The War on Portals, with Mike DelPrete

Hi everyone - we have reuploaded our interview with Mike as there was an audio dropout in the original episode. Sorry for this - it sounded great during recording and editing!Harvey Hancock is joined by Mike DelPrete and Simon Baker to unpack the war on portals.00:00 - intros00:52 - Mike's Madrid preview04:12 - The FTC's settlement with Zillow and Redfin07:19 - Why Rocket’s ownership of Redfin makes rentals strategically valuable09:01 - The “war on portals” and why portal pricing is under attack12:02 - Industry-wide self-inflicted wounds19:44 - Are mature portal businesses losing their entrepreneurial muscle?25:16 - Why unique inventory matters most38:24 - OutrosGet your tickets to PPW Madrid here! https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ppw-e...

Harvey Hancock is joined by Mike DelPrete and Simon Baker to unpack the war on portals.00:00 - intros00:52 - Mike's Madrid preview04:12 - The FTC's settlement with Zillow and Redfin07:19 - Why Rocket’s ownership of Redfin makes rentals strategically valuable09:01 - The “war on portals” and why portal pricing is under attack12:02 - Industry-wide self-inflicted wounds19:44 - Are mature portal businesses losing their entrepreneurial muscle?25:16 - Why unique inventory matters most38:24 - Outros

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/

Harvey speaks with Rita Goh from Property Guru about the company’s “Moving Out” micro-drama campaign, a social-first marketing experiment that went viral in Singapore, and beyond!0:00 Intros1:46 Property Guru context3:34 What is this social first marketing strategy?5:40 Moving Out in context18:04 Storyboarding and Creative22:19 Anonymous Vs Branded content26:26 Gen Z demands and activities31:07 Advice to other Marketers and other topics

Harvey joins Simon for a fast-moving news roundup covering Idealista’s planned expansion into France, Zillow’s FTC settlement over its Redfin rentals deal, and results from KE Holdings and Swiss Marketplace Group.We discuss strategy, market structure, cross-border expansion, and where portals may need to evolve beyond pure advertising to stay relevant.00:00 - Introduction and the news roundup format00:53 - Idealista’s France expansion and the market context16:28 - Zillow’s FTC settlement and the Redfin rentals deal22:34 - Czech Republic and Bezrealitky30:03 - KE Holdings Q234:54 - Swiss Marketplace Group interim report and market reaction44:41 - Wrap-up

Simon and Harvey get together for a roundup of this week's news stories, including Silver Lake's Housetrack divestment, new data on Redfin and Boneo, and a long conversation about international expansions.0:00 sponsor messages and intros1:04 Silver Lake and Hometrack12:09 Redfin and Boneo26:00 International Expansions

Simon and Harvey catch up on some financial results around the world, with some adjacent conversations including traffic, hirings, amortization, LLM traffic, legislation changes, going public, and more...0:00 Intros and PPW Europe update3:00 Rightmove HY 2026 results11:30 Scout24 H1 and Q2 202619:25 REA Group FY2026 results31:00 Idealista FY2025 results42:00 Square Yards Q1 2027

Harvey Hancock and Simon Baker break down the latest US portal results from Zillow and CoStar Group.00:00 Intros06:13 Zillow’s Q2 results and wider context09:57 Zillow layoffs and the AI efficiency question15:16 Realtor.com, Redfin, and the broader traffic trend19:32 Turning tire kickers into qualified prospects20:07 AI assistants as qualification and nurture tools23:36 CoStar Group, Homes.com, and revenue mix38:39 Depth advertising at Homes.com43:11 Final conference reminder

Ed Keith is joined by Esteve Castells — former Head of SEO at Adevinta and founder of AI search visibility platform LLM Pulse — to work through what generative search actually means for real estate marketplaces.Chapters:00:00 Intro01:53 From Adevinta's global SEO lead to founding LLM Pulse04:01 What running SEO across a portfolio that size was really like05:59 Evangelising SEO inside a business that didn't believe in it09:32 How LLM Pulse started, and what it does now11:55 Executives vs operators: who's actually taking AI search seriously13:10 Will portals lose the search phase to LLMs?16:58 The strategic case for — and against — building ChatGPT apps22:23 Real estate vs other verticals, and the unique inventory problem26:15 Domain authority is out. What replaces it?29:26 Why 96% of what an LLM sees about your niche is other brands33:54 Scraped listings, attribution, and whether to block AI crawlers37:38 Will ChatGPT pick a favoured marketplace in each country?41:54 Ed's theory: portals will lose the consideration phase45:00 What portals can actually do about disintermediationThe evangelist's job never really endsEsteve joined Schibsted Marketplaces in January 2019 into an organisation with almost nobody working on SEO full time — a business that had grown on brand and TV without needing it. The hardest part of the job, he says, was never the SEO itself. It was getting resources and getting people to care. The eBay Classifieds Group acquisition brought a stronger SEO culture with it, and the team finally had a tailwind. He now sees the same cycle starting again with AI search, except this time nobody has the playbook.The disintermediation questionThe boardroom worst case is straightforward: ChatGPT serves every house on the market by going straight to the agency, and the aggregator in the middle disappears. Esteve points out that real estate is unusually exposed here because almost nobody has unique inventory — the same listing sits on the agency site, several portals and the meta-aggregators on top of them. Generalist goods marketplaces are far better protected, because they're the canonical source and they own payment and delivery.SEO and GEO are the same ingredients, a different dishEsteve's view is that SEO is the foundation for AI search, but the actions diverge. LLM Pulse data shows 96% of what an LLM sees when answering a query in your niche is about other brands, not yours — which pushes the work off your own site and onto third-party sources and PR. He also flags the brands that quietly went invisible because an IT decision blocked ChatGPT's crawler.The attribution problem, and who ChatGPT partners withCitation CTR is under 1%, so the marketplace that sourced an answer rarely gets credit for it. Esteve's research has found ChatGPT typically favours one media partner per country — Prisa in Spain — and the open question is whether that pattern extends beyond media. If it does, he argues it may favour the number two or three player rather than the incumbent, since the big marketplaces are the most hostile to partnering with OpenAI.Guest:Esteve Castells, Founder at LLM Pulse — LinkedInPresented by:Edmund Keith — LinkedIn

In this week's news roundup, Ed, Harvey and Simon dig into Rightmove's £1.6bn class action and the "retaliation" row, Aurum PropTech's bold plan to make housing.com profitable, and a provocative question: should portals switch sides and go buyer-first?Chapters:00:00 Intro00:57 Rightmove's £1.6bn Class Action & "Retaliation" Claims12:42 Can Mature-Market Portals Keep Raising Prices?18:00 Aurum PropTech Buys housing.com from REA India27:24 Who Won the REA India Deal?29:35 Ed's 18,000 Portal Claims Database31:56 The Consideration Phase: Should Portals Go Buyer-First?48:00 And Finally: PPW Europe, MadridPresented 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/