Good afternoon, everyone. We might make a start. So pleased to be joined today by Damian Eales, the CEO of Realtor.com. Damian, thank you so much for making the time to be with us here.
Good to see you.
A bit over 12 months in the seat as CEO, it's obviously been a very interesting time in the market, to say the least. Just start by talking about what you saw as the opportunity for Realtor when you took the role, and some of the steps you've been making to seize that opportunity.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing you come to realize about Realtor.com is the power of the brand that it represents. It's not often in your career that you get to be the custodian of a brand that's 108 years old, actually, Realtor, and of course, Realtor.com is the first of its kind, the first North American real estate portal, 26 years old this year. So, you know, what comes with that is a lot of brand leverage, and you know, it's exciting as a former marketer that we can really not only reinvigorate that brand, but actually leverage the News Corp network to grow it. Of my history, I've worked for News Corp for 13 years.
A big part of that was in Australia, where we really leveraged the News Corp media publications in Australia to grow REA, and you know, we want to do a very similar thing in the U.S. So that was exciting. I think probably the you know, I think the third opportunity that springs to mind is that it's such a significant market, the U.S., and relatively untapped. I mean, even just in our core business of buying and selling, the total addressable market of commissions is something like $100 billion, and I think that even if you add up all of the portals combined, we're only capturing a fraction of that. There is a lot of manual processing involved in different states with different regulations across the U.S. That presents an awfully large opportunity, we think, to digitize that process, and we can both offer value to the customers and the consumers in this industry, but also to our shareholders in the process. And I guess the final reason is, nothing like taking over a business at the bottom of the cycle rather than the top.
So if we think about the Realtor revenue mix over the next three to five years, you know, you obviously have been investing in the adjacencies alongside the core brand. How do you see that playing out on that sort of time horizon? You know, is it and I suppose, are there other newer opportunities that we should be thinking about that potentially come into the mix?
We're unapologetically focused right now on our core, and we've really spent the last 12 months, you know, trimming the organization, but also trimming our focus to ensure that we deliver buy well. That is our core business today. I also consider sell to be our emerging core, let's call it, and we've spent a lot of time in the last 12 months setting ourselves up for success in sell, and that's going to be an increasing focus over the next, you know, three to five years as we develop that. It's extraordinary that we've had such a strong relationship with so many brokers in America, but we've only helped them on one side of the transaction.
It's really a natural synergy that we can help them on the sell side as well, and we can talk more about how we're doing that. But you know, if I look in the medium term, on other parts of the other adjacencies in the business, it's not that we're not interested in them, but if we're going to invest time and energy in them, then we are probably better off doing that in some form of a partnership rather than diverting attention from core buy and sell, because we think if we do a better job there, we've got a lot more market share that we can gain. So, you know, recently we announced a partnership with Zillow on the rental side of the business. That's a great example of where we felt that the synergies of partnering with rental and the focus that it could give us in core buy and sell, was going to be a much better outcome for our shareholders.
Yeah, perfect. A couple of things to follow up on there, but maybe the point on sell as an emerging core. Can you talk a little bit more, I suppose, about the steps you're making to set that up for success? It's something that probably spoken about for a while. You know, what's different in terms of the recent focus-
Yeah
... and how does that translate over time?
Well, again, the two obvious, you know, synergies, I've mentioned one. We're dealing with brokers on a day-to-day basis today, and successful high-producing teams in this country on the buy side. They all list properties. The brokers, or at least the larger agents, list properties as well. So we haven't been helping them as successfully as we could have on that side. But the other synergy is that from a consumer perspective, the audience that we generate is not just buyers, obviously. Most buyers are about to sell a property, but we haven't been, again, serving them the opportunity to connect with a listing agent, so it is a higher focus.
I suppose some of it has come about because perhaps the urgency came about because of a particular focus on the listing side of the business, as the buy side of the business has been challenged. We don't think that there's any existential threat to buyer agency in the U.S., but that probably was a catalyst to the focus on the sell side. You know, how are we doing it? We've launched, in the last 12 months, two new products, which are fundamentally enabling us to capture share in this segment of the market. The first of those products is called Listing Toolkit. I'm pleased that it received, a month ago, the Inman's highest innovation award of the year.
Put simply, it helps listing agents do a better job of making a listing presentation to capture that listing. There is a really important insight on the sell side, and that is that there's been a lot of talk about the Your Listing, Your Lead model, and of course, listing agents want to get a buy-side lead on their listing, but what they want more than anything is to get the next listing, and so we're really focused on serving listing agents better so that they can capture the next listing. Listing Toolkit does that, and in the next few months, we're launching Listing Toolkit for Teams.
Teams will be an increasingly larger focus for our organization going forward because, you know, we think that high-producing teams enables us to serve more of their needs, deeper relationships, and Listing Toolkit for Teams will do that. On the consumer side of that transaction, after we get the listing agent to do a better job of listing presentation, is we're leveraging the acquisition of UpNest. So UpNest has been rebranded on our portal to a product called RealChoice Selling, where we offer consumers who are in the market to list their property, a presentation of three different listing agents, who have come to us from Listing Toolkit.
Those listing agents present not only their capabilities, their local market knowledge, their local success, the ratings that they have been given by other sellers historically, but also, importantly, the commission that they're intending to charge. You know, that competitive intensity is really powerful for us. It's generating both leads and also referral business for us. They're two key components, but probably the third is that we're doing a lot more work on helping listing agents market in their local territories. Today, that's very focused on how we leverage the Realtor.com site. You know, looking into the future, it's just another example where we can leverage the News Corp network.
Because the example I often give our customers is a lot of people think the New York Post is only read in New York. Of course, the majority of its audience is outside of New York State, so we have access to that advertising inventory. Through making a hyper-localized marketing pitch to our local real estate agents, we can access that inventory and really sell it at a higher yield for our shareholders.
That's helpful. The rentals partnership with Zillow that we touched on, I mean, that was a bit of a surprise to me. I mean, I hear your logic for entering it-
Yeah.
-but it feels like, you know, people who are probably frenemies-
Yeah.
Entering into some sort of agreement. Just talk a bit more about the logic there, you know, how that agreement came about, and I suppose how things have been performing since it was launched.
The catalyst for us was focus. We really do need to focus on core buy and sell, not only because we think that there is opportunity in improving how we do that, but the addressable market on that front alone is just too significant, too many opportunities, so we're gonna focus on core buy and sell. On the industrial logic beyond that, in terms of Zillow, it's pretty simple, actually. Obviously, the market leader from a revenue perspective in this market is Apartments.com. They make a lot more in revenue versus Zillow and Realtor.com combined in terms of revenue. Yet now, the audience of Zillow and Realtor.com in the rentals category is higher than Apartments.com.
In addition, we have the opportunity to say to property management companies that we bring an audience to the table of home, potentially home buyers or potentially home renters. We can see when consumers toggle between buy and rent. You can't do that on Apartments.com. You know, it's a single-use site for rentals only, so it's a different audience, which gives them a broader scope. So, you know, we figured that we were a lot better off to leverage and scale the Zillow sales force, who is now accountable as part of the relationship, to go out and grow the number of property management companies that they have on the books. We don't duplicate the process of adding that content to our individual sites. We take the feed directly from Zillow. Immediately, we get a better portfolio of property management PMCs, property management companies. But we think as those PMCs work out, that they're going to get a bigger, more effective audience, there'll be share shift, and that's what we believe will occur, and that was the logic of the deal. I should assure you that on almost every other front, we aggressively compete with Zillow.
In terms of that focus being the driver, are there other parts or other business lines that you're in today that, you know, you feel like you could do better in a partnership, or are we comfortable with sort of where you're at?
Look, I think more broadly, any other parts of the ancillary components of the business that are non-core, you know, we already have a very substantial partnership with a company, Veterans United, in terms of mortgage, and, you know, we will always consider, you know, mortgage partnerships, as an example. There may be opportunities on the loan side of the business. We're not ready to talk about any of those specifically yet, but what I would say is that we are very focused on core buy and sell. Particularly on sell, we've got a lot of upside and growth. The growth is being delivered. We're really pleased with our early results. Outside of that, I don't want to distract our team.
You know, we think that, I mean, this market will turn, and when it does turn, at some point, there'll be... There's a lot of pent-up demand in this market, and we want to ensure that our foundations are rock solid, so that when it does turn, and that trickle of listings and transactions turns into a torrent, then we're really well positioned to capture it in our core business.
Yep. And just following up on that, you know, the market turning. I mean, maybe a few green shoots with mortgage rates coming down a fraction.
Yeah.
Just talk a little bit more about what you're seeing in the market and sort of how you think the next 12-24 months could play out?
Yeah, I think that, yes, some green shoots, more, you know, perhaps a soft landing is in sight. I think that, inflation seems to have been tamed now under 3%. Yes, mortgage rates declining, jobs numbers okay, so long as the economy doesn't stall and continues, then we avoid a recession. I think, you know, a market rebound is well in sight now. The other green shoot for me is probably two things, one, that inventory is improving. I mean, it's up 36%. Last month was up 36% year-on-year. Now, it's still down, I think, about 26% versus August 2019, pre-pandemic, so it's not back to the highs, but it does demonstrate that there are more people in this market who are thinking of selling.
I think that could very quickly accelerate, depending on a few things. So that's a green shoot. The other one is pent-up demand. I mean, if you, the last two years have been closer to $4 million in transactions. That's a real anomaly, and there's a lot of life-changing events that occur amongst our friends and family that we know of, that are causing people to really start to trade off. When is that point when rates are going to be low enough for me to forego some interest savings for some significant lifestyle benefit? I mean, first-time home buyers is another interesting one. At the peak, first-time home buyers represented a little over 50% of transactions in the U.S.
In 2022, it was closer to 26% at the low point. I think it went to low 30s% the year after, and it's looking to be about the same this year. You know, there's a lot of first-time home buyers that are renting right now, that are sitting on their hands, that could very quickly get back into the, you know, make their first purchase, and we want to be prepared for that. You know, interest rates have come down, but unfortunately, there's an interesting survey out today, I think, from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, that signals that the vast majority of Americans are expecting further rate declines, so you do get somewhat of an effect of people just holding off a little bit more.
They've seen downward momentum. They're asking, "Where is it going to stop?" So, they don't get in too early. So, you know, I think that the election uncertainty, you know, needs to be considered as well. But if you put all of that aside, there are green shoots. We're cautiously optimistic that the spring will be a lot better. You know, it's worth reflecting that, I think since 2000 , one-third of the years since the year 2000 , nine years, have had home sales over $5 million, over 5% average mortgage rates. So I'd like to see mortgage rates rapidly accelerate to having a five handle, and then I hope, I sense that the market will start to unlock.
Mm-hmm. And I suppose the NAR settlement has been top of mind for the industry this year. You guys have also been very vocal in your support for buyer agency. Just talk about how you've positioned Realtor for this change, you know, and since the rules went into effect, you know, a few weeks ago, have you seen any initial impacts coming through?
You know, I think. You know, I look at the last 12 months, and it's been. If you talk to Realtors who have been in the business for a long time, they would say that it's been one of the most uncertain and high anxiety periods of their career. You know, part of that has been because of the extraordinary change management process that's had to occur in the industry. That change management has been different state by state, MLS by MLS, broker by broker, to some extent. You know, but I also look at August 17. It's come and gone. Houses are still being transacted. Buyers still need the support of buyer agents, and sellers still need the support of listing agents. So it kind of feels like year 2000 in that respect. It's come and gone. Planes didn't fall out of the sky.
Mm-hmm.
So I think certainty is coming back to our top customers, and the mix is changing too, I think to some extent. The more professional customers, the bigger, more higher-producing teams are dealing with this really well. They've taken the opportunity to retrain their team to role-play the process of selling yourself based on your value and earning the right to that commission. And they're seeing a lot of success in that regard. So I think Realtors will become more professional as an outcome. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it'll be a more transparent process. That's not a bad thing either.
I haven't heard any regulators in this country say: We want to lower the cost of buying a home in this country by eliminating the protections that Americans fought for in the 1990 s of buyer, independent buyer agency. I mean, dual agency, where one agent represents both the buyer and the seller, is outlawed in eight states in America for a reason, insofar as this is the most, often the most significant, often the most leveraged transaction of a person's life. And you know, they deserve independent representation, just as a company buying another company would have a different investment banker on both ends of the trade. You know, this is a significant transaction, and we've advocated very loudly for it, for two reasons, really.
One is, to some extent, to remind the community the benefit of independent buyer agency. Secondly, to remind our customers of the benefit, and I think thirdly, probably to remind lawmakers that as much as we should pursue, of course, greater efficiency in the marketplace, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I nvestment bank on both sides of the transaction sounds like a pretty good outcome. I mean, the market remains very competitive. This, I suppose, is a key-
Yeah.
Investor question, a key investor concern out there. CoStar is obviously making a lot of noise, you know, for the industry. Just talk about how you guys are responding to these threats, you know, whether you think you're investing aggressively enough to mitigate some of the longer-term risks.
Yeah. We're really pleased with how we've performed over the last 12 months, and yeah, you're right. Look, first and foremost, Zillow is our primary competitor. You know, they have a strong lead from the consumer side and from a revenue perspective as well. And we spend more time thinking about how do we gain share against Zillow, so make no mistake. But you're right, CoStar has made a lot of noise about Homes.com and also about this concept of Your Listing, Your Lead.
We're very familiar with Your Listing, Your Lead because that was the only product that Realtor.com sold for many, many years, and we chose, for a variety of reasons, to diversify to the buy side as well, and that was a very successful diversification for us. Where we don't think the comparisons with the Australian market, as you would well know, are fair and valid. Just because that type of model works in Australia, it doesn't necessarily work in the U.S. The U.S. has these things called multiple listing services, which ensure that when you're selling your home, you don't have to pay for the listing. Your listing is free and ubiquitous on many thousands of different portals. So we think we're far better to focus on core buy and sell.
In terms of the competitiveness, at the audience level, there has been a very strong fight in the market for audience share. I'm pleased to say, during this period of time, we have not only retained our audience share, but we've gained audience share. I think it's important that when people assess the competitive market, that they consider comparable statistics. You know, I have spoken publicly about the need to reference Comscore. I use Comscore because in the media sector, when you're selling advertising, and you go to a media buying agency, they don't look at what numbers you publish, they look at what numbers that are independently audited by the industry currency.
And if you look at Comscore, you know, we are the clear number two, we are gaining market share. And you know, despite the significant investment that CoStar invested in the Super Bowl, you know, their audience of the big four portals peaked last September at 20% share, declined to 18% at the Super Bowl and has declined to 14% since then.
Do you guys focus on audience traffic, you know, internally? Is that the metric that you-
We do, but you know, our last quarterly results were $74 million, which we think holding our share quarter- on- quarter was a terrific result, given the search demand, if you go to Google, was down 10% around about 10% in that quarter. Don't quote me precisely, but it was down in that quarter. So for us to hold our audience, despite declining search, I think was terrific. But as I said, when we're trying to compare ourselves with others, we use a comparable statistic, so we look at Comscore as well. And actually, you can look at the same story is pretty much told on Comscore, Nielsen, Semrush, and Similarweb, so choose your independent metric. We look beyond that headline metric.
You've got to be careful with audience because if you're not careful, it becomes a vanity metric. What's more important, and certainly what's more important for our customers, is that we generate for them quality leads. That means that you need a high-intent audience, you need more on-site engagement. We feel that we have the highest intent audience as a percentage of our audience, of all of the portals. Why? Because we measure it. We do surveys of all consumers to the other portals, and more of our consumers have a higher intent. Secondly, organic search is, to me, the most important audience metric 'cause it's free. You don't have to keep paying for it. We leverage the authority of other News Corp brands to build it.
We leverage the authority of writing journalism about real estate that improves it, and search. Our organic audience is a bigger proportion of our audience than the other portals, and I'm pleased to say that we're growing share in organic audience in terms of SEO performance, so we measure that. And then finally, we measure using publicly available data like Comscore. We look at engagement on site, so typically, we lead in terms of time spent on site and in terms of number of page views per unique, and that's really powerful because the better that is, the higher the lead submission rate, the better the quality of lead, the more our customers are satisfied, and I think the more our shareholders are satisfied as a result.
Great. And, you touched on a couple of things there in terms of, intent and quality of the audience. Are there any other key competitive strengths of Realtor, sort of, versus the industry that you wanted to highlight?
Yeah, I think that. Well, for one, our, you know, I, I touched on our brand before, but something very interesting about our brand that, that I just haven't experienced in any of the other four industries I've worked in through my career, and that is this affiliation that exists between Realtors and real estate professionals, and Realtor.com is quite extraordinary. The same applies to the MLSs. We have a very unique relationship with the MLSs. The other portals are effectively they get access to MLS content because they're a broker.
And that creates a bit of a rub with their customers, because their customers are constantly fearful, be it the MLSs or be it the brokers, that the portal will disintermediate them and put them out of business fundamentally, and certainly Zillow's exploration of iBuying, you know, stoked those fears. We're not a broker. We, for that purpose, access the MLS content through direct relationships with the MLSs. We think that that provides us with an opportunity to create even more valuable relationships into the future. It's a very unique position. MLSs, I think, would like to see a synergistic relationship between Realtor.com and the MLS. And similarly, our customers, I think, will be willing to shift share from our competitors to us if we can improve our core foundations.
And so, you know, it's probably not a strategic advantage, it's more of a strategic catch-up. But we have publicly said on a number of occasions that we are investing a lot in modernizing our tech platform. You know, like a lot of companies, we have accumulated technical debt over a number of years. We have acquired some terrific companies, but they haven't always followed through in terms of integrating those tech stacks into our core tech stack. As a result of that, you know, closer to one in two of our technology dollars has historically been spent on just keeping the lights on and keeping those systems connected. Our tech modernization program will deliver strategic advantage for our company because we are moving towards one in two dollars being spent on keeping the lights on.
Sorry, one in four dollars spent on keeping the lights on from one in two. That gives us a lot more dollars to invest in the velocity of our consumer technology. You're starting to see that. I'd encourage you to take a look at our mapping capability on our app today. We haven't started promoting this yet, but we will shortly. But our mapping capability that allows you to search with dynamic maps. You'll understand it when you experience it. That allows you to search in full color, to look at new statistics like value per square foot, to look for those pockets within a neighborhood if you're an investor, looking for where you can find value or lot size, happens to be the most important.
So rather than looking at a hundred different listings to find the lot size, the size of the home you want, look at a map that looks at lot size and visualizes it for you dynamically as you zoom in and out. Artificial intelligence will be another beneficiary of modernizing our tech stack. We've started to launch some AI tools. We don't need to be on the bleeding edge of this, but we wanna be on the leading edge. And now you can search today on our app for visually similar homes. If you like a modern, white, bright kitchen, then you can search for all of the other homes in that neighborhood that have those visually similar criteria.
If you want to buy a home, and then you want to renovate the home and envisage what the home will look like after the renovation, then we can help you do that on site today. That's just the start, and those consumer innovations will come through tech stack modernization. Not to mention, our site gets a lot faster, and in this game, a fast site, a fast page load, equals better search rank, search performance, free audience, very important. On the customer side, you know, I would reflect upon our business and say, historically, we've been a very product-centric business. We've developed and acquired different products, and we've sold them to the same customers, but in a disconnected way.
Tech modernization has allowed us to move from three customer apps to one app, which is now launched, I'm pleased to say, and that will give us the ability to launch new products, gaining a greater share of wallet of our existing customers a lot easier. There's a whole bunch of other benefits, like improved billing systems through providing greater lead nurturing capabilities, productivity enhancements for our teams that come with that tech modernization. You know, it's a really good example, I think, our tech modernization program, of how, again, we are leveraging the benefit of being in the News Corp family. Because you know, REA, the REA Group modernized their technology some years ago, and rather than us reinventing the wheel, we borrowed a number of the REA team to help us develop our strategy. That's worked fantastically because I think we'll probably be able to do it two years faster because we've learned from the successes and from their learnings as they did it.
And, we think about the 25 cents on the dollar on your tech budget coming back to provide optionality, and we think about potentially improving t he housing market. How do you think about the trade-off of investment, you know, for longer term revenue growth versus, you know, improving the, you know, the earnings of a Realtor, and then the pressures that Robert might be putting on you from an outcome perspective?
I think that the solutions that we're developing today in our core have a lot of scale potential, and probably the only thing that is holding us back is the market improving. We've got to deliver different pieces of work. We haven't fully launched all of our sell side products. We have an additional product that we haven't launched yet, that we're not quite ready to talk about, but we'll talk about soon, that will help on the sell side. That product set is not too far away from completion. We are focused on providing choice to customers. We historically, we've probably made too many decisions on behalf of customers, and limited choice.
We're opening that up so that if you would prefer referral, as opposed to buying simple connections or simple leads, we give you that opportunity. But equally, there are some customers who would prefer to buy the lead, and we're happy with that, and we can manage the pricing accordingly. So ensuring that all products are in all markets, ensuring that we both offer both buy and sell, ensure that our marketing products are developing. I think that we're developing the right product set. In some instances, we've already got it. We're developing the right product set. As the market improves, we will scale our marketing capability, our marketing investment, and our sales force accordingly to capture that upside.
Historically, you guys have made a few acquisitions.
Mm-hmm.
We touched on, you know, UpNest, but Opcity, and name a few. If you feel like your product set is not too far away from completion, is there, you know, is M&A something we should be thinking about? Or just how do you talk about how do you think about that sort of build versus buy, argument?
Yeah, I mean, we've the two acquisitions that we've made have been terrific acquisitions, and we just need to implement them fully and then leverage them hard. That's what we're focused on doing now. Both UpNest and Opcity are great examples of that. In terms of what the future holds, look, it's hard to say. You know, we will always consider other opportunities as they present. There's certainly always a lot of activity in this market, and if we see that there is a faster pathway to building a capability than building a capability ourselves, of course, we will consider it.
Yeah. Then the last couple of minutes of the presentation, if I put all of this discussion together, in terms of the opportunity ahead, and maybe put the cycle to one side, what do you think success looks like from a sort of revenue outcome, from a business outcome from here? I mean, we did talk about REA a couple of times.
Yeah.
They would guide to, or hope for double-digit revenue growth through the cycle.
Yeah.
Is that a starting point we should use for Realtor?
I think that the Australian market's very different to the U.S. market, and REA is a magnificent business, but there are some constraints in the U.S. market that we need to consider. I mean, you know, for one, you know, the mortgage lock that is occurring in this market does not exist in Australia because the majority of mortgages in Australia are variable, so it's very difficult to compare. I think that I'm very confident that we're doing the right things to gain an outsized share of growth as the market returns. We wanna do that through not just growing any audience, but through growing the highest intent audience, because that highest intent audience is going to convert into a higher quality lead. We're going to move, I think, from a product-centric organization to more of a customer-centric organization, where we will better serve those higher-producing customers, be they brokers or teams, and we will serve more of their needs on both the buy, sell and marketing sides of their business.
We think that if we do that, then we're confident that those who partner with us will capture their own market share in the area that they serve and the geography that they serve, and we wanna become their indispensable marketing partner. That's where our focus is. So if we can deliver that, we'll gain share, and I think we'll improve our Net Promoter Score. That's where our focus is.
Okay. Well, Damian, thank you for your time today.
Terrific.
Good. Appreciate having you here.
Thank you.