Insights
Zillow Continued to Lead the Web with 318 Million Monthly Visits, While Homes.com Grew over 200%
May 2023 U.S. real estate home search traffic update also shows Opendoor dropped 43%
Similarweb’s latest look at the real estate industry’s leading search sites for buying and selling homes shows an overall 0.5% year-over-year slight decrease in visits in the month of May.
Homes.com saw the most growth in web traffic on a year-over-year basis at 201%, and RE/MAX grew 22%. Opendoor saw a 43% year-over-year web traffic decline, and Rocket Homes saw a 34% drop in traffic.
Zillow led in share of traffic among real estate peers for the month of May 2023 (based on a look at seventeen leading peers) with a 43% share of traffic.
Key metrics
- When Zillow, Trulia and Streeteasy are combined, their market share of traffic makes up 52% of the category, and represents Zillow Group’s leading position. Overall, the top 10 real estate sites continue to control 98% of traffic share.
- Five of the seventeen sites tracked saw a year-over-year increase in traffic: Homes.com, RE/MAX, Redfin, Compass and Trulia.
- Homes.com and Redfin were the share gain leaders, while Realtor.com, Zillow and Movoto lost the most share.
Web traffic growth shows Homes.com performed best, Opendoor worst
We watch traffic to these home search sites as a proxy for potential demand, as most consumers visit these websites before making in-person visits and purchases, and as part of the process of listing their owned homes for sale. The chart below shows the change in web traffic on a year-over-year basis. Homes.com saw major growth, while Opendoor performed the worst. Homes.com appears to be benefiting from increased advertising spend and organic growth. Opendoor saw a 43% decrease as demand has abated for its services. Rocket Homes continued to be impacted by the high interest rate environment, with a 33% decrease.
Share of traffic finds Zillow leading, peers lagging
The below chart shows the relative market share of each entity in the peer group relative to each other (share of traffic). Zillow leads with 43%, followed by Realtor.com at 19%, Redfin at 15%, and Trulia at 7%. Traffic to Compass, Keller Williams, and eXp Realty barely registers amongst peers, even though they are industry leaders in transaction units and volume.
Changes in share of traffic show Realtor.com, Zillow performing worst (surprisingly)
Shifts in share of traffic year-over-year show that Realtor (-2.4 percentage points) and Zillow (-1.2 percentage points) performed worst, while Homes.com (+2.8 percentage points) and Redfin (+1.4 percentage points) did the best. The slip by Zillow is surprising, possibly indicating the broad-based loss of buyer interest across the category due to market and rate conditions.
Though Zillow has shown a consistent lead over the past year, it did lose share. While Homes.com’s and Redfin’s gains increased, Realtor.com faded further over the past twelve months.
The list of the real estate sites in this report and their traffic rankings is below.
| Brand or Co | Domain | May 2023 Visits | Visits YoY | May 2023 Share | Share YoY pp |
| Zillow | zillow.com | 318,373,040 | -3.2% | 43.0% | -1.2 |
| Realtor.com | realtor.com | 138,616,167 | -11.7% | 18.7% | -2.4 |
| Redfin | redfin.com | 109,271,830 | 9.8% | 14.8% | 1.4 |
| Trulia | trulia.com | 53,641,969 | 1.0% | 7.2% | 0.1 |
| Homes.com | homes.com | 31,253,850 | 201.3% | 4.2% | 2.8 |
| Movoto | movoto.com | 25,126,967 | -11.2% | 3.4% | -0.4 |
| OneHome | onehome.com | 17,480,800 | -1.5% | 2.4% | 0.0 |
| RE/MAX | remax.com | 12,850,082 | 22.3% | 1.7% | 0.3 |
| Compass | compass.com | 9,404,738 | 2.1% | 1.3% | 0.0 |
| Streeteasy | streeteasy.com | 9,351,719 | -4.7% | 1.3% | -0.1 |
| Century 21 | century21.com | 3,162,998 | -23.0% | 0.4% | -0.1 |
| Coldwell Banker | coldwellbanker.com | 2,776,910 | -11.6% | 0.4% | 0.0 |
| Rocket Homes | rockethomes.com | 2,356,616 | -33.6% | 0.3% | -0.2 |
| Keller Williams | kw.com | 2,110,243 | -23.6% | 0.3% | -0.1 |
| eXp Realty | exprealty.com | 1,758,579 | -5.4% | 0.2% | 0.0 |
| Opendoor | opendoor.com | 1,636,268 | -43.4% | 0.2% | -0.2 |
| Homelight | homelight.com | 1,232,051 | -15.0% | 0.2% | 0.0 |
Publicly traded companies that own the websites mentioned in this report include Zillow Group (NASDAQ: Z, ZG), Redfin (NYSE: RDFN), News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA), CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSTR), Rocket Companies (NASDAQ: RKT), eXp World Holdings (NYSE: EXPI), Opendoor (NASDAQ: OPEN), Anywhere Real Estate (NASDAQ: HOUS), RE/MAX Holdings (NASDAQ: RMAX), Compass (NYSE: COMP).
The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.
Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.
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Image by Shahid Abdullah from Pixabay
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