Google Listings Aren’t a Threat to Home Stocks

Housing technology companies are offering far more than just online listings—and those expanded services act as a buffer against disruptions in the residential real estate market.

A turf war over the online home listings business has been brewing for some time. Then Google entered the fray.

As part of a pilot program, the search giant began placing home listings at the top of certain Google search results. News that Google might push deeper into home listings sent shockwaves through the stocks of companies that currently dominate the space.

On December 15, after reports of Google’s test spread over the weekend on social media, Zillow Group’s market value dropped by about $1.5 billion. Shares of CoStar Group, the parent company of Homes.com, fell to their lowest level in more than three years. Neither stock has fully recovered since.

The selloff, however, appears unwarranted.

A Small Experiment, Not a Market Takeover

There is no indication that Google’s home listings feature will see a broad rollout. The test itself is limited in scope: listings have appeared only for mobile users in select cities such as San Francisco and Miami. A Google spokesperson described it to Barron’s as “a small experiment,” without specifying when it began or how long it would last.

Wall Street analysts largely agree that investors overreacted. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has previously experimented with home listings—efforts that ultimately faded away. Still, as Benchmark analyst Daniel Kurnos put it, “No one likes it when an 800-pound gorilla comes sniffing around.”

The episode reflects deeper anxieties about disruption in the housing technology sector, driven not only by Google but also by the rise of artificial intelligence. Agents told Barron’s they are already receiving increasing referrals—of mixed quality—from AI-driven chat platforms.

More disruption is coming, and companies are preparing for it.

Listings Are Only One Piece of the Business

Major housing platforms—Zillow, Rocket’s Redfin, and CoStar’s Homes.com—are no longer just house-browsing websites. Each has expanded into adjacent services that help insulate them from changes in how buyers search for homes and how agents advertise.

Realtor.com, which also operates a listings platform, is owned by Barron’s parent company, News Corp.

Among the big players, analysts say Zillow’s core business appears the most insulated from increased competition, thanks to strong organic traffic and brand recognition. According to web traffic measurement firm Semrush, Zillow is the most-viewed real estate website in the United States.

In recent years, Zillow has pivoted away from relying primarily on agent listing marketing. Instead, its main sources of growth now come from mortgage services and rental listings. The company also offers agent-focused products such as workflow management software and seller-oriented listing tools.

“The combination of the business that we’ve built is far more diversified than it was five years and 10 years ago,” Zillow Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Hofmann said at a December technology conference.

Benchmark’s Kurnos rates Zillow’s Class A stock a Buy, with a $95 price target—nearly 40% above its recent price of $68.54. “To think that Google would somehow displace the most complete end-to-end solution in the marketplace with the strongest and stickiest agent product suite seems rather far-fetched,” he wrote.

Homes.com and CoStar’s Long Game

CoStar’s Homes.com was positioned as an agent-friendly alternative to dominant listing sites, focusing on services for sellers’ agents rather than lead generation. CoStar acquired Homes.com in 2021 and announced its aggressive expansion with a Super Bowl commercial in 2024.

Usage has grown since then—but so has spending. CoStar’s marketing budget reached $1.36 billion in 2024, up from $684 million in 2022. That surge in spending has weighed on earnings, contributing to stock declines. CoStar shares are down 26% since the Friday before the 2024 Super Bowl and fell another 6% in 2025.

Homes.com remains a relatively new arm of CoStar’s broader commercial real estate business, which includes data analytics software and marketing platforms. Fears of technological disruption have only added to recent pressure on the stock.

Still, CoStar is betting heavily on innovation. According to CEO Andy Florance, 50% of Homes.com’s software development is now focused on artificial intelligence. “AI offers transformative opportunities to unlock tremendous value in real estate,” he said on an October earnings call.

Rocket, Redfin, and Vertical Integration

Rocket, one of the largest mortgage originators in the U.S., made a major move into listings with its 2025 acquisition of Redfin. By the third quarter, more than one in ten of Rocket’s retail loan closings came from customers who used both Redfin and Rocket, CEO Varun Krishna said. “We expect this to only increase,” he added.

Even if competition intensifies or demand for listings portals weakens, Rocket maintains a dominant position in mortgage origination and servicing. Its $14.2 billion all-stock acquisition of loan servicer Mr. Cooper brought an estimated one in six U.S. mortgages under the combined companies’ management.

That refinancing opportunity is one of the reasons Rocket’s stock surged 72% in 2025.

A More Competitive—but Stronger—Ecosystem

For real estate professionals, increased competition may ultimately be beneficial. Wendy Monday, a broker at Nashville-based Onward Real Estate, says she currently advertises on Zillow but is watching Google’s experiment closely.

“The more platforms there are,” she said, “the sharper their tools all have to be.”

For now, Google’s test looks less like a threat—and more like a reminder that housing technology companies have evolved well beyond simple listings.

Source: Barrons

New Megacities Lie in the Path of Devastating Floods

Cyclone Ditwah brought Sri Lanka’s most damaging flooding in 20 years.

 Humanity’s future lies in some of the most vulnerable spots on the planet.

We’ve seen that in stark relief of late. A United Nations report last month concluded that the world’s population is increasingly crowded into a group of often low-lying, middle-income megacities in Asia and Africa.

Jakarta and Dhaka dethroned Tokyo’s long-held status as the world’s biggest city, with 42 million, 37 million and 33 million people respectively.1Mexico City and Sao Paulo were overtaken by Shanghai and Cairo among the global top 10. Bangkok, Delhi, Karachi, Lagos, Luanda and Manila were some of the fastest growing among metropolises of more than 10 million.

Many of these very regions have been hit by a devastating run of floods in recent weeks. The monsoon belt from Southeast Asia to West Africa is at the same time the swath of the globe that is urbanizing fastest, and the one where catastrophic rainfall is set to increase most dramatically. Nearly 1,000 people have been killed in a wave of storms that have stretched from Sri Lanka to Vietnam, with more than 442 dead in the north of Indonesia’s Sumatra island and at least 160 fatalities in southern Thailand.

Cities of the Future

The world's fastest-growing urban areas are mostly in Asia

Such disastrous events are hardly unprecedented. Most of our earliest civilizations grew up along inundation-prone river valleys, as evidenced by the near-universality of deluge myths. In the same rural areas of Southeast Asia that have been among the worst-hit by the rains of recent weeks, homes were traditionally built on stilts under steeply-pitched roofs to allow water to run away without doing harm. Local traditions often warn against building near wild rivers prone to bursting their banks.

The sophistication of this vernacular technology is under-appreciated, but — as with the more technical modelling that’s done to mitigate flash flooding in the modern urban environment — it’s inadequate to the challenges we’ll face as our planet warms.

With each degree that the local temperature rises, the atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture goes up by about 7%. That’s an immense amount when you consider that a cyclone can easily hold half a billion tons of water. Indigenous knowledge, like modern flood maps, is grounded in a historical understanding of how rainwater behaves — but the heating of our planet is making all those old predictions irrelevant.

The risks of this are greatest in the expanding megacities. The current rural population of about 1.5 billion will barely grow before heading into permanent decline in the 2040s, according to the UN, but two-thirds of population growth between now and 2050 will be in cities. About half of the billion new urbanites will be in just seven countries, most of them in the Asian and African monsoon belts: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

Unlike rural-dwellers who can often site their settlements in more stable locations, city migrants rarely have much choice about where to live. That’s why so many shantytowns are built on land previously neglected as too risky, from the landslide-prone hillsides of Brazil’s favelas and Venezuela’s barrios to the swamps that gave rise to slums in Mumbai’s Dharavi, Bangkok’s Khlong Toei and Lagos’s Makoko.

Unequal Burden

Source: Rentschler et al., Flood exposure and poverty in 188 countries. Nat Commun 13, 3527 (2022)

Precious few of these places have the sort of wealth to handle the engineering challenges of weather-proofing their built environment. Out of 1.8 billion flood-threatened people worldwide, just 11% are in high-income countries.

Unlike famine and infectious disease, tragic urban floods are rarely the result of absolute poverty. Instead, they’re most often the outcome of development that’s failing to keep pace with the problems it brings in its wake — cities whose allure is drawing people in so fast that infrastructure is incapable of moving at the same speed. The most damaging flooding over the past week in Thailand was in Hat Yai, a bustling tourist and shopping destination close to the Malaysian border that’s home to a special economic zone and one of the country’s busiest airports. In Sri Lanka, the fast-growing capital Colombo was worst-hit.

That puts a grave responsibility on municipal and national governments. All are counting on cities as the engines of growth over coming decades, but they’ll need to work hard in the face of natural disasters that will perpetually threaten to tear apart the urban fabric. The great centers of India, straining under water shortages and choking urban pollution, show what can happen to a country when urbanization starts to fail.

Bringing fresh water and global connections with them, rivers and coastlines have long been the lifeblood of the world’s great cities. As rising seas and devastating floods now make those same places increasingly unlivable, we must confront the possibility that these life-giving attributes could be their doom as well.

Source: Bloomberg

Why many Asian megacities are miserable places

And why Shanghai and Tokyo are not

For seven decades Tokyo was considered the world’s most populous city. That was 15 years too long, according to data released last month by the UN. Until recently the organization's statisticians accepted national governments’ definitions of where their cities began and ended; their latest report accepts the reality of urban sprawl.

Cities are home to 45 per cent of the global population, with megacities continuing to grow, UN report finds

By their new measures, Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, jumps to the top of the board with 42m people, about as many as Canada. Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, with 37m, has also

pulled ahead of Tokyo, with 33m. Delhi and Shanghai, with around 30m people each, fill out the top five.

The UN’s latest figures highlight tremendous urbanisation. These days 45% of humanity lives in cities (with at least 50,000 people); another 36% inhabit towns (with at least 5,000). The data also show that much of the growth is happening in middle-income Asia. Only one of the world’s ten biggest cities lies outside that continent. And only seven of the world’s 33 “megacities” (boasting over 10m people) are in rich countries.

By 2050 Jakarta and Dhaka will between them add another 25m people, nearly as many as live in Australia. These migrations should help make people better off. “Dhaka changed my life and secured my kids’ education,” says Clinton Chakma, who found a job as a waiter after migrating from a farm in 2022.

Yet there is also a huge risk: that as Asia’s cities expand, squalor, pollution and gridlock increasingly undercut the economic boost they provide. “People move to cities to be part of the labour market,” says Alain Bertaud of New York University. But if the labour market does not work “you build a poverty trap”.

The number of “megacities” (10 million inhabitants or more) continues to grow; over half are in Asia

Jakarta, Dhaka and Delhi already rank among the world’s worst cities to live in, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Jakarta ranks 132nd out of 173 cities; Delhi is 145th. Dhaka comes third from last, with only Damascus and Libya’s Tripoli behind. If Asian countries are to break out of the middle-income trap, they must solve the problems that plague their cities. The best way of doing that is not through piecemeal projects, but by taking a hard look at the dysfunctional ways urban areas are governed. 

These migrations should help make people better off. “Dhaka changed my life and secured my kids’ education,” says Clinton Chakma, who found a job as a waiter after migrating from a farm in 2022.

Yet there is also a huge risk: that as Asia’s cities expand, squalor, pollution and gridlock increasingly undercut the economic boost they provide. “People move to cities to be part of the labour market,” says Alain Bertaud of New York University. But if the labour market does not work “you build a poverty trap”. Jakarta, Dhaka and Delhi already rank among the world’s worst cities to live in, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Jakarta ranks 132nd out of 173 cities; Delhi is 145th. Dhaka comes third from last, with only Damascus and Libya’s Tripoli behind.

If Asian countries are to break out of the middle-income trap, they must solve the problems that plague their cities. The best way of doing that is not through piecemeal projects, but by taking a hard look at the dysfunctional ways urban areas are governed. Jakarta—nobody’s idea of a lovely city—is as good a place as any to see all this on the ground.

After years of expansion it now encompasses the neighbouring cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi (see map). Yet there is far too little co-ordination among these neighbouring authorities. A settlement as populous as some countries is governed as coherently as a clowder of cats. The cost of this fragmented governance is perhaps best seen in Jakarta’s notorious traffic. It is the world’s 12th-most congested place (Dhaka ranks third and Delhi seventh). Unable to afford housing near their workplaces, many Jakartans live in far-flung suburbs. A vastly inadequate public transport system encourages them to travel by two-wheelers or in cars, which jams up the roads and causes air pollution. All this cuts productivity.

The government of Jakarta reckons traffic jams cost its economy $6bn each year. In 2019 Jakarta got its first metro line. But it stops abruptly at the city’s official administrative boundary, short of commuter neighbourhoods. There is an urgent need for co-ordination within the agglomeration, says Adhika Ajie, the head of research and innovation at Jakarta’s city government. “Otherwise it’s useless.” Good luck with that.

“Throughout my time there was very little conversation with other mayors of surrounding cities,” says a former official in the city administration. Similar problems affect megacities elsewhere in Asia. Dhaka has enveloped satellite cites with which it has little co-ordination. But it also suffers from being run by two municipal corporations, a national development authority, several ministries and dozens of different agencies which are individually responsible for things such as water, sewage and transport.

A mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation once complained that he lacked the authority to deal with 80% of the problems that affect his city, including traffic and flooding. Parts of India, now home to five “megacities”, are in the same boat. Governance in Delhi is split between municipal bodies, a state government, the national government and several bodies created to oversee matters such as housing, planning and the metro rail. The Kolkata metropolitan area (the world’s ninth-largest) contains no fewer than 423 different governing entities, according to the World Bank.

How do successful cities do it?

One model is Shanghai, which is run by the central government as a province rather than a city. It exercises strong, centralised authority over all major urban functions, from planning to transport. But China’s governance model is unique: pressure on leaders comes not from voters but from bosses in Beijing. Party leaders cannot afford to let areas of the city grow unruly. A better model is Tokyo.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) is responsible for big-ticket public services such as water, sewage and public hospitals. Beneath it sit 23 wards and a host of peripheral cities and towns. Each municipality has its own elected mayor and assembly, responsible for services such as schools, waste management and community planning.

The TMG co-ordinates between them. It is a sensible split that clearly delineates authority while also making sure that decision-making is joined up. Like the megacities of middle-income Asia, Tokyo has no single government body for the greater metropolitan area, which includes parts of the neighbouring prefectures of Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama. But the national government plays an important role in coordinating between them. And a dense metro and commuter-rail network ties the region together. Over 90% of people in the greater Tokyo area live within a 20-minute walk of a station. It helps, of course, that Tokyo is richer than other Asian megacities.

When it became a city of 20m in 1965, Japan’s GDP per person was $9,500 (at 2011 prices). When Dhaka hit that number in 2005, per person income in Bangladesh was $1,900. Yet making Jakarta, Dhaka, Delhi and other Asian megacities more liveable can start with changes to governance, not with huge investments.

Overhauling power structures is harder than splurging on big projects. But the potential pay-offs are mega.

Source: The Economist