Mergers and acquisitions, antitrust lawsuits, listing bans and the potential entry of a new portal competitor ruled 2025. Here’s a look back at the top moments.
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Twenty-twenty-four appeared to be the height of the portal wars — Move and CoStar spent the year locked in a fierce legal battle, Redfin weathered a rough patch with two rounds of layoffs, Zillow navigated a leadership shift with Jeremy Wacksman moving from COO to CEO, and the beginning stages of a post buyer-broker commission settlement world pushed them all to expand their strategies.
However, 2025 quickly made the previous look like child’s play, with a momentous shift in artificial intelligence, several major mergers and acquisitions, a crucial decision from the National Association of Realtors to amend its Clear Cooperation Policy, and a string of lawsuits against portal giant Zillow transforming the competitive field, potentially opening the door for a new leader — Google — to enter the industry.
If you’ve forgotten all that’s happened this year, here’s a look back at the top 10 portal moments.
CoStar closes $1.6B Matterport deal
Nearly a year after announcing its acquisition of spatial mapping company Matterport, CoStar officially closed the deal in February.
The acquisition had been a key part of CoStar’s earnings outlook throughout, as the company planned to leverage Matterport’s 3D interactive floor plans to bolster the Homes.com search experience.
In CoStar’s third-quarter 2024 earnings, Florance said integrating Matterport technology was a key part of bringing Homes.com out of a membership growth plateau, alongside hiring a larger dedicated sales team.
Fast forward to Q3 2025, and CoStar’s bet has seemingly paid off, with Homes.com listings that featured Matterport’s digital twin technology receiving 40 percent more views than those without it.
Rocket decides to purchase Redfin for $1.75B
Rocket Companies shook the industry in March with the all-stock purchase of real estate brokerage and portal Redfin.
Rocket CEO Varun Krishna and Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman laid the groundwork for an end-to-end homebuying and selling service for consumers, which they called the “Rocket-Redfin experience.”
Krishna and Kelman said their focus was on creating a more integrated consumer experience by leveraging data and AI.
“There’s a lot of flow, and there are actually quite a few people that are involved in that communication,” Krishna said. “If we can get that group working as a team, if we can get the data flowing as a package, if we can get insights and workflow and automation to be as streamlined as possible, then we can create time for the consumer, we can eliminate manual data entry, we can automate the mundane, then we can just create more certainty that if you go with the Rocket-Redfin experience, you’re more likely to close.”
Rocket closed its acquisition of Redfin in July and reported seeing “awesome early data” on higher lead volume and conversion rates.
Zillow announces its Listing Access Standards
In March, the National Association of Realtors announced the fate of CCP — the rule would stay, but with a new exemption that would allow homesellers to have their listing agent delay putting a listing on the Internet Data Exchange (IDX).
As for how long the delay could be, NAR left that decision to individual Multiple Listing Services (MLSs). And NAR’s decision ultimately drew mixed responses.
A month later, Zillow announced that listings not added to the MLS within 24 hours of being publicly marketed, and not made available to the portal, would be banned from the platform for the “life of the listing,” i.e., as long as the offending broker was listing the property.
“The idea is buyers and sellers benefit when they have unfettered access to all the information about the market,” Zillow Chief Industry Development Officer Errol Samuelson told Inman in April. “You’re going to need to make a choice in how you want to market a listing.”
Industry players quickly took sides, with some — like eXp Realty, West USA Realty and NextHome — committing to follow the portal’s listing access standards, and others — like Compass — criticizing the portal.
Redfin also announced a listing ban, but decided in October not to implement it “in large part due to the Rocket acquisition.”
Compass lodges antitrust complaint against Zillow
After months of skewering Zillow through op-eds, social media posts and on conference main stages for its listing access policy, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin took his fight to the courtroom.
The New York City-based brokerage filed an antitrust complaint against Zillow in June, claiming the portal had employed “anticompetitive tactics to protect its monopoly and revenues in violation of the antitrust laws.”
The complaint zeroed in on Zillow’s listing ban, which Compass framed as an attempt to bolster the portal’s bottom line by removing seller choice.
“For Zillow, every home buyer search conducted on Compass instead of Zillow is a lost opportunity for Zillow to lock that prospective home buyer into Zillow’s ecosystem and make money selling her information to real estate agents for a lead fee — Zillow’s central business model,” the complaint read.
Zillow leadership disputed Compass’s claims, saying the listing policy was in place to protect marketplace transparency for agents and consumers.
“Hiding listings creates a fragmented market, limits consumer choice and creates barriers to homeownership, which is bad for buyers, sellers and the industry at large, especially in this inventory and affordability-constrained environment,” the company said in June.
The lawsuit took several turns throughout the fall, with Compass requesting a preliminary injunction to stop Zillow from enforcing the ban while the complaint works its way through the courts.
Both parties endured a four-day evidentiary hearing in November, during which Zillow and Compass’s top brass were grilled about their respective policies and internal communications regarding those policies.
The judge presiding over the case is expected to make a decision about the injunction at the top of the year.
CoStar comes after Zillow with copyright infringement claims
A month after Compass filed an antitrust complaint against Zillow, CoStar came with a lawsuit of its own, focusing on 46,000 CoStar-copywritten images displayed on Zillow Rentals listings.
“Zillow’s theft of tens of thousands of CoStar Group’s copyrighted photographs is nothing short of outrageous,” CoStar CEO Andy Florance said in July. “Zillow is profiting from decades of CoStar Group work and the billions of dollars we have invested.”
In court documents, CoStar said there isn’t a multiple listing service (MLS) for rental listings where information and images can be easily distributed to multiple sites. As a result, the company said, multiple competitors have relied on CoStar — which owns Apartments.com — to gain access to listing photos for multifamily and single-family listings.
CoStar claimed Zillow Rentals has used CoStar-copyrighted images to attract new customers and advertisers by building webpages for properties not actively listed, and then selling advertising packages for those listings.
Zillow began removing the images in question in September, but avoided admitting fault, saying that the “photos are provided by Zillow’s customers, who grant Zillow a license to the photos and warrant that they have all rights to do so.”
The lawsuit is still working its way through the courts, with Zillow and CoStar agreeing in December to move the venue from New York to Washington state.
Move and CoStar’s year-long legal battle ends
Realtor.com and CoStar became quick enemies in 2024, as the latter company boasted traffic statistics that allegedly proved it had knocked Realtor.com out of the No. 2 spot in the portal war.
The companies’ rivalry played out in interviews, earnings calls and complaints to the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division.
However, their tiff escalated in July 2024 when Move sued CoStar and former Realtor.com News & Insights editor James Kaminsky, who accessed more than 40 Realtor.com files after being laid off from the company that January.
Eventually, in early 2025, Move announced it had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it reached a settlement with Kaminsky.
Although the lawsuit is over, CoStar and Realtor.com have continued to trade subtle barbs.
Federal Trade Commission calls foul on $100M Zillow-Redfin rental syndication deal
This year wasn’t easy for Zillow, which faced a federal regulator’s attempt to topple its headline-making rental syndication deal with Redfin.
The deal allows Zillow to host all of Redfin’s rental listings for buildings with more than 25 units. It also includes Zillow paying Redfin an unspecified amount for leads, and has an initial five-year term with up to four years of automatic renewals.
The FTC sued Zillow and Redfin in September, saying the deal violates the Sherman and Clayton Acts, and severely restricts competition within the Internet Listing Services (ILS) advertising market, which was dominated by only three companies — Zillow, Redfin and Apartments.com.
The FTC argued that Zillow essentially paid Redfin to stop competing in rentals, and that move negatively impacts the property management companies (PMCs) that rely on these portals to advertise their listings.
Both portals defended the agreement, saying that the sunsetting of Redfin’s rental sales team allowed Redfin to redirect those funds to improving the rental search experience for millions of consumers.
Zillow is sued — again
While batting off complaints from competitors and regulators, Zillow saw another lawsuit added to its list — this time from consumers.
A Washington homebuyer filed a class-action lawsuit in September, claiming that Zillow has been deceiving homebuyers and inflating their costs through the Premier Agent Flex program.
The complaint said homebuyers don’t realize they’re being put into a lead funnel when they click “Contact Agent” on Zillow listings, and may not realize they can hire a different buyer’s agent than the one they were connected to.
The complaint alleged that Zillow’s Flex program violated the Washington Consumer Protection Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). It was updated in November to include a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) count to account for brokerages’ participation in Zillow’s alleged scheme to inflate consumer costs.
Zillow has made little comment about the case, outside of saying the lawsuit “fundamentally misrepresents how Zillow operates and the value we’ve delivered to buyers, sellers and real estate professionals,” and noting it will “vigorously defend [itself] against these claims.”
Zillow’s mortgage segment comes under fire
In November, an Alaska homebuyer filed a class-action lawsuit against Zillow, alleging that the portal giant’s home-loan metric for Premier Agent program members violates the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) and the Washington Consumer Protection Act.
The complaint said Zillow rolled out Zillow Home Loans pre-approval quotas for Premier Agent members in 2022, with those quotas being directly tied to the quality and volume of leads. However, the complaint said, homebuyers aren’t aware of the pre-approval quota and don’t realize they can choose a different lender.
“Agents who meet ZHL pre-approval quotas receive better leads and placement, while those who fail to do so face reduced volume or removal from the program — a textbook quid pro quo that turns Zillow’s referral network into a mortgage funnel in which Zillow controls the flow of valuable buyer leads,” the complaint said.
Zillow has yet to comment on the lawsuit, which was consolidated into the September class-action lawsuit on Tuesday.
Google makes a portal play
The year had one more trick up its sleeve, with a HouseCanary ad pilot sparking questions about whether Google was plotting an entry into the portal realm.
On Dec. 12, industry strategist Mike DelPrete noticed data and analytics firm HouseCanary had quietly launched a Google ad pilot, which prominently displays listings from its search site, ComeHome. The ads at the top of search results for real estate in several key markets, including Chicago, Denver and Austin, and invited homebuyers to schedule a home tour with a top-rated real estate agent selected by Google.
The platform transfers the homebuyers’ information to the agent, with an expected response time of 15 minutes or less. The feature is only available on mobile.
Some experts said the partnership will likely have little effect on the existing in the short term. However, Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng painted a more dire picture, saying Google’s move could encroach on Zillow’s Premier Agent offering.
Although analysts said it will “take years” for Google to compete as a portal — if that’s the company’s wish — industry leaders are already preparing for a competitive shift.
“As Google’s experiment suggests, the next era of real estate won’t be won by whoever displays homes best,” Inman contributor Molly McKinley said on Dec. 19. “It will be won by whoever understands buyer intent most deeply.”
Email Marian McPherson
Topics: Compass | CoStar | Homes.com | Move, Inc. | portal wars | Realtor.com | Zillow Show Comments Hide Comments Sign up for Inman’s Morning Headlines What you need to know to start your day with all the latest industry developments Sign me up By submitting your email address, you agree to receive marketing emails from Inman. Success! Thank you for subscribing to Morning Headlines. Read Next
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