The short answers

Three questions that come up constantly, answered plainly before the detail:

  • Does Zillow own Realtor.com? No. They are direct competitors with no common owner.
  • Does NAR own Realtor.com? No. NAR licenses the trademark and the URL; a News Corp business operates the site.
  • Who owns Homes.com? CoStar Group, which acquired it in 2021.

Here is the ownership in one view:

  • Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy → Zillow Group, Inc., an independent publicly traded company. Its portfolio also includes Follow Up Boss, ShowingTime, and dotloop.
  • Realtor.com → operated by Move, Inc., part of News Corp — the same parent as The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, HarperCollins, and realestate.com.au.
  • Homes.com → CoStar Group, Inc., the commercial-real-estate data company behind LoopNet and Apartments.com.

Three companies, three strategies, three different answers to what happens to the lead on your listing — which is the part that actually affects you.

The Realtor.com and NAR relationship, which confuses everyone

This is the one agents get wrong most often, and understandably: the site is named after the trademark their dues pay for.

The precise relationship is stated in News Corp's annual report to the SEC:

"Move is a leading provider of digital real estate services in the U.S. Move primarily operates Realtor.com®, a premier real estate information, advertising and services platform, under a perpetual agreement and trademark license with the National Association of Realtors® (“NAR”)."

Unpacked: NAR owns the REALTOR® trademark and the realtor.com URL. Move licenses them. Move — a News Corp business — builds the product, sells the advertising, sets the strategy, and keeps the revenue. NAR is the landlord of a name, not the operator of a website.

Which is why "but it's the Realtors' own site" is not a reason to expect it to behave differently from a commercial portal. It is a commercial portal with a licensed name, run by a media company answerable to its shareholders.

Do they have the same listings?

Mostly the same, from mostly the same place, but not identical — and the differences are in places that matter.

Realtor.com makes the strongest claim, and again it is in the SEC filing rather than marketing copy: its sites and apps "display nearly 100% of all Multiple Listing Services ('MLS')-listed, for-sale and rental properties in the U.S., which are primarily sourced directly from relationships with MLSs across the country." The filing adds a freshness figure: approximately 94% of its for-sale listings are updated at least every 10 minutes, with the rest at least daily. Direct MLS relationships are the reason it can say that.

Homes.com describes listing feeds covering more than 90% of all MLS subscribers in the United States — broad, and stated in terms of subscribers rather than listings, which is a slightly different measure.

Zillow aggregates from MLSs and brokerages and adds substantial non-MLS inventory — rentals at scale, new construction from builders, for-sale-by-owner listings, and its own off-market estimates. Zillow Group reported its portfolio drawing a monthly high of 259 million unique users and roughly 9.6 billion visits in 2025, so it is the largest audience by a wide margin whatever the listing overlap.

So the practical answer: for MLS-listed homes for sale, expect heavy overlap. Where they diverge is at the edges — how fast an update propagates, whether a given MLS has a direct feed or a syndicated one, and how much non-MLS inventory sits alongside. If a listing appears on one and not another, the usual cause is a feed arrangement or a delay, not a conspiracy.

Where Homes.com gets its information, and why its model differs

Homes.com is the newest of the three in its current form, and the most different in intent.

CoStar Group acquired it in 2021 for $156 million and rebuilt it, then spent heavily on advertising to establish it. The listing data comes from MLS feeds — CoStar states coverage of more than 90% of U.S. MLS subscribers — supplemented by CoStar's own research operation, which is the company's actual core competence from two decades in commercial real estate data.

The strategic difference is the lead model, which CoStar markets as "Your Listing, Your Lead": on a home for sale, only the listing agent is shown, and inquiries on that listing go to that agent. There is no buyer's agent advertising alongside your listing.

That is a genuine product difference rather than positioning, and it is aimed squarely at the complaint agents have made about the other two for a decade — that a portal takes the listing you won and sells the resulting buyer inquiries to your competitors. Whether Homes.com's audience is large enough for that to matter to your business is the separate and more important question.

What the ownership actually means for you

The trivia is only worth knowing because it predicts behavior.

Each portal monetizes your listing differently, and that is the real distinction:

  • Zillow sells buyer-agent advertising against listings — you can pay for share of voice in ZIP codes, which is what Premier Agent pricing is.
  • Realtor.com sells agent advertising too, with a free profile tier underneath; notably, its own FAQ confirms that the lead form on a free profile isn't routed to you unless the consumer uses the Connect button.
  • Homes.com routes listing inquiries to the listing agent and monetizes through membership and area advertising instead.

None of these is charity. All three are advertising businesses whose inventory is, in part, the work you did to win the listing. Knowing which model you are standing in tells you what to expect, and there is no version where the portal's interests and yours are perfectly aligned.

Which is the argument for not depending on any of them. Claim the free profiles, keep the facts accurate, take the exposure — and build the pipeline you actually own alongside it. If you want that sequence in order, the DIY playbook is free and ungated.