When Andy Florance acquired Homes.com in 2021 for $156 million, he set out to build a serious residential portal using CoStar Group’s data- and content-driven playbook. The company backed the effort with hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and platform investment, including Super Bowl advertising and major sports sponsorships.

Florance positioned Homes.com as a deliberate break from the lead-selling model used by rival portals. Its “Your Listing, Your Lead” approach limits advertising to listing agents and prominently features them on every listing, whether they pay or not.

By 2025, the strategy began to show measurable progress, marked by the following developments:

• Homes.com becoming the third most popular U.S. real estate portal in Q3, drawing 28.0 million monthly average unique visitors, according to T3 Sixty analysis of Similarweb data
• Accelerating agent adoption, with more than 7,000 new subscribers added in the third quarter — the company’s strongest performance to date — bringing total subscribers above 26,000
• The introduction of Boost, a product that allows consumers and agents to pay a one-time fee to enhance a listing’s exposure

Growth, however, came at a cost. CoStar’s net investment in Homes.com reached roughly $850 million in 2025, prompting increased investor scrutiny and a strategic shift: Beginning in 2026, the company will cut Homes.com net investment by about 35%, stepping down spending by more than $100 million annually through the end of the decade. CoStar has framed the pullback as part of a longer path to profitability, projecting positive adjusted EBITDA in 2030 and revenue exceeding expenses by the end of 2029.

With a market capitalization of roughly $29 billion as of December 2025, Florance retains significant resources and flexibility. Homes.com is no longer in pure build mode, but it remains central to CoStar’s residential ambitions. That shift — from expansion to execution — keeps Florance among the most influential leaders shaping residential real estate.