HW Media Leans Into User Revenue as Ad Sales Turn Higher

By: Christiana Sciaudone

The housing market has been a rollercoaster since March 2020 when money was cheap and our enforced home imprisonment led us to seek out more space.

New and existing home sales in the U.S. peaked late that year. Since then, prices and interest rates have shot up, inventory has remained limited and buyers are waiting on cheaper financing to materialize. 

HW Media, which covers the housing market, has nonetheless not skipped a beat, even with a bumpy 2023. The company has continued to invest in content and product—data reports and lead gen through its research arm, subscriptions and events, primarily—to increase user revenue, which keeps growing as advertising proves to be more uncertain. Chief Executive Officer Clayton Collins told AMO:

While the market has been through a dramatic roller coaster in the last two years, for everyone in mortgage and real estate, including mortgage and real estate media, we’ve kept our foot on the gas just enough to keep building through what’s been a extremely volatile market. Our ability to build out these diversified user revenue categories is one of the best decisions we’ve ever made, but also probably one of the most important factors that’s enabled our business to continue.

Much of the behind the scenes work is being revealed now, including new offerings and pricing. “There’s work that’s gotten done in the background while a lot of folks in the industry have been in freeze mode, just not doing anything,” Collins said. “The optimism that we have, and the optimism we’re seeing from clients is a result of the market, but also a result of the work we’ve been doing to prepare this business to really serve our users and advertisers into the future.”

HW Media anticipates a thawing of the housing market in 2025, and reports “more exuberance” in advertising for the year with pent-up demand for housing combined with lower rates driving optimism. The company is also on the lookout for acquisitions. It is generally not backed by outside private capital and plans to largely self-fund, limiting the pace of growth and profit. 

“We fund growth, we fund operations, we fund payroll off a profit,” Collins said. “That’s the right way to run a media business. At times, we can run a lot faster if we took a different funding strategy, but I like the way we do it.” 

HW Media, which has a team of 55 now, wants to enter into new verticals—its current strength is in single-family homes—and has had a knack for acquiring small- and medium-sized publishers and absorbing and investing in those teams and brands. The company is ready to enter into new areas, with Collins saying that anything under a roof counts and he’s actively in talks with owners. 

“We’ve in the past four years done an average of one deal a year, and I think we can move a little faster than that,” Collins said. 

User Revenue

Collins led a private equity buyout of HousingWire in 2016 with his own firm and developed it into a multi-brand housing-related b2b media company with events, research and more. Revenue will come in under $20 million this year, and surpass it next year, which includes an expected and as of yet unknown acquisition. 

User revenue just surpassed the 50% mark, taking over from advertising and marketing, and Collins expects more sales to come from users over time, though he would like a balance between the two sources. 

“The user revenue category has been a way more predictable grower, where marketing services is a little bit harder to model to perfection,” Collins said. “That 50-50 mark is where we really want to keep the business.”

Events—which have been seeing massive growth across industries—have been the highest percentage growth area for HW in recent years. The company is leaning into them, but isn’t banking on just gatherings to thrive. 

“I love events, but I do feel like the topic has gotten super buzzy right now, and if I’m an advisor, investor or CEO of a media company, I’m putting as much emphasis on diversification across multiple product and growth areas versus throwing all my chips in the event bucket events,” Collins said.

I have no aspirations of building this into an events-first business. We’re a media business that serves our audience the way our audience wants to be served, and if that’s through data, research, journalism, events, awards, recognition, programs, other software products, we are there to help our audience with what they need to be fully informed.

To bolster the data business, Collins bought Altos Research, which tracks active market real estate data across the U.S. and was part of his vision when he first bought HW Media to branch into industry and market data. They license the data to aggregators and proptech companies, investors and homebuilders. They also sell a software product to real estate agents so they can track what’s happening in their zip code. 

“Right now you have to jump between half a dozen different platforms or media outlets to parse together the full picture,” Collins said at AMO’s summit in mid-October. “We want to be the full picture for mortgage and housing professionals.”