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While both Zillow and Compass have yet to announce their second quarter 2025 earnings results, both companies were the subject of conversation on a Q2 2025 earnings call Tuesday evening.
During a call with investors and analysts, CoStar Group CEO Andy Florance discussed the current battle ensuing between Compass and Zillow over the latter’s listing access standards policy, which Compass claims prevents it from using its three-phased marketing plan, causing the company and its agents “irreparable harm.”
“This month, Zillow began questionably leveraging its market power by forcing agents to market listings on its platform within 24 hours of the listing being marketed or risk the listing being permanently banned. This tactic, we believe, raises serious antitrust concerns. Indeed, Compass has already filed a lawsuit against Zillow for such practices,” said Florance, who has been a vocal critic of the policy since it was first announced.
Boosting listings that Zillow bans
In addition to being an opponent of the policy, in early May, CoStar announced that it would allow any listing banned by Zillow to be ‘Boosted’ on Homes.com for free. CoStar announced the Boost feature during its Q1 2025 earnings call. So far, CoStar said it has sold over 1,200 Boosts to agents and home sellers.
“Boosted listings reach over 14,000 homebuyers with an average of 32 views per buyer making boosted listings 25% more likely to go under contract within 10 days. I can’t pass that up. Nearly 25% of Boost users have converted to full Homes.com memberships. So the Boost program is a great lead pipeline for our sales force,” Florance said.
The first property Homes.com boosted free of charge due to it being banned from Zillow was in Montgomery County, Maryland. Florance highlighted his visit to this property on his social media this past weekend.
“With a Homes.com boost, we’ve been able to serve it up to buyers 155,000 times in the first 12 days, it was on the market. 205 buyers have favored listing on Homes.com and 43 have shared it with a friend or family member,” Florance added during the call.
According to Florance, the listing complied with the rules of both the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and its local MLS, Bright MLS.
“Zillow falsely labeled the property as off-market on their website, misleading buyers,” Florance said.
Zillow may become ‘an existential threat’ to the MLSs
Florance and CoStar are claiming that due to the recent changes to NAR’s optional no-commingling rule and Clear Cooperation Policy, that Zillow is concerned that listing agents may opt to use sites like Homes.com, which do not sell leads to buyers’ agents.
“By demanding immediate listings and simultaneously offering Zillow exclusive listing, Zillow risks weakening the relative value of the MLSs. A major brokerage has informed us that Zillow now seeks direct feeds from brokers, bypassing MLSs, suggesting MLSs may soon recognize Zillow as an existential threat,” Florance said.
During the call, Florance also addressed the mailers sent directly to home sellers advertising Homes.com’s Boost product, calling the mailers a “member agent appreciation campaign,” and adding that the campaign was aimed at nearly 100,000 home sellers.
Net new bookings up for Homes.com
The early success of the Boost program was not the only good news for CoStar’s Homes.com during the quarter. Homes.com reported its best net new bookings on record in Q2 2025, adding 6,300 members, up 56% from the prior quarter. This improvement is in part due to the growth of the dedicated Homes.com sales team, which CoStar says it plans to triple from 230 representatives at the end of 2024 to roughly 750 at the end of 2025. Overall, CoStar said it plans to grow its core sales team by 20% in 2025.
Across the CoStar ecosystem, net new bookings for the quarter were up 65% over the prior quarter to $93 million. The company said this was in large part due to Apartments.com’s highest net new bookings quarter in two years.
Despite this improvement, CoStar saw its net income drop to $6.2 million, from $19.2 million a year earlier. However, CoStar’s Q2 2025 performance was better than the prior quarter, in which it recorded a $15 million net loss.
Although income was down, revenue for the company was again up, rising 15% year-over-year to $781 million, marking the 57th consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. In North America, CoStar’s residential segment generated $17.1 million in revenue during Q2 2025, up from the $16.2 million in revenue it recorded during the same quarter a year prior.
CoStar also highlighted the user traffic to the sites in its Homes.com network, which reported an average of 111 million monthly unique visitors in the quarter, according to data from Google Analytics. The Homes.com network includes the Apartments.com network and the Land Network, which generated 48 million monthly unique users and 12 million views, respectively, during Q2 2025.
