News Corp’s Move Inc., the operator of Realtor.com, grew revenue for a seventh consecutive quarter even as the site’s unique visitor base kept shrinking, according to News Corp’s fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results, released Aug. 5. The divergence highlights a strategy of chasing higher-value leads over raw traffic as the housing market stays frozen by high mortgage rates.
Move’s revenue rose $19 million, or 13%, to $167 million in the quarter, driven primarily by higher sales of RealPRO Select, a premium product, and growth in seller, new-homes and rental-related revenue. News Corp said the shift toward higher revenue-per-lead offerings, rather than growth in visitor volume, is now the company’s deliberate strategy for the real estate portal.
Traffic down, engagement and revenue up
Average monthly unique users of Realtor.com’s web and mobile sites fell 6% year over year to 68 million in the fiscal fourth quarter, a decline News Corp attributed primarily to broader macroeconomic trends and the company’s deliberate focus on higher-quality leads over audience size.
At the same time, monthly average visits climbed to 297 million, according to Comscore data cited in the earnings release, pushing Realtor.com’s share of total visits to all U.S. real estate portals to 33% β News Corp said that gives it the industry lead in engagement as measured by visits per unique user. Lead volume rose 1% year over year even as the unique-user count declined, a sign that the smaller audience Realtor.com retains is browsing more pages and generating more leads per visitor than before.
For the parent company overall, News Corp reported fiscal fourth-quarter total revenues of $2.34 billion, up 11% year over year, with adjusted earnings per share of $0.35, up from $0.19 a year earlier β results that beat Wall Street expectations. Full-year revenue rose to roughly $9 billion, up 7%, with EBITDA margin expanding to 18% from 16.7% the prior year.
Contrast with Zillow’s volume-first strategy
The results put Move Inc.’s approach in sharper contrast with rival Zillow, which has pursued a “Housing Super App” strategy built around maximizing traffic and cross-selling mortgage, rental and agent-connection services across a larger user base. Zillow this month cut more than 500 jobs in its second and largest restructuring of 2026, even as it reported its own revenue growth, underscoring how differently the two largest real estate portals are managing a housing market where overall transaction volume remains constrained by mortgage rates near one-year highs. Zillow has also continued expanding its data partnerships, including a new MLS data license with Realtracs that includes AI use guardrails.
What it means
Move Inc.’s results describe a company betting that a smaller, more engaged and more monetizable audience is worth more to real estate agents and lenders buying leads than a larger but less committed visitor base β the opposite bet Zillow has made with its super-app push and subsequent restructuring. Both companies are managing the same frozen housing market and the same pool of home shoppers; they are simply optimizing for different metrics to get there.
Whether Move’s premium-lead strategy continues to produce double-digit revenue growth as unique users keep declining is the key question for Realtor.com’s business heading into fiscal 2027. A shrinking audience can support rising revenue for a period if the remaining visitors convert at a high enough rate, but there is a practical floor below which fewer visitors eventually means fewer leads regardless of engagement quality β a dynamic RealtyWire will continue to track as both portals report results through the rest of 2026.
