the thing though, with the consumer, is that gonna be a detractor to the consumer? Because it's like, well, I don't wanna, I'm scared to click the button because all of a sudden I'm gonna be having multiple agents calling me. Every time I click on it, I'm in. All of a sudden, Bob, the agents calling me a million times.

[00:33:50] Nick: Most agents don't call, though. Let's be honest, most agents don't call. Most don't. Most don't. So the winner here is man homes.com could be a killer for people and teams. Can promote their listings and can make phone calls because you're gonna win. It's a competitive industry and usually the first one there wins the first one to make that conversation.

[00:34:11] Nick: The first quality conversation, the first person to show 'em Mahomes gonna win. Statistically 70% of people work with the, the first agent they talk to or meet with. Right? Yeah. So that 70 plus percent, right? Yeah. So. Unless you forget about 'em. So I like the idea of them being able to send properties to the consumer, because what that's gonna do is they're, they're getting the agents to do their, some of their heavy lifting, getting the people back to the website to search more, right?

[00:34:45] Nick: So right now, Zillow, if you sign up on their website, Zillow sets you up on a alert, right? They have you on alerts, they're going to email you like, new listings, price reduced listings, things like that. But it's not curated by a human. Mm. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And there's some really good agents out there that are good at, you know, getting on the MLS and sending properties to people, you know, every day they get up, have a cup of coffee, look at the MLS, you know, see what's on the hot sheet, new listings, and you know, texting 'em to people, which in fact, texting a new listing to somebody is the winner.

[00:35:23] Nick: Like you're working with a buyer. Text them the link. Oh

[00:35:26] Suneet: yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just send them a link from your own website, not a portal, please. And if you post it on Facebook, send it

[00:35:36] Nick: from our own website

[00:35:37] Suneet: and not from a portal.

[00:35:38] Nick: Oh. Does that just drive you, uh, crazy When like, one of your agents, one of your agents promotes a listing on, on like Zillow.

[00:35:45] Nick: How about we like literally we have every IDN site. Just pick one. Just pick one. I had an agent and I've probably, it's probably had more than one agent do this. Their friend decided to go for sale by owner, and as a good friend, they posted it on Facebook and said, Hey, my friend, you know, I just wanna let everyone know.

[00:36:07] Nick: My friend listed their, I was for

[00:36:09] Suneet: sale by owner.

[00:36:11] Nick: I was like, I was like, take that down. Like, it's all like, I appreciate your helping your friend out, but it, it's a weird message if you're an agent. You know, so

[00:36:24] Suneet: yeah, let you have to send me a message right now. I just found out about this off market property.

[00:36:31] Suneet: Lemme know if you wanna see it. Mm. Well the hell was a bad headline,

[00:36:36] Nick: but, well, or, or you know, Hey, you, I know of the home. So yeah, you be careful with that one. But yeah, sending properties to buyers, that's what they want. Buy, give buyers what they want and they want properties and. The E, the eer, the automatic alert is great to get 'em back to the website, but what's even better is you actually selecting it.

[00:37:00] Nick: Curating it. Oh yeah. Shows that. Yeah,

[00:37:05] Suneet: yeah. Take away. For everybody listening, let's wrap this up. Everybody listening, go to homes.com and make a profile. Okay, we will make sure to stay educated on and let you guys know on what's happening with homes.com. But they got a lot of money. They got a lot of tech they want in.

[00:37:31] Suneet: If you're sleeping on this, you might miss up. So let us wake you up and go to homes.com

[00:37:40] Nick: and register a hundred percent. Register and get the, and if you have a list, if you're a listing machine. Look into boosting those listings because that could be a great ROI on leads. They're gonna be populating the listings not in the order of the algorithm.

[00:37:59] Nick: Well, in the, just in the order of a a search, they're gonna be free leads. You can put your listing, your hottest listing towards the top. More clicks, more views, more leads. When Zillow, what do your listing presentation? And then you go to the listing presentation and say, I can boost your, I boost our listings on homes.com and we get eight times the results.

[00:38:24] Nick: Right.

[00:38:25] Suneet: And so the Super Bowl this year, great. You know that website homes.com, you'll never guess. I'm able to actually boost your listing on homes.com. Isn't that great? Mm-hmm. Any more questions before we sign the paperwork?

[00:38:40] Nick: Mm-hmm. Exactly. It's, I, I'm, I'm sure other agents put their homes on the homes.com.

[00:38:48] Nick: Right. But they do the free version and you know where the free, you know where the free version gets you? The bottom of the list? Yeah.

[00:38:54] Suneet: When's the last time you got something great for free?

[00:38:57] Nick: Yeah. So I cracked the code on homes.com. Our listings now show up at the very top or towards the top. Great. I cracked the code.

[00:39:06] Nick: Isn't that great? Cracked the code on it. I have a great relationship with them. I partnered with them. I'm a member. I'm a premier member. Yeah, we're already, see, this is what happens with Cindy and I talk Mastermind. But you do, it's, it's, we're joking aside, but it's true. This is where it's at. Well, Cindy, wrap it up.

[00:39:26] Suneet: All right. Well guys, I hope you got something out of this conversation about homes.com. I think it's super relevant and not enough people in the industry are talking about it. While the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl homes.com, CoStar definitely won the advertising by just the depths and creativity in their adver, in their ads.

[00:39:51] Suneet: So go to homes.com, sign up. We have no affiliation with them at all. However, if they want to affiliate with us, go ahead and gimme a call. They'll, we have no affiliation with them at all. If you got something out of this, share it with a friend, click like and subscribe, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Reside

[00:40:10] Nick: Platform Podcast.