Real Estate Portals Need to Retrofit More Than Their Products

We recently took the time to convert all our historical news output into structured data and link it to the companies we write about. The project has thrown up some pretty revealing figures. One in particular, we think, highlights a very easy win for real estate marketplaces...

There are well over a thousand real estate portals in our database, but since 2020, we've only covered product updates from around 1 in 8 of them.

The loud brands out there are monopolising our pages. Data from the last six years of our news coverage shows that over half of all the stories we've published about real estate portal product innovations have come from 12 brands.

• Just 5 portals around the world account for 32% of our product innovation coverage
• We have never covered a single product update for 88% of the portal brands we track
• The vast majority of portal operators choose not to tell their peers and the industry at large (including investors) about their innovations

Our coverage is biased, though; we are a small team that, out of necessity, leans heavily towards covering companies that make it easy for us to write about them. The ones that send us press releases, reply to our emails, write their own product-related blog or otherwise put their projects out there are rewarded with free publicity.

Product teams work hard on new map features, listing enhancement tools and agent-facing dashboards. Turning those little wins into press releases and sending them to journalists does not require a Content Strategy, a weekly meeting and a Communications professional. It probably just needs a Claude subscription.

Extend the product 'retrofit' to comms

Zillow's product updates alone have accounted for 12% of our product news output since 2020. The Seattle-based portal giant has consistently told the world most of what it's working on over the years, and the cadence of its product innovations stands in stark contrast to some of its international peers.

The eighteen publicly traded companies we track that operate real estate portals have lost, on average, 41% of their market cap over the last twelve months. The consensus is that they need to invest in product innovation and 'retrofit' their way out of the AI-disintermediation narrative and back into investor portfolios.

What the public companies losing value for all to see have in common with those losing it in private is that they'd be wise to extend the retrofit to their communications strategy.

If your peers don't know what your CEO thinks about AI, what you're building and what you're aiming for, investors won't know, the narrative around you won't shift, and your valuation will be helplessly tied to the rest of the sector.

Below: More blue than pink is always a good idea, regardless of stock market fluctuations 

Our dataset is a record of how narratives are formed at the industry, individual company and portal level, but it is biased and incomplete. The 88% who never told the industry what they were doing excluded themselves, through small decisions about which press releases to send, when to decline an interview, and which emails to reply to.

As a real estate marketplace, it has never been as important to tell the world what you're working on. The 88% may be doing the right things internally, but they're just not showing their work. There is now more to gain from actively diverting the narrative than there is to lose from upsetting the status quo.