Homes.com was back at the Super Bowl, and this time, it brought Dan Levy, Heidi Gardner, and Morgan Freeman into the mix.
CoStar Group, the parent company of Homes.com, doubled down on its marketing approach with two new 30-second Super Bowl spots:
But let’s be real—this is about more than just a couple of funny ads.
CEO Andy Florance: “We believe it is obvious…”
Directed by Taika Waititi, the ads feature Levy and Gardner struggling to convince their corporate lawyer to let them just say Homes.com is the best. The lawyer isn’t having it. But when Morgan Freeman says it? Well… that’s another story.
Andy Florance, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CoStar Group, said,
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. 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 ads are a follow-up to last year’s $1 billion real estate marketing campaign, which launched at the 2024 Super Bowl and helped Homes.com explode in web traffic. In a press release, the portal stated it had “110 million average monthly unique visitors to the Homes.com Network for the last fiscal quarter according to Google Analytics – an audience comparable to the Super Bowl’s viewership, and nearly double that of Realtor.com’s 62 million average monthly unique visitors for the last fiscal quarter, according to its publicly reported internal data.”
Homes.com vs. Zillow and Realtor.com
Homes.com isn’t just flexing its web traffic numbers—it’s going after the industry giants.
Unlike its competitors, Homes.com claims to give home sellers and their agents full control over their leads, rather than selling them to agents who may or may not have the listing.
And they’re taking direct shots at the competition in the process. In a statement, Florance said:
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. That is why we put the home sellers first with our “Your Listing Your Lead” principal.
And the “disclaimer” on the Homes.com website didn’t back down:
An Ongoing Battle
The drama between the portals escalated in 2024 when Homes.com put out an ad that read, “Homes.com now has DOUBLE Realtor.com’s traffic.”
Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales fired back, accusing CoStar of misleading traffic stats by bundling multiple sites together—which he discussed on Knowledge Brokers Podcast.
That turned into a full-blown legal battle when Move, Inc. (Realtor.com’s parent company) sued CoStar for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
Homes.com Isn’t Slowing Down
With another Super Bowl marketing campaign this year, Homes.com is showing no signs of stopping.
The big question is: Will consumers and agents buy into it?
Or will Zillow and Realtor.com strike back?
Either way, one thing is clear: The portal wars aren’t over.
