Battle Lines Drawn in New York Portal Wars as CoStar Circles around Zillow Dominated Market

December 16, 2020

For a while now it has been no secret that the American commercial real estate giant CoStar is coming for Zillow. Last month CEO Andy Florance fired a shot across Zillow's bow in an interview with Brad Inman in which he openly criticised Zillow's business model and subtly called the Seattle company a failure. The latest development in the narrative of CoStar moving in on Zillow's residential turf comes from New York where Zillow owned market-leading portal StreetEasy may soon have competition from a collaboration between CoStar and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY).

According to an unconfirmed report from AIM Group, REBNY is working with HomeSnap, a company in the process of being acquired by CoStar for $250 million, to build a public-facing portal for the New York City area which would be in direct competition with StreetEasy. Despite being a clear market leader, the Zillow owned portal has a long history of spiky relationships with those in the city's agent community and CoStar backed HomeSnap will be hoping that a collaboration with New York's agents' trade association will get customers on board to take on Zillow.

It won't only be Zillow and StreetEasy that a potential CoStar backed New York portal would be in competition with, however, as over the Summer many of the city's agents banded together to create the OneKey MLS and portal. On top of competition from OneKey, a fourth player emerged in the New York property marketing scene this week in the form of Homes.nyc, the brainchild of Gabriel Technology Solutions founder Michael Gabriel. Homes.nyc has already run into trouble, with REBNY complaining that Gabriel's portal is apparently listing properties that it does not have consent for though there is speculation that the REBNY complaint itself is perhaps not so much about the listings themselves and more about protecting the interests of the potential partnership with HomeSnap and CoStar.

 

December 16, 2020
Since March 2020 Edmund's job has been to read about, write about, collect data on, analyse and generally know about real estate marketplaces and the companies that run them. Before that he worked at the aggregator Mitula Group (which became Lifull Connect) for five years.

Subscribe to our mailing list to get the famous, free Friday newsletter!

News and analysis to help build better online marketplace businesses, in your inbox, every Friday

Related News

Cooperrocketacq
Rocket to Acquire Mr Cooper Mortgage Service for $9.4 Billion

Rocket Companies has announced a $9.4 billion all-share deal to acquire Mr. Cooper, the largest mortgage servicer in the United...

Read More
Scout24 German Houses 1
Scout24 Closes Another Data-Focused Acquisition

Germany-based marketplace operator Scout24 has continued its expansion into real estate data with the acquisition of Austrian proptech firm ImmoUnited....

Read More
People Roundup 28Mar 2
People Roundup: Aviv Group, Pisos.com, Kleinanzeigen, REA India, Anjuke

There have been several high profile C-suite moves in this week's People Roundup. We'll start in Europe...   Europe: Aviv...

Read More
Product Update 2025Mar28 3
Product and Services Roundup: Zoopla, ViewIt

This week's Product Roundup starts in the UK, where it's all about Zoopla...   UK: Zoopla's MyHome product is used...

Read More

Editor's Pick