In Two Fast-Track SWIFT Cases, National Advertising Division Recommends CoStar Discontinue Certain Claims for Homes.com Website

New York, NY – July 9, 2024 – In two Fast-Track SWIFT challenges brought by Move, Inc., BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division recommended CoStar Group discontinue certain claims relating to the volume of traffic to CoStar’s website, Homes.com, including:

• “Homes.com just reached 156M monthly unique visitors.”
• “Homes.com now has DOUBLE Realtor.com’s traffic.”

Fast-Track SWIFT is an expedited process for single-issue advertising cases brought to the National Advertising Division (NAD).

In the first challenge, Move challenged CoStar’s monadic claims about traffic to Homes.com. NAD recommended that those claims be discontinued because the claims conveyed a message that Homes.com attracts 156 million monthly unique visitors when that figure was based on combined total traffic, calculated using Google Analytics, for 16 other CoStar websites. According to Google Analytics, Homes.com itself has 110 million monthly unique visitors.  

In the second challenge, NAD considered the accuracy of the challenged comparative claim that “Homes.com now has DOUBLE Realtor.com’s traffic.” NAD determined that this claim is not supported and recommended that it be discontinued because Homes.com’s claimed 110 million monthly visitors are not “double” the 66 million unique visitors claimed by Realtor.com. NAD declined to reach the question of whether Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, both site centric data gathering tools, could both be used together to make a single comparison of website visitors.

NAD noted that nothing in these two decisions precludes CoStar from making other truthful and non-misleading claims about the number of unique visitors to its websites collectively, or to any of its individual websites, or comparative claims about Homes.com’s traffic. 

In its advertiser statement, CoStar stated that it will comply with NAD’s recommendations. 

All BBB National Programs case decision summaries can be found in the case decision library. For the full text of NAD, NARB, and CARU decisions, subscribe to the online archive. Per NAD/NARB procedures, this release shall not be used for advertising or promotional purposes.