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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“That policy is really about protecting transparency. So back to your earlier question, we all benefit Zillow and our competitors from these MLSs have most all available listings for free. For free for us, but for free for the agents who work and for free for the buyers and sellers to use any site”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess I'm a big believer in finding the truth, don't find the right answer. There was a famous quote that I'll get wrong that was like, you know, humans are naturally biased to want to be right. And sometimes they want to make the argument versus actually seek the truth in the data. So our version of kind of customer obsessed is we're looking for the answer from the buyer or the seller or from the agent using the software. And ideally, the data helps us make sure we don't have biases or we re-challenge assumptions. So like we push for data where we can get it and data to make decisions. That doesn't mean we wait for data. Like sometimes you have to make a gut decision, but often we want to be as data informed as we can.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, product engineering is probably the largest group. We are first and foremost technology innovators, and that's kind of where we got our start. And that's still, as we talked about earlier. Yes, the business models evolved, but building the best products and services, even if that's becoming software for the real estate agent or if that's becoming software for loan officers, that's still how we get to our end goal of more transactions. So that's still the largest investment we have. But as the businesses are growing, right. staffing more loan officers, staffing more account managers to work with agents, that is variable growth that comes as we see more share come. So those are growing as well. And those are probably on a percentage basis growing more, even if on a dollar basis that's still a smaller part of the company.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think about it as, I guess, maybe chop it into fixed and variable headcount would be one way to think about it. And, you know, fixed is largely product engineering, marketing, design, and shared services. And then variable is sales, operations, support, and things that grow with revenue. So loan officers, rental sales, loosely speaking, it's about half and half.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you've evolved, right? There's been periods of growth in Zillow, there's been periods of layoffs. One of the, I think, the most boldest attempts that will make home buying easier was Zillow would just own all the homes that did not go well. How big is Zillow now?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starting to intentionally think about okay, well, how do we fold some of that back into the functional expertise capabilities? Street easy here in New York, which I know you all know well, that was something we acquired and maintained its independence and have continued maintained its independence because there's not a lot of value and there's actually a lot more value in keeping it independent and thinking about New York because it's such a unique market. So we don't have a one size fits all, but broadly speaking, we have kind of a functional business matrix that we look at, does it make sense for the next thing we're doing?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, most of our for sale business is how we think about it. We think about for sale and rentals. So most of the buyers and sellers that are using the Zillow brand that you see and most of the agents that are talking to them and most of the loans and home loans that you're getting in our residential real estate is kind of the most mature part of, and I don't say mature in terms of market share and growth, but in terms of how long we've been at this. We also have startups, acquired businesses, smaller businesses that we intentionally run more independently for some period of time until we need to think about how to better integrate them. Rentals is a great example. We have a rentals marketplace that's now north of 20% of our company, but that was largely a startup inside of Zillow for a long time and it operated and still operates relatively independently with a GM of rentals and had a lot of its functional teams fully owned. And as it's matured and now it's going to be our next billion dollar business, that's one of our goals is we are”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll answer both those questions. The company structure pre and post my taking over CO didn't change too dramatically, mostly because the CO transition was pretty planned. So I was COO before and we really planned for succession. And so we started organizing the company back then. So the question probably is better answered as how did we set up the company at that stage. And that's largely how it's structured now. I'm sure you get this a lot. We're kind of a classic matrix. We have functional teams and functional expertise that then sits alongside business groups for our most mature businesses. So great product marketing, engineering, and design teams that are fully integrated with dedicated leaders that matrix into the business team and most of our mature businesses are run in one group. So that's most of Zillow.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just pure software design on top of databases. We're going to actually go and address the business logic that someone is having when they're looking at a listing. That seems like you would have to change the company pretty dramatically. So tell me how the company was structured before you became CO and then this is the Dakota question. How is Zilla structured now?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to come to that. But I see all these politics as upper grabs. The other reason is I wanted to set up the decoder questions here. You had a business that was, hey, there are a bunch of public or semi-public databases that we can access to. And our job, as you've described it, is to build the best product on top of those databases and to say, here's the listings, here's the best tour, here's the best photo viewer. And that is, you know, I don't mean this to sound reductive, but that is like, we're going to make a great mobile app. We're going to have the fastest photo viewer and worry about caching images where they are and all that stuff you're going to do. We're going to have the best 3D tours. The things you're describing now are we're going to do real estate transactions.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any internet brokerage based site to display that came about as the internet was coming as sites like Zillow were coming. So they reacted to that, I think in a, again, in a pro-competitive and prosumer way. It probably happened over the last 10, 15 years. I mean, the other part of the Zillow history is we didn't start that way, right? Because back then, there wasn't this sort of internet-powered set of MLS rules. They were before the internet. They hadn't thought about this. So we had to go sign up and get all these things on our own. And we did that And we built these great brands and consumer experiences. And then I think the industry kind of caught up.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't have the history perfect, but the internet broadly, I think, helped them evolve that way. There's a standard that they created that I'm sure if we go back to when Zillow was founded, it wasn't available where brokerages, the real estate industry, the MLSs could make available a feed for any internet site.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's many, many other examples of this credits to Ben Thompson, who came up with aggregation theory. Zillow is one of those aggregators. And so even in the case where there was another database of information, you're saying the real estate agents knew that the audience was unzillow. So they should put their listings on Zillow as well. At what point did you realize that you had the ability to go say to the NLS providers, hey, this is way more efficient because at some point they didn't think that was efficient. When did you realize it would be more efficient or when did they realize it'd be more efficient to connect directly?”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of feeds and relationships and changes and all the things. So on balance, the idea that the database is coordinated and broadly available is 80-90% good and there's 10, 20% friction and rules that we don't love, that we work hard to lobby and advocate and change for.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think many see it as complimentary. I think the challenge with 500 plus is there's 500 plus groups. So there's not, we can't have one conversation. There are many MLSs that are very consumer focused and most of their rules, as you put it, are pretty consumer friendly because they want to support broad membership, their interests are how can we have more members? How can we have more folks come and use our service? So there are some that are more industry focused and we would actually take issue with some of their rules and we do and we're allowed when we think they have anti-consumer rules. But I guess to answer your question on balance, the idea of not having a shared cooperative database and we go sign up and get all the listings, which by the way we did before all this. Like we did not get our listings from the MLS until six or seven years ago. We still had most all the listings on Zillow because people want to put their listings on Zillow. It was just way less efficient to get it that way. You're talking about tens and thousands.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're the only country in the world that works this way. Every other country, they are private databases. They are somewhat controlled. That creates less competition, that creates less transparency, and it actually creates a worse consumer experience. So we have grown up and the internet coming to real estate actually allowed the MLSs to build this so that it's commoditized, right? And Zillow then has to differentiate on top of that, right? We have to fiercely compete for audience and win that audience with better products on top of commodity data. Many marketplaces, yeah, you build content other people don't have and you have this lock-in benefit. We don't have that. We have to build better touring experiences. We have to build better AI powered virtual touring. We have to build better financing. We have to attract buyers and sellers to want to use our services because one click away is the same listings on another website.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I think 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. And your comment on 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 industry, they are surprised to learn is 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, right? And what that means is it's an incredible public good. Buyers and sellers, big brokerages, startups, innovators can all get access to the same information because the real estate industry has agreed to cooperate and share it.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's a big public database that created a lot of value for Zillow, create a lot of value for Zillow's users. Over time, as you want to take control of more of that transaction journey, right? 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 is there's 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. That's right. Where it's tempting to think of that as one database, but it's actually like hundreds of databases”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to come to measuring transactions, especially in our current real estate market. It seems like transactions are just going to stay low for a while, that initial piece of Zillow, we're going to just show you what houses are available, how much they transacted for. That is just a public database, right? This is just a thing that happens in your area and you can have access to that database. And I would say, broadly, 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's certainly now on your phone. You know, I'm at a restaurant some town I'm visiting. I can just see what the houses are worth.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so that's been the journey we've been on. We're not done. That's, like you said, there's no more complex database than the real estate one. That's what makes building this integrated experience so hard is 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 were really just getting started.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People love the brand, the cocktail party story was always, wow, can you change my estimate? Or, you know, how do you do that? We're customer obsessed and we would ask customers how it was going. And they're like, well, I love using Zillow. Like, okay, well, then what? Well, I cried when I bought my house. And the data point I always remember was we surveyed the average homebuyer. We do this every year now as a housing trends report and sort of percentages and demographics and trends. And one of the things that stuck out back then was more than half of buyers cried during the process. Well, that's not great. We're like, 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, right? And we obviously still have ads and 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, the seller, transact, right? 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.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2006 with this estimate. That was our launching product. And that was just trying to answer one question, right? 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, right? And the first probably 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 sold leads and sold advertising. And probably about, I don't know, 10, 11 years in, we had built this great brand, right? We were very proud that Zillow was searched more than real estate in Google. That was sort of the, you know, we have become a category term.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you're the CEO, and the whole market has changed. Describe the Ark of Zillow briefly for people, what the app was, what the company is now, what you want it to be a CEO. So 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, Richard and Lloyd Frank, they 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 were for sale or what houses are worth or you know the data is locked in a professional database and i have to go pay for access and so that was the kind of founding inspiration was 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 so we launched in february”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like its primary purpose. I mean, it's entertainment on Zillow has been a growing phenomenon really since I've been there. Absolutely. Even since 2009, I want to say? 2009, 16 years. 16 years. And you only just became the CEO, I think, last year, the year before? Yeah, about a year and a half ago, August 24. That shift from, hey, we can put all the houses for sale in your era on your phone and you can just see what's happening to, oh, we're going to transact a lot to at one point. I think Zillow was buying lots of houses.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jeremy Waxman, you're the CEO of the Zillow Group. Welcome to Dakoder. 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. Yeah, I mean, we're here for the week. Zillow's 20th anniversary yesterday. We're celebrating it today. So it worked out really well to be in person, so I'm excited to do it. Yeah, it's always a little looser when I'm in person. So excited to do it. I'm excited for this episode. Zillow is one of those, you know, it's a tech company. There's platform dynamics. There's lots to talk about. My favorite Dakota episodes are the ones where you point out that a database is very complicated and full of political machinations and like 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. So I think most people understand Zillow as the app where you judge other people's taste and interior design, especially in 2026 America.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe you need an app like Zillow more than ever, which is, of course, the case that Jerry made in this conversation. That's because the politics of Zillow's own 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 as a whole have an uneasy relationship with the platform. Jeremy's argument here is that the future of Zillow looks a lot like an end-to-end platform for those real estate agents. 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 Dakota in this one. It's going to surprise you, I think. Okay, Zillow CEO Jeremy Waxman. Here we go.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Dakota is my show about big ideas, another province. Today I'm talking with Zillow, CEO, Jeremy Waxman. 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 that into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become a vertically integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate. Now, if you've been listing to Dakota lately, you have maybe already guessed why I was so eager to talk with Jeremy. A popular mobile app like Zillow is really the front end to a big series of databases. In the politics of who gets to access 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 real estate database, which is called the MLS directly. Or maybe you do need an Apple Likezillo.”
2026-03-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT