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A year after shocking the industry with staggering $1 billion marketing budget for Homes.com, CoStar is looking to continuing its momentum with a second slate of star-studded Super Bowl ads on Sunday. Dan Levy and Heidi Gardner will reprise their roles as Homes.com executives alongside Morgan Freeman.
In meta fashion, two 30-second spots by ad agency RPA will center on Levy and Gardner’s attempt to make an ad proclaiming Homes.com’s dominance as the best home-shopping site. However, the duo’s mission keeps getting thwarted by a corporate lawyer who worries about their ability to make such a claim. Instead of giving up, Levy and Gardner keep finding more creative ways to display Homes.com’s value — eventually leaning on Freeman and his celestial voice to win the lawyer over.
Andy Florance | Credit: CoStar Group
“We believe that it is obvious that Homes.com is the best home shopping website anywhere, but our lawyers told us while it may be true, we cannot legally say that in an ad,” CoStar Group Founder and CEO Andy Florance said in a statement. “So we turned to the very best talent in RPA, Taika Waititi, Dan Levy, Heidi Gardner, and Morgan Freeman to not tell the world that Homes.com is the best. When Morgan Freeman says so who can say it is not so?”
The company said its previous Super Bowl run yielded a healthy return on investment, making it a no-brainer to produce another slate of ads for this year.
In the month after 2024’s football showdown, traffic to the Homes.com Network of sites (i.e. Homes.com, Apartments.com and Land.com) reached 149 million average monthly unique visitors. Those ads, along with spots during other prime-time events including the Oscars and the 2024 Paris Olympics, have kept traffic steady with 110 million average monthly unique visitors using the portal during the fourth quarter.
The $1 billion ad push also aided Homes.com’s consumer awareness, which has grown from 4 percent to 33 percent.
Florance said consumers are warming up to the Homes.com experience. Since listing agents get prime placement on Homes.com’s site, he said, consumers don’t have to worry about getting calls from multiple agents attempting to connect with them as a lead.
“We believe that Homes.com offers home shoppers the most content on an attractive spam free site,” he said. “One hundred percent of home shoppers use the internet to look for their next home purchase and we believe that Homes.com is the best place to successfully market a home for sale.”
“We suspect that home sellers would be outraged if they knew that other real estate portals use their listings as bait to generate leads for potentially competing agents and competing homes for sale,” he added. “That is why we put the home sellers first with our ‘Your Listing Your Lead’ principal.”
The CoStar CEO didn’t share the budget for this year’s advertising blitz. However, it’s not hard to imagine that it’ll be somewhat smaller, as Florance signaled in the company’s latest earnings call that they’d shift some ad spend dollars toward pushing the pedal on growth, acquisition and merger plans similar to the 2024 purchases of Matterport and Visual Lease.
