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 by teardown.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

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

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.