Real Estate: Teardown Pack
Load this pack when the target is a brokerage or agent team, a proptech company, a home builder, a property manager, or a commercial real estate firm. Growth here depends on listings and leads. Portals sit between buyers and agents, so many companies fight to own the lead before a portal does, and the agent or broker count is often the real growth engine.
Contents
- How to recognize it
- What drives growth here
- Signals to collect
- Going inside
- Rules that limit copying
- Plays that usually transfer
- Metrics to ask about
How to Recognize It
- Listing search with IDX or MLS data (
/listings,/homes-for-sale/<city>,/property/<id>), and IDX vendors (IDX Broker, iHomefinder, Showcase IDX) found byteardown.mjs stack <domain>. - Real estate CRMs and lead tools (Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, BoldTrail, Lofty, Sierra Interactive, Real Geeks).
- "What's my home worth" valuation pages, neighborhood guides, and agent directories.
- Builders: community pages, floor plans, "quick move-in" inventory, and interest lists.
- Property managers: owner and resident portals (AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi, Entrata).
teardown.mjs detect <domain>flags most of these.
What Drives Growth Here
- Agents are the growth engine for brokerages. Many brokerages grow by recruiting agents, not by generating consumer leads. Check agent count and recruiting pages before judging consumer marketing.
- Portals own search. Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, and Homes.com dominate listing searches. Independents win on local content, neighborhood pages, and long-tail searches portals don't cover well.
- Rates and inventory drive cycles. Lead volume swings with mortgage rates and listing supply. Check the macro curve before crediting a move.
- The rules of the game changed in 2024-2025. After the NAR settlement, offers of buyer-agent compensation came off the MLS and written buyer agreements are required before touring (from August 17, 2024). In March 2025 NAR kept Clear Cooperation but added delayed-marketing exempt listings, and portals set their own standards on privately marketed listings. Many recent moves (flat-fee buyer offers, private listing networks, buyer-agreement funnels) are responses to these changes.
- Seller leads are worth more than buyer leads. Valuation tools and "sell your home" offers target sellers because a listing creates many buyer leads.
- Builders and property managers market like product companies: paid social for communities, interest lists, and incentives for builders; owner acquisition and resident retention for property managers.
Signals to Collect
| Signal | Where or how | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| ★ Agent count over time | Wayback captures of the agent directory; brokerage recruiting pages | Whether growth comes from recruiting; jumps are moves in moves.csv |
| Recruiting offers | "Join us" pages, revenue share and stock plans, read in Wayback captures (teardown.mjs history <url> catches fee and cap changes) |
The agent value proposition and when it changed |
| Neighborhood and city page rollout | teardown.mjs site and sitemap-growth |
Their local SEO engine; each wave is a move |
| Listing count and freshness | Their own search pages and portal profiles, read by hand | Market share signal and how current their IDX feed is |
| ★ Valuation and seller tools | "Home value", "instant offer", and cash-offer pages | How they capture seller leads before a portal does |
| Portal presence and ad products | Agent and brokerage profiles on Zillow, Realtor.com, Homes.com | Paid portal dependence |
| Paid social and search | teardown.mjs ads and sc-ads |
Community launches, listing ads, recruiting ads |
| Video and listing content | YouTube channel, home tours, market updates | Agent-led content engines |
| Reviews | Official Places API or manual reads; portal reviews per agent | Reputation by agent and office |
| Builder community launches | Community pages and interest lists via Wayback and subdomains |
Launch timing; each community is a move |
| ★ Public filings | teardown.mjs filings <company> for public brokerages, builders, and REITs |
Agent counts, closings, orders, and marketing spend |
| Lead routing tools | teardown.mjs stack <domain> |
How leads reach agents and how fast |
| ★ Private and exclusive listing programs | "Coming soon", "private exclusive", or off-market pages, dated in Wayback | Whether they use listing control to recruit agents and win sellers; launch dates are moves |
Going Inside
- Don't request showings or valuations for homes you won't buy or sell. Agents spend real time on each request and often split fees with others. Only engage if the user has a genuine need.
- With approval and a genuine need: register on the listing search, save a search, and log every email, text, and call for 30 days. Record speed to first contact and how leads are assigned to agents.
- Without a genuine need: use public search pages, the valuation tool's first screens (stop before entering a real address that isn't the user's), and published recruiting materials.
- Never enter someone else's address or personal details into a valuation tool.
Rules That Limit Copying
- Fair Housing Act: ads can't express a preference or limit based on protected classes, and HUD and the Justice Department have applied this to ad targeting and delivery. Meta runs housing ads as a special ad category with limited targeting, and Google restricts targeting by age, gender, parental status, marital status, and ZIP code for housing ads in the US and Canada.
- MLS and IDX rules: each MLS sets display rules for listing data, attribution, and refresh. You can't copy another site's listing data.
- RESPA Section 8: restricts referral fees and kickbacks among settlement service providers. Joint marketing and marketing services agreements with lenders and title companies have drawn CFPB scrutiny. Check with counsel.
- State license rules: most states require the brokerage name and license details in ads, and regulate team names.
- Buyer agreements and compensation: since August 2024, MLS participants need a written agreement with a buyer before touring, and compensation offers can't appear on the MLS. Copying a pre-2024 buyer funnel may not work.
- Telemarketing and texting: TCPA consent rules apply to lead follow-up. The FCC's one-to-one consent rule was struck down in January 2025, but prior express written consent still applies to marketing calls and texts made with an autodialer or a prerecorded or artificial voice. Do-not-call rules and state laws add their own limits.
Plays That Usually Transfer
| Play | Run it with |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood and city page family with local data | programmatic-seo, content-strategy |
| Seller valuation tool as a lead magnet | free-tools, lead-magnets |
| Fast lead routing and follow-up sequences | revops, emails, sms |
| Agent recruiting page and offer | product-marketing, offers |
| Market update video series | video, social |
| Review program per agent | referrals |
| Local schema on listing and office pages | schema |
Metrics to Ask About
- Agent count and productivity: agents, and closings or volume per agent.
- Cost per closed transaction: spend divided by closings, by channel.
- Lead to appointment rate: share of leads that meet an agent.
- Speed to lead: minutes to first contact.
- Seller lead share: listing leads vs buyer leads.
- For builders: interest list to sales appointment, and sales per community per month.
- For property managers: doors under management, owner churn, and resident renewal rate.