News Roundup 04/09/26: Portal Shares Rebound, Compass vs StreetEasy & Silver Lake Sells Hometrack
In this week's news roundup, Ed, Harvey and Simon look at a portal share price recovery that's outpacing the market, the escalating Compass–StreetEasy standoff in New York, and Silver Lake's sale of Hometrack to Providence Equity Partners.Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 Portal Share Prices Bounce Back13:43 Compass vs StreetEasy: The New York Standoff23:48 Silver Lake Sells Hometrack to ProvidencePortal Share Prices Bounce BackA composite of eight listed portals — Rightmove, REA Group, Scout24, Hemnet, CoStar, Zillow, Baltic Classifieds Group and Swiss Marketplace Group — appears to have bottomed out in mid-June 2026. Off that low the composite is up roughly 18%, with the median portal rising about 12% over three months against 2–5% for the benchmarks. The rebound is uneven: Hemnet and SMG around 29%, KE Holdings 26%, REA 22%, Rightmove 20%, Scout24 20%, CoStar 13%. Portals are still around 42% below where they were a year ago, while the S&P and FTSE sit at or near record highs. Simon's read: the sell-off had less to do with portal fundamentals than with capital rotating into AI stocks and a fear that LLMs would route around portals — while the businesses themselves kept posting strong numbers.Compass vs StreetEasy: The New York StandoffStreetEasy, Zillow's New York portal, has capped how many new agents can join its Experts programme from any brokerage already holding 20% of its user base — a threshold only Compass and its subsidiaries (Anywhere, Corcoran, Sotheby's, Coldwell Banker) meet. It follows Compass's autumn 2026 marketing playbook, whose first suggestion to agents was to delist from StreetEasy. With Compass controlling an estimated 80% of Manhattan listings by one study, Simon frames this as a battle over unique listings and a genuine existential question for StreetEasy — and asks whether the tit-for-tat response is for StreetEasy to become a brokerage itself.Silver Lake Sells Hometrack to ProvidenceHometrack, the AVM business inside Silver Lake's Houseful, is being acquired by Providence Equity Partners. Harvey's original read was that this signals Silver Lake gearing up to sell Zoopla; Ed's is that a data engine is now an easier asset to sell than a consumer-facing portal. Simon — a Hometrack director twenty years ago — explains why it's so defensible: decades of UK housing data, an AVM used by 16 of the 20 largest UK lenders, and a repeat-revenue model around quarterly loan-book revaluation that took the cost of a valuation from roughly £200 to £20. He's unconvinced a portal group loses much by selling it, and explains why putting an estimate next to an agent's asking price is a problem of its own.PPW Europe runs 28–30 October — https://ppweurope.comPresented by:• Edmund Keith — https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-keith/• Harvey Hancock — https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvey-hancock/• Simon Baker — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stbaker/
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