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Homes.com President Dave Mele is leaving the company, according to an exclusive interview with Real Estate News on Friday.
Mele joined Homes.com in 2014, after a lengthy career in the news publishing industry where he led operations for The Virginian-Pilot and successfully transitioned the company from a print-only to print and online model. Mele was tapped to bring that same magic to Homes.com, which at the time, was the fifth most trafficked real estate portal in the U.S.
“We are very much focused on growth and growth for quality — we are not trying to have 100 million unique visitors,” Mele told Inman in 2015 of his approach to growing Homes.com’s reach. “Our goal is to deliver transaction-ready consumers to professionals, and that’s what we are focused on.”
“For us, we don’t have to be the biggest; we take the Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s position of quality over quantity,” he added. “We have a lot of respect for Zillow, but let’s just say we are different.”
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That focus shifted in 2021 when CoStar Group acquired Homes.com for $156 million, setting the stage for the platform to become a serious contender in the residential portal space with its “Your Listing, Your Lead” model.
“Together we will be dedicated to growing the Homes.com brand,” Mele said of the new opportunities the acquisition brought to the Homes.com team. “and building innovative solutions that expand the marketing options available to consumers and their agents.”
In the three years since, Homes.com has undergone a major transformation with Homesnap being integrated into Homes.com as Homes Pro, a hefty marketing budget and an aggressive traffic strategy that’s seen the traffic for the Homes.com Network reach 156 million monthly unique visitors — a number that places it in the top echelon of residential portals in the U.S.
More changes are on the way for Homes.com with CoStar Group’s $1.6 billion acquisition of Matterport and its digital twinning technology, which is expected to create a one-of-a-kind home search experience for listing agents and homebuyers.
In an emailed statement to Inman, CoStar Group co-founder and CEO Andy Florance thanked Mele for his contributions and wished him well on his next chapter.
“We are grateful to David Mele for his contributions to Homes.com over the past year,” he said. “He was a member of a very talented and motivated team that is successfully launching Homes.com, the industry’s first agent-friendly portal with more than one hundred million unique visitors that empowers agents to sell homes faster and for more money.”
“We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors,” he added.
