YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Waxman

lines on the record: 77
first: 2026-03-02
most recent: 2026-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Building out the rest of this integrated transaction, right? We want to get to a place where you can open the app, the experience you had that you talked about the next time you do it, you're messaging with your agent inside the app, you're getting pre-approved in the app, you're closing the app, you're signing the app, and you feel that it's more digital. And it actually does the work the way the rest of the apps on your phone work. It does feel more like a one-stop shop.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And I think the big challenge. Collect them. And then, okay, we benefit if you convert them. And they think about Zillow's customers and they think about their other customers. And they're just like two separate worlds. And they're like, well, I really like a lot of the data I get about Zilla's customers. Like, can you help me with those insights about the database of all my other customers? And so we're now launching a software tool that doesn't just give them the thing they're used to, which is if they want to use data on Zillow, buyers and sellers, they can. If they don't have Zillow buyers and sellers, we can't help them. We're actually helping them connect the intelligence and insights from Zillow to the rest of their data, even if they're not Zillow customers. And so you could say that's Zillow providing more software and tools, but it's also us opening it up and giving them more agency to run the rest of their business the way they want.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I go back to the really unique thing about this category is, and we'll talk about transactors, buyers and sellers, not people who are just kind of using it as entertainment. You are selecting from a too limited set from what you want and having to make a set of trade-offs. So in that marketplace where supply is so constrained, the buyer actually has a tremendous amount of agency. It's more about actually making sure you hire the right professional and making sure you end up making the right decision, which you won't really, there's no A-B test for that. You won't really know until you do it and then you look back. That's actually where the agency comes from. Maybe if we're ever in a market again where there is, it is an extreme abundance market and buyer choice is not so constrained. It would feel differently. But right now, if I'm a buyer, the agency I have is, I mean, eventually I'm going to see all the homes that I possibly could buy before I make my decision.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you one sort of last big picture question that I want to ask you what's next broadly for Zillow. Whenever I talk to people who use platforms, big platforms, there is this sense that they've lost agency, right? And I think this is very true of the consumers on consumer platforms. It is extraordinarily true of creators on the consumer platforms. You ask a TikToker if they feel a tremendous amount of agency about TikTok. They do not feel that way. I think more and more consumers do not know what the algorithms are showing them. Real estate is a different business, a different market. You've said many times Zillow is small. But to many participants in this ecosystem, you're the platform and your rules are what makes things happen. And as you build more software for the agents, the way your platform is designed will shape more of how they do things. Certainly for buyers, the idea that their housing stock options are limited to what they see in Zillow feels like a constraint. How do you give everybody in this ecosystem more of a sense of agency?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is that incentive. So innovate and create the right incentives for people to use it, but it's going to get quickly commoditized. And that's part of why we're even open with all the rich media stuff. So yes, we have our own tech. We support everyone else's tech. We support a bunch of 3D interactive floor plans on Zillow because if we can just get more folks using the tech and the tools, more transactions will move offline and online. That's still the biggest shift we're working on is our business is transaction volume based. We benefit from getting more transactions flowing online and digitized. So we're going to bend towards open and we're going to bend towards platform support because we still need to get all this tech, whether it's Zillows or not, to be across more of the content.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think our broad philosophy is any innovation today is going to become commoditized in table stakes. So we want to lead with innovation and create the right incentives for the marketplace to use the innovation. Because back to you said, like the biggest challenge we're trying to get showcased more used is it's really hard to do. People have to change their workflow. Not a lot of photographers are changed on it. There is this unnecessarily I want to show all the things that showcase would show in the house. It's like, but you should, it'll sell the house faster, but it'll show this room I don't want to show or.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always the opportunity to sort of extend the standard, to build the proprietary version, to capture audience by saying you can only get this here. It sounds like showcases one of those examples. How broadly do you think about that dynamic, right? There's the public database and then there's, we're going to add to it. We're going to add our own proprietary information to this and say to every buyer, if you want the cool drone flyover, you're only going to get that in Zillow. How does that dynamic work? Because even, I don't know, you had to dispute with like matter port, right? Like there's these other providers that would love to be in your views and then there's the opportunity for you to capture that value yourself. How do you think about the balance?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All those assets are really complicated. I feel like I could do another full hour on just what. What technology we're using to create virtual tours? Let me ask you that, right? Like every sort of view of a database with its own custom extensions, and this is just, again, very reductive, very abstract”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we want to create the most fair and transparent and accurate version of a listing as best we can. We started the conversation too much to the seller. We started with the buyer. And a lot of our innovations are around, look, more transparency is good. Yes, you want to try and like hide the bad stuff. They're going to find it when they come see the house anyway. So you're just, now you're just wasting the seller's time with people walking through the house who aren't going to buy the house. So virtual touring is actually a good example of trying to giving buyers more empowerment actually helps the seller, even if it sort of is an indirect thing for the seller.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think MLSs are going to have to roll with it. I mean, we're not in the business of trying to figure out how to create the rules and the fines for licensed agents. We're not the associations, MLSs. They are grappling with this concept right now. And we for sure will have a point of view on it.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, photographer, and they'll shoot it in the best possible light, and then we'll generate a full flyover. You can like joystick around the house and see it from all angles. And we fill that in with LLM tech. That showcases things that maybe they didn't want to show. And that gives you a more realistic sense of the home. And so trying to navigate that balance of, well, maybe I didn't want to market it that way. But oh, if I showcase it this way, I'll actually drive more demand. That's one way we're really trying to drive the right incentive is we can show that when you generate a more realistic version of things, it actually provides more demand and more pull-through from buyers if you give them more realistic content, not just staged content. And we're getting to three, four, five percent of listings are now doing that. And we just started that a couple years ago. So that's a good example of tools we're bringing to bear and using AI to actually create a more realistic version, to maybe counter that incentive.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but the flip side of that is we're trying to use the AI tools to generate a more realistic version, which I think is part of the challenge of getting things like showcase going is people who Want to market the home, maybe don't want to show. So we take a good example like we take drone photography.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then they're usually entrusting a professional to go see the house while they're doing the site. So someone's putting eyes on the house. So, you do have this, you know, you're not, again, you're not buying shoes off Amazon. And they're like, well, wait, that's not what I thought I bought”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. If not, the full not every, but you definitely have the content challenges. But the reality is if you can, at the end of the day, someone's going to go tour the home before they buy it. People aren't buying, well, actually that's not true. Some people do buy houses sight unseen.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it is long tail user enter directly into Zillow's tools. And so we have to build good compliance tools. I think the nice thing is the benefit in doing it in the real estate market is probably lower because ultimately you're trying to sell the home or rent the place. And if you do it, it might drive top of funnel volume, but the incentive will quickly get squashed because you won't actually rent or sell a place.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a professional database that has some rules around it is good for this. I mean, the one of the benefits of an MLS is we are one member. There are many members and we all want to solve that problem. And so you can have compliance and rules and violations and fines. And you have licensed professionals who are endorsing and stamping that the content is accurate. So when it gets through, that's maybe a licensed professional who didn't do the right job. And so you have a way to police or manage that. So that's one way. As you talked about earlier, we're not going to just rely on the mechanisms of 500 plus.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, let me ask you the question. I think everybody thought I was going to ask when I talked about AI. It's the first question my wife asked me. It's the first one that comes up. Every platform that has user content on it, and I would count Zillow as a platform with user content, it's a little different, but it's still user content. It's not yours, is overrun with slop, like pure AI slop. And I see this in listings now. Actually, you initially saw it with over HDR photos. Then the photos you were looking at had no relationship to reality And now you're seeing virtual staging It's getting maybe one tick too aggressive. Like, it's not actually so easy to just rip out the floor. But here we are. We're just going to rip out the floor. And now your fully virtual tours. Generated 3D tours”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“80% of Zilla Stravic comes to us free and direct now. And so, yes, if that percentage went down, that's a different customer acquisition equation. And we need to be good at where the traffic's going to come from when they get into the category of transactions.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would have said it a little differently, which is maybe we care more about the transactors than the Dreamers over time, but that's already where our business is. I mean, we make money with the transactors. The dreamers and the shoppers and the browsers are efficient tomorrow's transactors. And we love filling that. And the brand stretching across both is a huge CAC advantage and a huge lifetime value customer. So that part we can talk about. But I don't think it's we would pivot to be B2B focused over B2C focused. I think it's more you would probably think about the transactors as the customer segment, as the more durable part of the customer segment.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That cycle is already quite good for you. Or they become a new source of demand, and sure, you know, maybe they want to ask the horizontal LLM a question that they're asking us right now. And then when they get into the category of actually transacting, which again is the business that we're trying to build, they're going to want to use our software workflows data and people to transact. And so it's just a different source of top of funnel. This is the age-old question. When Google came around and when mobile and apps came around, it's like, oh, you know, the top of funnel versus the transaction flow, that is why I think we get really excited about the software, the workflows, the data, and the licensed professionals that are in the category is we think building that vertical integration, as you put it, is really the most durable components of any evolution, even if the way people get to our front door might change over time. And then on the flip side, we also are going to look to innovate on those capabilities because there is the horizontal ask, a horizontal.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have and I mean, you kind of started to answer the question. It'd be easier for me to cup out and say, well, our category is different, but we do think our category is different. And then we'll get back to the business model that we think we're building that's pretty durable for any potential aggregation change, I would say, over time. Real estate is probably the most, as you started, the conversation, complex, regulated, localized, licensed category out there. So it's very hard to think about, okay, well, is there a better way to shop for shoes or is there a better way to find the restaurant I'm going to order delivery from in the next 20 minutes? I mean, every category has its challenges in how aggregation might change, but I think real estate is different for the structural reasons, also for the consumer reasons. So you're not doing something every day. You are buying a house. The average home buyer right now is once every 14 years.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have conversations with both types of administrations over the 20 years we've been here because housing, as you said, is such a kind of fascinating database. The other challenge is you asked about DOJ FTC. It is more of a local issue. A lot of times these things play out at the state regulator level or state associations and even local markets. And when we get back to macro lobbying for supply, that's a county level challenge.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about okay, let's build something that's pro transparent, pro consumer, and there's going to be places where we want to innovate. And innovation is going to be stuff that hasn't been thought about from regulatory frameworks. But if we can show our work and explain why we want to do what we want to do, we think that'll end up being a good conversation regardless of administration.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have a benefit in that we're so small in that market, right? The market, which is, well, one, we would argue a local share of transactions. But even if you want to think about a national market, a national share of transactions and we are so small, and then the components of the transactions, mortgage is one of the most regulated markets out there. And we are basis points of share relative to the large mortgage providers. And so we can grow nicely and still be very, very small. So we need to be aware, but we try and build all of our products backwards from the customer outcome and from consumer choice. It's kind of in our DNA and it's in our business. Again, as we talked about earlier, more volume is better for Zillow. Therefore, that's why we focus on transparency. So that tends to align us well with avoiding any regulatory scrutiny. I'm sure there will be a point.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably wanted to spend time trying to figure out what how she should buy, trying to figure out how to help you like the best agents are, yes, they're staging the home, but more often they're negotiators, they're consultants sometimes or therapists. They're doing the professional service client service work, but they're stuck doing all the busy work. Like the customer relationship management software we offer, you go watch and agents are spending so much of their time follow-ups responding to the text that came in, checking the item off the to-do list. This is stuff that software and workflow can and should do for them. So if we can generate more data to help take away the busy work, the back office work so they can kind of do their front office client work, that's intensely valuable to them as small business owners.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for the agent, the example you just gave, letting them focus on the atoms and not the bits is incredibly valuable. I mean, that's the other thing. If, you know, you talk to Pam, she probably won.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm just thinking about when you say we're going to build a bunch of software for the agents or we're going to originate a bunch of mortgages, the value of the agent is perfect knowledge of their locality in many ways or like being able to stage a house. Like it's in the atoms. It's not in the bits.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than you could. You have to make a set of trade offs when you're buying to say, well, the perfect house is probably never going to come up. It's like, what's available in the timeframe I have and the price right I have then? And if you did it 10 times in a row in 10 alternate universes, it would play out differently. And so when you're making a set of trade-offs, more data about how to make that trade-off is immensely valuable. So take a product that Zillow offers called Zillow Showcase, which allows AI tools to generate more of a virtual tour and generate more data to learn about whether that house is good for you before you'd have to go get in a car and waste your Saturday going to the wrong houses. That kind of data is immensely valuable because people are in search of basically almost like regret minimization when they're buying in the category. So I think it depends on the type of data, maybe in the transaction, whether it's sort of worth going after and investing in incremental data.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it depends on the type of data. So let's take two examples you kind of brought up there. So in the mortgage process, the mortgage is, for lack of a better term, a government mandated commodity. I mean, at the end of the day, a conforming loan is eventually sold to a bunch of GSEs, and so it has to fit a bunch of standards, has to be underwritten exactly the same way. So all the data collection for a mortgage is every company is collecting the same stuff. And so you're in that case maybe AI or whatever for more data collection is less interesting on a national or a local scale. But I think your question was also more about, okay, well, you're buying a house in Seattle and there's only so many houses in my price range in the neighborhoods I want to look at in Seattle. And so what's the value of going after more data? Well, in that case, it's actually more data to help the buyer get a better sense because what's unique about real estate is you are making a set of trade-offs. It's not like you go to Amazon or you're even shopping for a hotel and you actually have to pick from more supply.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buyers' agents close a handful of transactions a year. If you ask them what they want, yes, they want to help their customer save money for sure, but they want to make sure the deal doesn't get wrecked. And so what we are doing is building a capability set that we're taking to more and more agents to show them, yes, Zillow, even though we are a national brand, we have local expertise and we have loan officers everywhere that can help. And that's the number one question we have to solve is that we got the deal done for them even when the hiccup happened at the 11th hour or even when someone called on Saturday night. Like that's what their value prop test is. And then, of course, the buyer's value prop test is trust the agent, trust the loan officer, but also they want to be, they want to be efficient.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's kind of two questions there. Yes, the more important, I think, part of that is can we offer a mortgage service that your buyer's agent would want? We think the answer to that question is yes, because one, it'll be more economical. It'll be integrated into the software. If you hired Pam through Zillow. Ideally, she's using follow up boss. That's our customer relationship management software that many of the top agencies use. Your loan officer shows up in there, your pre-approval letter shows up in there. So we win her business because we are efficient, we are price competitively. But the most important thing, the reason that she recommended that person, if she's doing her job right, is she just knew that lender was going to close.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, in that case, we are more competing directly. We are an incredibly small mortgage originator. I mean, mortgage is a massive category. We are basis points of share. But the growth for Zillow is going to come from offering that more often because when a buyer comes to Zillow, they're asking two questions. They're saying, well, can I afford it? And is there anything I want to buy? In asking those two questions, they kind of realize, oh, I need a professional. And so one of those two things leads them to hire an agent. And we're trying to offer answers to those questions kind of all in one place. That gives us this tremendous customer acquisition cost advantage to offer mortgages as one of the things they could choose.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want to be able to open an app and go, okay, here's my conversations with my agent, here's my offer, here's my financing, here's my closing. I just kind of want to see it all there. That's what we're trying to build. You have to originate the mortgage yourself really to do that.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a place where we actually probably are more competing directly because now we actually originate mortgages. So that's also part of that transaction Jeremy we talked about. In the first chapter of Zillow, we were just an ads marketplace for mortgage too. And a lot of people came to Zillow and said, I need financing. And we said, great. There's a bunch of mortgage providers that will advertise to you and go work with one of them. And then all the advertising inefficiencies that you talked about happen. We now are actually in the loan origination business. And more and more are originating mortgages ourselves. And you are right. We have a customer acquisition cost advantage there because we already have the shoppers on Zillow. There's also a customer benefit there. Again, back to like ask the buyers what they want, what they don't want is not just to be marketed aggressively to. They also don't want to have to hire a bunch of different companies to do pieces of the transaction and have no idea where they all are and have 37 Gmail threads and text messages about all the pieces.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More transaction volume. We're taking more share of transactions because we're able to grow, you know, you can grow from five, six, seven on a percentage, you know, seven percent of four is still going to be a lot more than 3% of six.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a small percentage of a number that is flat allows Zillow to grow and gain share even when the market is depressed. That's kind of a short version of how we think about it internally. Despite being a brand that is so well known and 60, 70% of all homebuyers are on Zillow in any given month or quarter, our transaction share as best we can measure it. And there's ways we have more so than others is single digits, right? The number of times a buyer and seller moves from using us as a shopping and dreaming site to hiring one of our agents, using one of our loan officers, using the software to help sell and list their home, and then we participate with the agent. That's single digit. And so you're right while the housing market has contracted from the pandemic, Zillow's share has grown. And that's why our revenue and our business is able to grow in a flat housing market.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad you asked that question because that is we get asked about rates so often and the demand side, but the affordability crisis is an availability problem. And that's the problem. The US Zillow estimates is nearly 5 million homes underbuilt. We just coming out of the global financial crisis back in 2008, 2009, which many folks listening, I would think would remember, we stopped building enough houses to keep up with new household formation and we definitely stopped building affordable homes. And so we have this accumulated deficit of supply. That was a problem, that has been a problem that is now exacerbated by the mortgage rate lock you talked about. So you need more new construction to help balance the market, but you also need existing home sales to come on and folks to say, well, I will trade out of my 2% mortgage because I need to or because rates have come down or because enough time has gone by. So you need both those things, but it is a”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they may get more comfortable with a 5% mortgage. You ask them three years ago what rate would you have to see? And they say three, now three or four years go by, and there's reasons people want to move that they've been putting off, and now they might say four, or at some point they'll say five. So the pent-up demand and rates easing will eventually converge and you'll start to see folks get unstuck from their mortgage more often.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, mortgage rates. Everyone loves to talk about mortgage rates and pre-tabetic, they were really low, and now they've run up, although ironically historically they're still not nearly as high as they have been in historical times. The challenge, though, is home prices. As you said, home prices are up nearly 100% in many markets from pre-pandemic levels. And that's not sustainable and incomes aren't rising that fast. So trying to ease that supply demand imbalance in the real estate market is really the only way to get back to more normalized housing market. The way I always like to describe that is in any given year over the last three, four decades, about 6 million homes would trade on average, five and a half to six million homes. So that's, you know, 10, 12 million people are going through this part-time job process of moving. The last couple of years, it's been four million homes. So we're off two million off kind of a normalized market. And it's not really budging. And affordability is the reason.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah, we got into cellar because we talked about listings and databases, but most all marketplaces start from demand, and Zillow is mostly focused on the demand side and helping buyers. And we are absolutely in an affordability crisis in this real estate market. That's why, as you mentioned earlier, we are seeing such depressed volume of transactions is because it is so.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, no, only in as much as agent's margin is not really high, the end agents environment. We think about it as there's a lot of people in the middle of this real estate, and you go back to the real estate database, there's a lot of folks in organized real estate. Zillow is very, very focused on the buyer and seller, but we're also very focused on the individual agent at the end of the chain because those are the folks actually producing. And that is what's led us into building a bunch of software for them and building a bunch of data and workflows for them, even though they work at tens and thousands of these brokerages and across tens of thousands of these markets. We don't really think about the companies they affiliate with as much as we think about their end agents. And those folks are all basically small business entrepreneurs. They are running their own business. They aren't getting a lot of business support from the inherited entities. And so we're trying to help them run their business better. That's how we help them help buyers and sellers sell more homes and then more transactions is better for us.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we reconcile it by what's best for the seller. I mean, that's again, that is honestly if we ask 90. Of sellers, do you want to do something different? And they said that we'd go work on that. But you ask sellers, do you want to broadly market your home? Do you want to sell faster and for more money by public marketing? And they say yes. And by the way, agents do too. And I think that's part of the other nuance in this industry that folks don't quite get is a lot of these industry imaginations are between the brokers and the MLSs and the associations and NAR and all the legal work. The industry is actually run by over a million independently licensed real estate professionals who are independent contractors. And so they inherit a lot of benefits from the companies they affiliate with, but they make their own decisions. And they are a fiduciaries in many cases, and they are supposed to disclose the benefits and risks of how you go sell your good to your buyer and seller. So that's what we're trying to help support. It is not surprising that companies want to find a way to find more margin, maybe at the expense of their end, buyer and seller.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right up against you saying, actually, the ecosystem has to be maximally transparent because you're not actually doing the listings, right? Like you're not the seller's agent. And in many cases, you're not the buyer's agent in many cases. There's some amount of referral there. So they're trying to protect their cost of actually sort of managing the inventory. How do you reconcile that, right? That industry was destabilized by a legal settlement and they're trying to find a new equilibrium and you're saying, actually, we're not going to let you make changes. How do you reconcile”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I'm pushing here is I think I understand a broad dynamic in this industry, which was there was a pretty big settlement in a lawsuit about realtor fees and broker fees. And now those fees are up for negotiation. And so you can see the big agencies are actually trying to close their little markets, right? They have a lot of listings that they can just sell in between themselves. They can sort of pre-negotiate those fees. You can disagree with that reaction, but it's sort of a rational economic reaction to, okay, we're not going to negotiate broker fees the way we were. We're just going to create a little closed ecosystem.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company is not choosing which customers can get access to the stuff and making it broadly available for some but not for others, which can lead to all kinds of bad behavior. And you're not telling the seller that by doing so, you're going to get even more money, right? If you're going to forego some demand that you'll somehow increase price, that's the only thing we say. Well, hey, if you want to do that, like we don't want those listings.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only thing we take issue with is selective marketing. So, you know, there are plenty of ways for you to be private or sell your home in a private fashion today. You can never put your home in the MLS and you can sell it off market. And that happens in privacy situations or luxury situations. You can put your home in the MLS and sort of opt out of the internet because you actually don't want people traipsing around and driving around your street. You can hide the address if you have privacy concerns. Like you can take all these steps today. And then, of course, you can put your home on the MLS and it comes to all the sites. You can also list your homeless coming soon in the MLS and say, well, I'm actually not ready to sell. I have to do a whole bunch of work, but I'm going to be selling my home when the spring selling season comes. So I should start to tell people about it. So that's a version of windowing. The common theme across all those is”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People don't, you can do that, right? You can sell your home privately, you can opt your home out of the internet because you have privacy concerns. All those mechanisms exist today. And we support all those things. We're not saying you can't do that. You can window. You just can't window by only showing your home to some people and then forcing those people to go work with certain companies over other companies because the toll on all those customers is going to go up.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think you should think about real estate more as e-commerce than as premium content, right? And when you're selling a good, you want to advertise to as much demand as possible, kind of as quickly as possible. I mean, the number one thing, the reason people cry is because it's so hard to buy and sell. And it takes weeks and sometimes months to do it. And you have people traiping through your house. And you basically have to hire someone to be kind of a part-time job on your behalf to help coordinate all this stuff. So the idea that you wouldn't try and maximize price when we ask sellers, most people say, no, no, no, I want to sell my house for the most I can in as short a time as possible. So that doesn't really fit with trying to window or hold things out or take longer. And so for us, we're like, well, the goal would be to help sellers do that, to help sellers understand that if you want to maximize price, the way to do that is to broadly market your home as quickly as possible. If you don't, and there are rare cases.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the company you're talking about is Compass, which is reasonably high end real estate firm. They have a bunch of software of their own. They will happily tell you that they're a tech company You're obviously in a lawsuit with him. Every other business I can think of, there is some windowing, right, where you have your first customer, Netflix and TV is a great example of this, right? The movie comes out in theaters. Ted Serandos has to promise Congress he's going to maintain a 45-day theatrical window. He's going to buy Warner Bros. Then it goes to, I don't know, goes to HBO and then to Netflix and then to the Delta seat back. And every one of those is a different payment. And you can see windowing happens across different businesses. Why do you think windowing is inappropriate in the real estate market?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are companies in the space that want to take those listings off the internet and hide them for themselves and not put them as part of the database. And we don't think that's a good thing. And if you look at the other real estate markets in the world, that's how they work. Private databases where you have to pay for access leads to consumers having to pay more. So we think that's a bad idea. And so for us, it was easy to say, okay, well, what we can do as audience in the industry is we can say, well, we don't think you should be able to free ride and only give the internet the listings that you want and still get access to everyone else's listings. So we just, we won't let you do that on Zillow, right? If you want to do that, then that's fine. You can go operate that way, but we don't want to have that listing. And it was more of an educational tool so that people understood there was a trade-off if they did that. And ideally, in sense, what we already see, which is the majority of sellers and sellers agents, if given a choice, want”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT