News broke earlier this week that Remodelista and Gardenista, the home and garden design sites, have been acquired by Realtor.com. Realtor.com is approaching 60 million unique visits per month, while the two design sites tally 1.5 million. Josh Groves, publisher of Remodelista and Gardenista, chats with EAL about how Realtor’s reach will scale the design sites’ content, as well as what the trade can expect from the acquisition.
How did the acquisition come about?
We started to talk with Realtor.com last year. They were interested in having more content, more inspiration, for their readers. It seemed we could get a lot more done if we became a part of the organization. It came about very organically. We’re, of course, very interested in their 50 million-plus viewers.
How, if at all, will your editorial content change?
Remodelista and Gardenista is definitely not changing in their outlook or perspective. That’s part of the reason we’re joining Realtor.com: They like our perspective, point of view and content that they can offer to a slice of their readers.
Will you add any new sections?
We definitely will be. This just all happened in May, so we're still in the planning process, but looking to take advantage of Realtor.com’s substantial tech resources. We’re looking to add some services, such as [providing] designers and professionals ways to keep content in their own folders on site, and giving them additional ways to communicate and message with their clients. We’re looking at which design modifications would make sense. Certainly, there’ll be some changes, but none that would drastically change the look of Remodelista and Gardenista. I hope we’ll start seeing things happen in the end of this quarter, in September, October.
How will your relationship with the trade change?
One thing we’re looking forward to doing is expanding our designer directory. For the past seven to eight months, for reasons that are boring to go into, it has been hard for us to update that section. One of the things we’ll be focusing on first is enabling that to get working again. Part of that is because we want to start drawing in more design professionals.
We don’t expect our traffic to be like Realtor.com’s, but it’ll certainly expose our content to people who may not have heard about it before. Realtor is part of Move Sales, which has a number of different properties, such as Doorsteps, a rental property site. A part of what appealed to us is becoming part of this network, giving us confidence that we’d remain independent with our point of view but still be part of something which has scale and a lot of resources.
