Damian Eales on 'imminent' Realtor.com app for ChatGPT [EXCLUSIVE]

Realtor.com is a publishing company through and through.

In recent years, Realtor.com and its owners at News Corp. have begun referring to the portal as “the largest publisher of original real estate news in the United States.” Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly spending time on artificial intelligence platforms, a trend that is widely expected to continue as companies like OpenAI evolve and embed themselves into everyday lives.

Against that backdrop, Zillow recently partnered with OpenAI as the first real estate platform to appear within ChatGPT, a move that proved controversial due to concerns about ownership of listing data.

Now, Realtor.com is close behind, company CEO Damian Eales told Inman in an exclusive interview.

“The future for me is that we will be a research platform as much as a search platform,” Eales said. “We will be an answers platform, not a listings platform.”

The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and length. This is the second of a two-part interview.

What’s interesting is that I’m almost interviewing a competitor right? ‘The largest real estate news source in the country.’ 

For consumers.

But it does feel like Realtors could just go to Realtor.com and read the news there because it’s nationwide coverage.

Yeah, but I’m not gonna write too many articles about the Clear Cooperation Policy. 

That seems like a strategic shift. I mean, it is within the ethos of News Corp, and Move. It’s a publishing company through and through. And all of the portals are content. 

We put the throttle down two and a half years ago because I’m probably the first News Corp leader — as in I come from the news organization — and I recognize the value of journalism to not just build audience, but to actually build trust, to build authority, to build brand. That’s why I was really motivated to amplify our journalistic endeavors. 

Is the concept to attract as big an audience as possible, and then you place listings within the stories? How does that play into the need for quality? I might be interested in the headline, and I might click on a listing, but I might not be the greatest lead for an agent.

It’s funny. We call our business a search platform, but I think increasingly we should be thinking of it as a research platform. This is particularly apt in an AI context. I give our team internally the example of my 22-year-old daughter in Sydney, who’s just recently bought a very modest studio apartment. She’s entered the property market. She’s been a test case for me for the last four or five months. 

She would have spent three weeks researching the concept of homebuying before she looked at a listing. You know the concept of rent or buy? What can I afford? Taxation implications. The process of homebuying. What’s involved? The spreadsheet. All of this she did on ChatGPT before she looked at RealEstate.com.au, our sister company in Australia. 

It occurred to me that in a traditional model, a portal like Realtor.com might not really value that audience because it doesn’t lead to looking at a listing. And so, we might have historically called that not valuable traffic. Whereas I consider it to be the most valuable traffic.

And again, we’ve doubled down on journalism because, to succeed in an AI world, the AI companies rely on a distributed trust network. [That’s] the reason why we’re proud of the fact that we’re the most trusted by Realtors and most trusted by real estate professionals. That [trust] is built on the journalism that we write as well, from a consumer perspective. That is what trains AI models to serve answers.

The future for me is that we will be a research platform as much as a search platform. We will be an answers platform, not a listings platform.

Photos by AJ Canaria Creative Services

Along the lines of AI integration, Zillow is pairing with OpenAI. Is Realtor.com going to do that as well?

Yes, we will. I think we’re in the early days of this, too, by the way. But these emerging LLMs and the LLM browsers that are now launching are really the new front end of the internet. Some people are calling them the new operating system of the internet. We will always be where the consumer is. 

And you know, over a 30-year history, we’ve faced some pretty tectonic, technological transformations, and I’m very confident that with this one, we will perform really well. 

I’ve spent a lot of time with the executives at OpenAI and Google and Anthropic and others, and we will be where the consumer is. I’m convinced that these companies want to work with us to find a model that is good for their consumers, but also economic for them. That’s going to require us to adapt to that new ecosystem. 

It’s interesting because I was looking around and saw there’s conversational search on Realtor.com. Personally, that’s not how I search for houses. But I might be missing the three years down the line, five years down the line AI as an operating system.

There’ll be an enormous amount of experimentation that occurs. And let’s see how consumer behaviors change. But I think that the one thing that we can say we already know is that the LLMs are doing a good job to win on research as opposed to all of those top-of-funnel things that you do before you look at the listings. So it depends on what you mean by search or research. 

As an interesting experiment, I ask ChatGPT or Gemini to do some deep research on all of the residential real estate queries that they are receiving and categorize them from high to low. Typically, when you do that, searching for listings actually falls a fair way down the list. So all of those queries that my daughter was going through in terms of the buying process and where is it better to buy or when is it better to buy, or trying to understand what might happen with interest rates, and how that might impact the value of my property, those questions are perhaps where LLMs will help us more.

That strategy makes a lot of sense because you’re going to show up in queries now based on people doing research.

Fundamentally, the way companies like OpenAI see the world is a distributed trust network. Not one brand, but many brands. Those brands that are more authoritative and more trustworthy add more value to an LLM. 

Now, we’ve got to make sure that we work with them to find a way to be present in the experience more than just a small reference within the answer. We have to go beyond zero clicks, because zero clicks means zero Realtor. And the ChatGPT app SDK that we will shortly be present in is one example of that.

That will occur on all LLMs. That will occur on all LLM browsers that are being launched or [that are evolving], and we have to be present in all of those places just as we’re present on Safari and Chrome now. 

Secondly, we have to provide reasons why you would take the off-ramp to our native experience. So our native experience has to evolve, too, by taking the best that AI has to offer and infusing that throughout the traditional search experience or research and search experience. 

Did you say new app SDK?

Well, that’s where Zillow is. All brands have access to that SDK now, and so when they open it open it up, you’ll see a lot of brands appear. 

So when is Realtor.com going to appear? You said an announcement was coming soon.

It’s imminent.

Email Taylor Anderson