Tje rapidly rising site traffic at Homes.com took center stage at CoStar Group’s Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call with investors Tuesday evening.
The company reported via Google Analytics, that the Homes.com network recorded an audience of 110 million average monthly unique visitors in Q4, which it claims makes the network the second largest residential real estate marketplace in the U.S., behind Zillow.
“This is nearly double Realtor.com‘s 62 million average monthly unique visitors that News Corp reported for the same quarter recently. I think that’s remarkable,” Andy Florance, CoStar Group founder and CEO, told investors and analysts on the call. “Realtor.com launched 30 years ago in its predecessor back in 1995, and we passed them in apples-to-apples traffic in our first year of the relaunch. We began the year with our low-single digit unaided awareness and during the year built and grew that awareness number to as high as 33%.”
Florance said CoStar Group is hoping to grow the Homes.com brand awareness even further this year, in part aided by the company’s second Super Bowl advertisement campaign.
“I believe that we can reach 50% unaided awareness this year, potentially surpassing in two years what our competitors spent 30 years building,” Florance said.
Some of this brand awareness has already resulted in strong net bookings increases. Company-wide, net new bookings were $53 million in Q4, up 21% from Q3 2024. Additionally, in January 2025, CoStar reports that the Homes.com sales team sold $3.73 million in annualized net revenue.
According to Florance, some of this growth can be attributed to the growing Homes.com sales team.
“When we launched Homes.com sales just 12 months ago, we only had 41 Homes.com sales professionals to prospect over 1 million real estate agents. To backstop this very small team, we temporarily sent all of our sales forces to sell Homes.com,” Florance said. “We no longer need to do that because over the past year, we’ve grown the Homes.com sales force nearly six-fold to 277 salespeople.”
Florance says the company is anticipating that its Homes.com sales team will grow to 500 employees by the end of 2025.
“I expect that as the team both grows and becomes more experienced, that the sales numbers will increase significantly,” Florance said.
Florance also discussed Homes.com’s “your listing, your lead” model, which he said has taken time to sell to agents accustomed to buying leads on listings that may belong to other agents.
“Simply put, Homes.com provides a unique Internet marketing solution that helps agents sell the home they were hired to sell faster and for more money, making them better listing agents. In contrast, the legacy solutions in the past 30 years sell agents leads that really belong to competing agents,” Florance said. “When we first launched, many agents thought that we were just like the legacy portals selling them leads that belong to competing agents.”
Looking ahead to 2025, Florance promised the launch of three “major initiatives” for Homes.com, which he believes will add new revenue streams to the brand. However, he did not elaborate.
“We had a great first year for Homes.com and we’re building phenomenal momentum to create the leading site for buying and selling homes,” Florance said. “I believe that we can win major share grow a third $1 billion business and generate substantial long-term EBITDA value for our shareholders.”
Company-wide, CoStar Group generated $2.74 billion in revenue in 2024, up 11% annually. However, net income fell to $139 million in 2024 from $375 million in 2023. The firm’s residential North American network generated $58.9 million in revenue in 2024, while its largest revenue source in 2024 was the company’s multifamily segment, which generated $1.067 billion in revenue.
