Zillow

Zillow was founded by Richard Barton, Spencer Rascoff, and Lloyd Frink in 2006. Zillow is based in Seattle, Washington, and serves as a large competitor in online real estate databases nationwide. Zillow was built to make home-buying easier, allowing users to view homes online and engage in the real estate transaction process online, making finding, buying, selling, or renting a home available online with connections to local real estate professionals and Zillow's algorithmic tools.

Zillow is a brand of Zillow Group. Zillow Group's other brands and affiliates include Zillow Premier Agent, Zillow Home Loans, Zillow Closing Services, Zillow Homes, Inc., Trulia, Out East, Street Easy, HotPads, and Showing Time. Through using Zillow's services, an individual can access the other brands and affiliates of Zillow Group. Zillow is free to use for many and makes money by charging property management companies to advertise listings on the platform; offering premier agent branding on the website, including listing service search, client reviews, past sales, bio, photos, and videos; earning revenue when real estate agents advertise on the platform; and offering mortgage services.

Zillow's platform is a full-featured real estate application intended to help anyone looking to buy, rent, or sell a home. The app allows users to browse millions of homes and apartments using search filters to help them find what they are looking for. Listings on the platform can include 3D walk-throughs and publicly available tax information. Listings can be for-sale-by-owner or agent-created; rental listings from owners, apartment complexes, and property management companies; and Zillow can pull listings from Multiple Listing Service systems dependent on the area.

The quality of a listing on the application depends on the lister, but there is an expected minimum available amount of property data, such as the size of the property, the number of bedrooms, publicly available tax history (amongst other publicly available property data), and a Google maps or street view photo. The search feature allows users to filter listings by various criteria, such as square footage, property type, and number of rooms. It also allows users to filter for specific amenities, such as waterfront property, single-story homes, or properties with a specific number of parking spots. Zillow's platform offers an extensive directory of real estate agents, and users can search agents in a given area and search for a specific agent if they have one in mind. Once the user has found a preferred agent, they can contact them through Zillow's contact form.

Zillow offers a variety of mortgage tools, allowing users to find a mortgage while in the process of finding a home and keeping users on the Zillow platform. This includes a mortgage calculator to estimate payments and see which houses they could reasonably afford. It also allows users to shop mortgage rates, allowing them to sort offers by reviews, fees, rate, APR, or monthly payment, after filling out a questionnaire to allow a user to get pre-qualified. Zillow offers advice for choosing and ensuring the mortgage lender is the correct lender as well and offers access to a mortgage marketplace, which includes mortgage bankers, retail lenders, consumer direct lenders, portfolio lenders, correspondent lenders, wholesale lenders, and hard money lenders.

Zestimate is Zillow's home valuation model that offers users an estimate of a home's market value. To do this, the tool incorporates public, MLS, and user-submitted data into Zillow's proprietary formula. This can further take into account home facts, location, and market trends. The tool is not considered an actual appraisal, nor can it be used in place of an appraisal, but it can offer users an estimate or idea of what they can expect to receive on a home. Zillow also offers listing accuracy through Zestimate, giving users an idea of the potential chance for an error in price estimate.

During 2021, Zillow attempted to integrate artificial intelligence into its Zestimate feature, in what the company called Zillow Offers. Through this feature, Zillow would use the Zestimate program to find certain homes in which Zillow would offer a cash offer through the Zillow Offers program. For a home that applied, the Zestimate represented an initial cash offer from Zillow to purchase the property. In late 2021, Zillow shut down Zillow Offers after the company took a $304 million inventory write-down, which Zillow blamed on recently purchased homes at prices higher than the company believed the market would allow them to sell for. Zillow CEO Rich Barton explained that shutting down Zillow Offers was partially based on the unpredictability in forecasting home prices beyond what the company expected.

Zillow built a ChatGPT plugin, which the company announced in May 2023. The plugin was built to allow users to discover real-estate listings through a conversation with ChatGPT. The plugin can be used to buy, rent, or browse, with questions about specific property listings offering more information based on Zillow's property listing database. Users can ask ChatGPT to show them specific types of houses in a region they are interested in, and ChatGPT returns relevant information based on Zillow's database. The plugin is intended to allow users to perform a natural language search to find properties without visiting multiple websites and by integrating the user's preferred criteria into an AI-powered search.