Zillow’s CEO on growing the company during a housing crisis

The Verge · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Today, I’m talking with Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman.Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software: the company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become a vertically integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate.Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.If you’ve been listening to Decoder lately, you’ve maybe already guessed why I was so eager to talk with Jeremy — a popular mobile app like that is really the front-end to a big series of databases, and the politics of who gets access to databases and how much that access should cost is newly up for grabs if you think the next era of software will be defined by AI. After all, you don’t need an app like Zillow if your AI agent can just go look at the multiple listing service, or MLS, database directly.Or maybe you do — maybe you need an app like Zillow more than ever, which is of course the case Jeremy made in this conversation. And the politics of Zillow’s database access are as complicated as it gets — the company is involved in big lawsuits over when and how houses get listed in MLS versus Zillow, and realtor groups have an uneasy relationship with the platform as a whole. Jeremy’s argument is that the future of Zillow looks a lot like an end-to-end business platform for real estate agents, and we spent a lot of time talking about whether a business as local and as relationship-driven as real estate can benefit from platform-level scale in the way he’s proposing.Yeah, there’s a lot of Decoder in this one — it’s going to surprise you, I think.Okay: Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. Here we go.This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Jeremy Wacksman, you’re the CEO of the Zillow Group. Welcome to Decoder.Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.I’m excited to be in person. I love doing these episodes in person. Thank you so much for coming to our office here in New York.We’re here for the week. Zillow’s 20th anniversary was yesterday; we’re celebrating it today. So it worked out really well to be in person. I’m excited to do it.It’s always a little looser when we’re in person, so I’m excited to do it. I’m excited for this episode. Zillow is one of those tech companies, there are platform dynamics, there’s a lot to talk about. My favorite Decoder episodes are the ones where you point out that a database is very complicated and full of political machinations and big economic regulatory disputes. And there is no more complicated database than the databases of houses that are for sale in America.I think that’s well said.And so I’m dying to just dive into that. I think most people understand Zillow is the app where you judge other people’s taste in interior design. Especially in 2026 America, it feels like its primary purpose.Entertainment on Zillow has been a growing phenomenon since I’ve been there. Absolutely.You’ve been there since 2009, I want to say?2009, 16 years.16 years. And you only just became the CEO, I think last year or year before?Yeah, about a year and a half ago. August 2024.That shift from, “Hey, we can put all the houses for sale in your area on your phone and you can just see what’s happening,” to, “Oh, we’re going to transact a lot.” At one point, I think Zillow was buying lots of houses. So now you’re the CEO and the whole market has changed. Describe the arc of Zillow briefly for people, what the app was, what the company is now, what you wanted to be as CEO.Zillow started 20 years ago today as we’re recording this. And it was founded on the principle that real estate information wasn’t available to the average buyer and seller. So our co-founders, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frank had come off of Expedia. They had built a bunch of marketplaces. They looked at real estate. They were shopping themselves and they said, “Wait, I can’t find out what homes are for sale or what houses are worth. The data is locked in a professional’s database and I have to go pay for access.” And so that was the founding inspiration: “Let’s turn on the lights. Let’s give people access to information.” The other categories on the internet by then had gone that way. You could start to get access to travel and all the other verticals, but real estate really hadn’t come to the internet circa the mid 2000s.We launched in February 2006 with the Zestimate. That was our launching product. And that was just trying to answer one question: just what are homes worth? Not a perfect answer, but an estimate of, okay, take some comps and build a machine learning model to figure out what these houses might be worth to help you be smarter when you start to shop. And Zillow grew out of that into an advertising business. The first decade plus, it was just a classic ads marketplace. It was, okay, let’s offer great products to buyers and sellers. They come and use it. They dream, but they also shop and they buy. And advertisers, professionals are going to want access to that audience. So we’ll just sell access to the audience and sell leads and sell advertising. 10, 11 years in, we had built this great brand.We were very proud that Zillow was searched more than “real estate” on Google. We have become a category term. People love the brand. The cocktail party story was always, “Wow, can you change my Zestimate?” Or, “How do you do that?” But we’re customer obsessed and we would ask customers how it was going and they’re like, “I love using Zillow.” Then what? “I cried when I bought my house.” And the data point I always remember was we surveyed the average home buyer. We do this every year now as a housing trends report and percentages and demographics and trends. And one of the things that stuck out back then was that more than half of buyers cried during the process. We’re like, “That’s not great. We’re the preeminent brand in the category. We’re helping people with the start, but the rest of it’s still broken.” So we shifted and pivoted the business to be more transaction focused.And we obviously still have ads as a part of the business model, but what we’ve been focused on for a while now is actually building the software to help the buyer, the renter, and the seller transact. Not just find the agent, but coordinate and collaborate with the agent, the software for the agent to help you buy and sell the house, the software for the agent to help you list the house, the services for you to get the loan from us, the software for you to coordinate all that together. And we measure our growth and our success now as the amount of transactions that we actually participate in with the buyer and the seller.That’s been the journey we’ve been on. We’re not done. Like you said, there’s no more complex database than the real estate one. That’s what makes building this integrated experience so hard: you have to coordinate so many things, which we can talk about. But that’s really the history of Zillow. And it’s fascinating because we’re celebrating a 20-year anniversary and the brand has come so far, but the goal of building a one-stop shop for real estate, we’re really just getting started.I want to come to measuring transactions, especially in our current real estate market where it seems like transactions are just going to stay low for a while. That initial piece of Zillow, where it’s going to just show you what houses are available, how much they transacted for. That is just a public database. This is just a thing that happens in your area and you can have access to that database. And I would say, broadly, during the early internet and particularly early mobile, the innovation was often just exposing the database to people, packaging it up, making it pretty, saying, “Here’s some information that’s available to you that certainly now on your phone.” I’m at a restaurant, in some town I’m visiting, I can just see what the houses are worth.Or you’re walking the beach and you can say, “Wow, I want to move here! What’s that house worth?”That’s a big public database that created a lot of value for Zillow, created a lot of value for Zillow’s users. Over time, it seems like Zillow wants to have its own database. And the one that’s right next to it, that’s important. Over time, as you want to take control of more of that transaction journey, you need control over many, many more amounts of data through the process. Right next to that is the real estate industry in the United States, which has the National Association of Realtors. They’ve been in some regulatory issues that I want to talk to you about, but they maintain the multiple listing service, where it’s tempting to think of that as one database, but it’s actually like hundreds of databases.Over 500.Maintained by little groups of regional realtors all doing their thing.That’s right. That’s right.What’s your relationship with that? Because that feels like the most contentious back and forth of this all.It’s a great question. From the outside, you would assume it’s contentious because we’re the innovator, we came in, we’re the technologists, but the reality is we love the MLSs. They are the marketplace. We have this real estate database, that is the MLSs and it’s available to everyone. Whenever I talk to people about our industry and they don’t work in our industry, what they are surprised to learn is that the listings that are for sale are broadly shared by every person in the real estate market to everyone else. So the listings that are on Zillow, the listings that are on realtor.com, that are on our competitor websites, we all have the same listings. There’s no differentiation of what’s for sale. And what that means is it’s an incredible public good. Buyers and sellers, big brokerages, startups, and innovators can all get access to the same information be