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Realtor.com parent company Move Inc. has extended its revenue gains for the second-straight quarter of 2025, according to quarterly earnings data released Thursday by News Corp.
Move raised revenue in the quarter by 2 percent — to $135 million — compared to a year prior, primarily as a result of the rental syndication partnership Realtor.com inked with Zillow early last year, the earnings data shows.
Robert Thomson
“The sustained strength of News Corp’s third quarter reflects the Company’s strategic transformation,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement. “We have pursued digital growth, realigned our assets, focused relentlessly on cost discipline and asserted the essential value of our intellectual property in a changing, challenging content world.”
Move Inc.’s lead volume fell 17 percent year over year amid continued macroeconomic headwinds and mortgage rate volatility, executives said. Company executives said the loss was partially offset by higher revenue per lead as Move focuses on crafting premium lead options.
As for traffic, average monthly unique visitors to Realtor.com’s web and mobile sites decreased 8 percent over the quarter, to 66 million, according to the data.
Thomson said News Corp’s Q3 performance reflects the conglomerate’s resilience in the face of global economic headwinds. Thomson credited a strong digital real estate segment with pushing revenue up 1 percent year over year to $2 billion, and increasing net income 67 percent year over year to $107 million.
News Corp’s digital real estate services segment, which includes Move and Melbourne-based residential portal REA Group, performed well, with revenues growing 5 percent annually to $406 million. The segment’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) increased 19 percent annually to $124 million.
Unlike most U.S.-based companies, News Corp uses a reporting method that ends the year on June 30. What most companies call their first quarter is referred to at News Corp as the third quarter.
Lavanya Chandrashekar
In News Corp’s earnings call, Thomson and Chief Financial Officer Lavanya Chandrashekar lauded Realtor.com’s growth through the quarter, including new audience acquisition and engagement strategies and a brand campaign featuring country music icon Reba McEntire.
“At Realtor, lower referral and lead generation revenues were more than offset by robust growth from adjacencies,” Chandrashekar said. “Realtor.com has been shifting its audience acquisition and engagement strategies to focus on higher quality consumers and leads, which resulted in a notable increase in revenue per lead in the quarter, partly offsetting softer lead volumes. Expenses at Realtor came in better than we had initially forecasted, driven by the shift of a new brand campaign to the fourth quarter.”
Thomson lauded Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales’s leadership amid an intensifying competitive landscape.
“Damian Eales and the Realtor team thrive on competition and are gaining audience and user loyalty, pulling further ahead of Redfin and Homes.com thanks to the network effect created by our media platforms,” he said. “We believe that network advantage will become more pronounced as the character of search continues to change profoundly in coming years.”
The News Corp leader cited data from third-party analytics company Comscore, noting that total visits — which differ from tracking average monthly unique visitors — to Realtor.com in March prove consumers’ loyalty to the platform.
“Based on third-party verified source Comscore, total visits to the site reached 239 million in March, representing 29 percent of market share among the top real estate portals, and a 3.7 times traffic advantage over Homes.com and 2.7 times greater than Redfin,” he said. “Our 4.5 visits per visitor is the category leader and a compelling sign of engagement and loyalty. And let’s be very clear, these are not home-brewed metrics.”
Damian Eales | Credit: Realtor.com
The earnings call puts a cap on a transformative quarter for Realtor.com, which moved its headquarters to Austin in February. Alongside the new headquarters came a fresh mission centered on advocating for progressive, affordable housing policies. The portal unveiled its first initiative, “Let America Build,” at SXSW in March and hosted a series of panels with lawmakers, homebuilders, and housing advocates working to create modern zoning policies that align with today’s inventory challenges.
“I wish we’d spend more time talking outside of the bubble to all of the community leaders that the people in this room influence and certainly who we can influence as Realtor.com and who we can influence as News Corp,” Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales said at Inman Connect New York in January. “[We need] to start challenging politicians to deal with the issue of reducing red tape, freeing up land, dealing with [the ‘Not in My Backyard’ movement] and building more homes because we as an industry will be more successful, but more importantly, society will be more successful as a result.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing rivalry with CoStar Group faded into the background, with Move Inc. reaching a settlement agreement with former Realtor.com News & Insights editor James Kaminsky, who was accused of sharing trade secrets with CoStar after being hired as a Homes.com editorial manager in March 2024.
Move, Inc. also dropped its suit against CoStar, citing the portal’s decision to lay off Kaminsky in early 2025, which they said mitigated “additional misuse” of Realtor.com data. “Our commitment to safeguarding our trade secrets remains unwavering and uncompromising,” a Realtor.com spokesperson told Inman in April.
