News Roundup 05/06: CoStar Pays $800M For Zonda + Testing Realtor.com's New RealAssist AI

In this week's news roundup, Ed, Simon Baker and Harvey Hancock unpack CoStar's $800M all-cash swoop for new-homes data specialist Zonda, and share their first-hand impressions of Realtor.com's new Google-powered RealAssist AI search tool.Chapters:00:00 Intro00:52 CoStar Buys Zonda for ~$800M09:40 Realtor.com's New RealAssist AI (with Google)18:59 Can AI-Native Challengers Beat the Incumbents?30:06 Are Portals Building Search or a Decision Engine?CoStar Pays ~$800M for ZondaCoStar Group is acquiring new-home construction data specialist Zonda in an all-cash deal worth roughly $800 million — its first major acquisition since Domain in Australia and its first US deal since Matterport. The team digs into why "more data wins" fits Andy Florence's playbook, the flat market reaction, and the hard road from owning great data to delivering a stronger EBITDA margin. Unlike Matterport, Zonda is a profitable B2B business, so the question becomes which costs CoStar can strip out and which products it can layer on top.Testing Realtor.com's RealAssist AIEd and Harvey got a behind-the-scenes demo of Realtor.com's new conversational search tool, RealAssist AI — co-developed with Google and currently a whitelist-only beta. They cover what stood out: searching by affordability rather than price, "Google grounding" that pulls in third-party data, and a commute/lifestyle mapping feature. That opens a wider debate on the API costs of grounding every search in Google, whether AI-native challengers gain an edge by pricing those costs in from day one, and whether portals are really building search — or trying to own the comparison and decision phase before Claude or ChatGPT does.Presented by:• Edmund Keith — https://www.linkedin.com/in/edmund-keith/• Harvey Hancock — https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvey-hancock/• Simon Baker — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stbaker/