Hello,
In this week’s blog post we are going to talk about Real Estate and more specifically, the top most popular Real Estate websites in the United States.
Real Estate websites are the easiest source of information when it comes to selling or buying a property. According to the National Association of Realtors®, in 2018, people most often prefer to communicate with their clients through email. Up to 92 % prefer to communicate through text messaging, and 37% through instant messaging. Here is a list of the top popular real estate sites in the United States.
Zillow
www.zillow.com
By January 2019, Zillow is the most visited site in the U.S. with around 36 million visitors. If you are buying, selling, or just checking the market this website has what you need. When listing a home on this website, you’ll receive access to a sales proceeds calculator, your home’s value according to the site, also a local news feed. Zillow offers a tool that will help you to price your home accurately. The “Zestimate” tool immediately gives buyers an estimated property value based on information included in the listing.
Truila
www.trulia.com
Truila is the second most popular site for real estate with around 23 million visits each month. It’s best for buyers, sellers, and finding an agent. This is an all-in-one real estate site that offers to its users, apartments for rent, neighborhood insights, markets, and trends to help you figure out the smallest details on your purchase. This website has its internet real estate community. Trulia Voices allows you to get advice from local agents.
Realtor
www.realtor.com
This website provides great deals for selling, buying, renting, finding agents, and also finding mortgage lenders. It is licensed by the National Association of Realtors®, so the content you find here is 100% trustworthy. It receives around 18 million unique monthly visitors.
RedFin
www.redfin.com
Redfin provides all the needed information and it also helps you to sell your home for the lowest listing fee of 1%. This package includes updating the latest listings every 5 minutes, new home updates 3 hours faster, looking through professional photos and a 3D walkthrough, premium placements on the sites, a yard sign, and open houses. If you pay 2% listing fee, they offer other features, including a custom home improvement plan.
Homes
www.homes.com
Homes.com provides real estate buyers, sellers, renters, and real estate value seekers with up-to-date real estate information, tools, and home listings across the US and Canada. You can find “how-to” section guides on their website. Homes.com has more than 5 million visitors every month.
Apartmentguide
www.apartmentguide.com
With more than 2.5 million monthly visitors, Apartment Guide provides its users with a clear and simple guide to apartment living through content-rich apartment listings in a user-friendly format.
MLS
www.mls.com
This site is a free MLS (Multiple Listing Service search) for real estate MLS listings from licensed Realtors® and other real estate professionals. Besides real estate classes and mortgage calculators, you can also find homes for sale, new homes and resale homes, new construction, acreage, lots, land, commercial property, and investment property. Keep in mind that if you do not work under a licensed broker, you may not be able to use their services.
2026 Update: Who Owns the Big Portals Now, and How Big They Are
The list above dates from 2019, and the U.S. property-portal market has consolidated since then. Several "separate" sites now belong to the same three or four groups, and audience sizes have changed a lot. These are the latest figures the companies themselves report:
| Portal (owner) | Latest reported audience | Also owns or includes |
|---|---|---|
| Zillow (Zillow Group) | 239 million average monthly unique users, Q2 2026, down 2% year over year (Zillow, Aug 2026) | Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads, Out East |
| Realtor.com (Move / News Corp) | 68 million average monthly unique users in April to June 2026, down 6% year over year, and 297 million average monthly visits according to Comscore (News Corp, Aug 2026) | Operates under license from NAR |
| Homes.com (CoStar Group) | 83 million monthly unique visitors through July 2026 for the Homes.com Network (CoStar, Aug 18, 2026) | The Apartments Network (including Apartments.com) and the Land Network |
| Redfin (Rocket Companies) | Acquired by Rocket effective July 1, 2025, for about $1.74 billion (Rocket 10-Q) | ApartmentGuide.com, Rent.com and Rentals.com, which Redfin bought in 2021 (Redfin) |
Don't rank these numbers against each other. Each company measures in its own way: Zillow counts users across all its brands and apps, Homes.com's figure comes from Google Analytics and includes its rental and land sites, and Realtor.com reports its own users alongside Comscore visits, which give it a 33% share of visits to U.S. real estate portals. The safer conclusion is that Zillow Group is the largest by a wide margin, while Realtor.com and the CoStar network compete for second place. Trulia is no longer a separate rival; it is part of Zillow.
New rules since August 2024
Since August 17, 2024, under the NAR settlement, offers of buyer-agent compensation can no longer be made on the MLS, and agents working with a buyer must have a written agreement with them before touring a home. Commission is now negotiated directly, so read that agreement before your first showing. Portals remain the starting point, but most deals still go through an agent: in NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (November 4, 2025), 88% of buyers and 91% of sellers used one, and first-time buyers fell to a record-low 21% of purchases.
How to use the portals well
- Search on two groups, not five sites. Zillow and Trulia share an owner, as do Redfin and Apartment Guide, so add Realtor.com or Homes.com as your second source.
- Treat automated estimates as a starting point. Compare a Zestimate with recent nearby sales before you price or make an offer.
- Sellers: confirm the fee in writing. Redfin's seller page now promotes its lower fee for people who both buy and sell with Redfin, so ask what applies if you only sell.
- MLS.com is not "the MLS". It is a private listing portal that says it is not affiliated with any of the over 900 local MLS systems.
As reported by the National Association of Realtors®, over 90 percent of real estate firms have websites, and the most common feature on their websites is property listings.
