USA Today Jumps Into the Real Estate Listing Portal Wars

• Lead all about it: USA Today is making a surprise play in the portal wars, turning its national reach into a real estate lead machine.

• Skyline sheik: Saudi Arabia is betting big on Madison Avenue with plans for a billion-dollar trophy tower near Central Park.

• Industrial strength: BlackRock is betting big on warehouses as it folds a $7.3B industrial real estate firm into its growing private capital empire.

Editor’s Pick

USA Today Jumps Into the Real Estate Listing Portal Wars

Newspapers were the original public real estate listing publications. Over time, dedicated listing databases started to replace classified ads. Now we see another newspaper trying to get back into real estate listings by creating its own online portal. The national news brand USA Today has launched a home search portal on its homepage, making it the latest entrant into what’s become a portal free-for-all. While it might not have the gravitas of a Zillow or the war chest of CoStar’s Homes.com, what it does have is scale: the parent company, Gannett, operates over 200 daily newspapers and hundreds more local news websites. That reach gives its new portal a strong distribution channel and positions it as a dark horse in the increasingly crowded world of online property listings.

This isn’t the first time a media company has tried to leverage eyeballs into real estate clicks. The Daily Mail famously launched Mail Property (later branded as PropertyMail) in the UK nearly two decades ago, only to eventually pull the plug. The Times of London and The Telegraph have made similar attempts over the years. U.S. outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal maintain real estate verticals, though they typically stop short of becoming true portals. The difference now is that USA Today appears to be skipping the editorial middle ground and jumping straight into lead gen.

The announcement comes at a moment of flux in the portal landscape. Zillow remains dominant, but its once-stable moat has been challenged on all sides. CoStar’s Homes.com has thrown billions into advertising and onboarding agents, while Realtor.com, backed by News Corp’s Move Inc., continues to compete for agent dollars and consumer traffic. Even non-traditional players are finding their niche—AI-powered platforms like Flyhomes and marketplaces like Landis are offering alternative user experiences that bypass traditional MLS listing cycles. What was once a relatively static portal model is now splintering into a web of competing data standards, lead-capture practices, and user funnels.

For commercial real estate professionals, the portal wars might seem like a residential drama—but they’re anything but. The consumerization of real estate search has spilled into commercial, with platforms like Crexi and LoopNet battling for mindshare while newer players explore embedded listings within content ecosystems. As national news outlets morph into listing aggregators, CRE brokers should be watching closely. The big portals have long been residentially focused, but their tech and data standards often set the tone for what tenants, investors, and property managers expect in other asset classes.

What’s most telling about USA Today’s move is how it reflects the broader monetization crisis facing media. With display ad revenue weakening and affiliate partnerships saturated, real estate offers something both tangible and lucrative. The real estate industry is willing to pay big bucks if it helps listings sell faster or for more money. The problem is that the winner usually takes it all when it comes to portals. Everyone wants the one portal that has access to ALL the listings. That is getting harder and harder as more real estate companies are delaying adding listings to a public portal until after they have been distributed internally. Zillow understands the gravity of this situation and has been battling with brokerages like Compass over the practice. An increasingly fractured listings portal ecosystem will only complicate things for consumers and will make it even harder for any of the portals to become the coveted "single source of truth."

Why Gulf Investors Are Buying Back Into New York

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is getting deeper into New York’s concrete sandbox, taking a majority stake in a pricey Midtown site alongside Related Companies. The partners plan to replace the current 17-story structure at 625 Madison Avenue with something nearly three times as tall, a shimmering 1,200-foot tower just a block from Central Park. The Public Investment Fund has already poured over $200 million into the project and is now reportedly footing most of the development bill, which could exceed a billion dollars. That’s a lot of petrodollars banking on the rebound of high-end office real estate in a city still reckoning with its post-pandemic identity.

The deal is just the latest example of a foreign capital comeback in Manhattan, particularly from the Gulf. After retreating during COVID, overseas investors are back in a big way. Commercial real estate purchases by foreign entities in NYC have jumped fivefold since 2022. The motivations range from portfolio diversification to dollar-denominated safety nets, but it’s also about prestige. And few addresses come with as much real estate swagger as a trophy tower on Madison Avenue. With interest rates still uncomfortably high for most domestic buyers, deep-pocketed sovereign funds are finding themselves at the top of the bidding pool by default.

For the PIF, this is part of a broader global shopping spree aimed at turning oil profits into real assets—fashion houses, hotels, soccer clubs, and now Manhattan skyscrapers. Their partnership with Related began quietly in 2020 and seems to be evolving into something more ambitious. Whether or not this project pencils out is almost beside the point. This kind of investment is as much about global influence as it is about IRR (or in this case, maybe NOI). And New York, with all its flaws, still holds the title of being the most sought-after American real estate for foreign investors.

BlackRock’s Quiet Real Estate Play Is a Big Signal

BlackRock is adding another trophy to its private markets shelf, acquiring net-lease real estate manager ElmTree Funds and folding it into its rapidly expanding private capital platform. The deal, which includes performance-based payouts, gives BlackRock access to a $7.3 billion portfolio of industrial properties purpose-built for creditworthy tenants like FedEx and Home Depot. It’s the second major move in as many months following BlackRock’s $12.5 billion acquisition of private credit giant Global Infrastructure Partners. The investment from the world's largest private equity firm underscores that Wall Street’ sees value in owning more of the buildings that make modern supply chains run.

Industrial real estate is becoming an increasingly important piece of private equity portfolios. While traditional real estate fundraising has cooled off, demand from institutional investors for direct, cash-flowing assets hasn’t. Managers like BlackRock are responding by vertically integrating real estate operations into their private market platforms, giving themselves more control and more stable fee revenue in an increasingly uncertain macro environment. Industrial properties, with its long leases and predictable tenants, is exactly the kind of product that pensions and sovereign funds want more of right now.

This isn’t just a real estate story—it’s a shift in asset management strategy. Firms that once saw property as a niche allocation are now treating it as core infrastructure. The line between real estate and private equity is blurring, and BlackRock is betting that future fundraising will flow not to flashy new funds, but to platforms that already own the infrastructure of our modern economy. ElmTree might not be a household name, but in the era of platform consolidation and capital scale, it’s exactly the kind of quiet powerhouse that makes sense to bolt onto a global giant.

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Propmodo Daily is written and edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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