Tuesday. 9:03 a.m. A realtor refreshes her dashboard. Clicks are down 42%. The phone is silent.
Her portal's homepage still looks the same โ gaudy carousel, auto-playing drone video over rooftops.Google's new algorithm just shoved it to page three.She blames the market. The market blames her. The assassin is in the server logs.
147
Median Requests
4.8MB
Average Load
0.28
CLS Score
-40%
Traffic Loss
Google's Silent Guillotine
Legacy real-estate portals have survived for years because Google let them. The search giant tolerated 150-MB pages and five-second load times like a landlord who doesn't care as long as rent arrives. But Chrome 128 changes the rent.
This August, Core Web Vitals penalties become fully algorithmic. Fail Largest Contentful Paint or Cumulative Layout Shift and you're gone. No warning. No appeal. Organic traffic vanishes. AdSense revenue collapses. Valuations sink to salvage. [Source]
The Bloated Corpse in the Room
Median MLS page: 147 requests, 4.8 MB load, CLS 0.28.
Penalty: minus 40% organic visibility, minus 100% AdSense RPM. [Data Annex]
Zillow's $1 Billion Autopsy, Revisited
Zillow's iBuying collapse proved algorithms can't price homes. Now their website is next under the scalpel. First load: 163 MB. CLS: 0.32. Same disease, different organ.
Agent Stockholm Syndrome
Realtors pay portals $12B/year for "exposure" yet own zero of the tech stack. When the traffic cliff arrives, agents will still pay โ until they can't. The parasite dies with the host.
The $36.2T Irony
Real estate is the largest asset class on Earth, yet its digital front doors are held together by WordPress plugins from 2014.
Pre-Buttal: The Myths Die First
Myth: "We'll hire a dev team."
Reality: Ninety percent of portals run on proprietary RETS feeds bolted to legacy PHP. Rebuild = 18 months, $2M. Deadline = 4 months.
Myth: "Google won't hurt big brands."
Reality: eBay lost one-third of its search visibility in the 2021 CWV update. Size is irrelevant; speed is king.
The Armor Stack Play
Astro/Svelte islands โ 98 kB initial load.
WCAG 2.2 AAA + JSON-LD schema baked in.
Cloudflare Edge deploy โ global LCP under 1.2 s.
Monetization:
- White-label SaaS: $149/month/agent โ zero CAC when sold as survival.
- Distressed M&A: buy portals at 0.8ร AdSense run-rate, flip at 4ร.
Market Size: 600+ MLSs, 1,400 regional portals. 40% traffic loss = $1.8B in ad spend looking for a new home. [Data Annex]
The Market Sees the Blood
Here's the irony: this isn't a "future trend." It's a scheduled event. Founders can acquire failing portals for cents on the dollar. Investors can ride the migration wave. Agents can stop paying for billboards on sinking ships.
Kicker
To realtors: stop paying for billboards on sinking ships.
To founders: build lifeboats, then charge first-class fares.
To readers: open Lighthouse, test your favorite portal, set a reminder for August 1st. The demolition isn't coming. It's scheduled. [Live Dashboard]