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It's been a rough few weeks for Zillow.
The country's most popular home-search portal is fighting battles on several fronts. It's fending off a flurry of high-stakes lawsuits, including an antitrust claim from the federal government. Its attempts to stem the rising tide of "exclusive inventory" — homes marketed for sale but intentionally kept off portals like Zillow — appear to have fallen flat. And the company's chief rival in that fight, the real estate brokerage firm Compass, just announced a mammoth acquisition that could give it greater influence over the way America's homes are sold.
Zillow promises its users a near-complete view of the housing market simply by scrolling on their phones. That vision is under threat. Compass CEO Robert Reffkin is leading the charge toward a more fragmented future in which more home listings are initially stashed away in private databases, available only to buyers who work with certain agents. Reffkin says this model would give sellers more control over where and how their homes are marketed. Zillow, along with many others in the industry, argues that sharing listings widely gives buyers a fair shake and sellers the best opportunity to get top dollar.
It's tough to bet against Zillow. With more than 220 million unique visitors each month, the company has the reach, name recognition, and market cap to square up against any of the industry's giants. "It's hard to take out the king," Jack Miller, the president and CEO of T3 Sixty, a real estate management consulting firm, tells me. "Whatever the challenge of the week is for Zillow, I still think they're such a powerful player."
There's no question, though, that things are changing. Portals like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com have never been able to show you every home on the market — even in the internet age, agents have always quietly passed around some listings before launching them widely. But no company has leaned into this strategy like Compass. The firm's website is home to thousands of listings that don't appear on other sites, and its pending purchase of one of the country's largest real estate companies could dramatically expand that stockpile of "exclusive inventory." Meanwhile, other brokerage firms are erecting their own walled gardens or threatening to follow suit. Those in Zillow's camp warn that we're headed toward a world in which just a handful of large brokerages control access to real estate listings, muscling out smaller players and making it tougher for buyers to find their dream homes.
That scenario is still a long way off, says Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. But Compass's latest blockbuster deal marks yet another move in that direction.
"If 10 years from now we're looking back," DelPrete tells me, "you could easily imagine looking at this moment and saying, 'Yes, that's when it all changed.'"
The most serious of Zillow's legal threats is also the most recent. On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission sued the search giant and one of its rivals, Redfin, over a $100 million deal the pair made in February. Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies would share advertisements for multifamily rental properties (think: apartments and condos) across their respective sites and subsidiaries, including Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com. The FTC's antitrust complaint accuses the companies of turning Redfin's sites into "a copy of the listings that appear on Zillow's sites," destroying competition while driving up costs for property managers and apartment hunters. A Zillow spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the arrangement actually benefits those groups and has "expanded renters' access to multifamily listings across multiple platforms," helping property managers fill vacancies and renters find homes. A Redfin spokesperson made a similar argument, writing in a statement that the company "strongly disagrees with the FTC's allegations."
That's far from the only major lawsuit looming over Zillow. In late July, the real estate firm CoStar sued Zillow for copyright infringement and more than $1 billion in damages, claiming the search giant had cribbed some 46,000 CoStar-watermarked photos for use on its own website. Then, on Sept. 22, a pair of big-time plaintiffs' law firms — the same firms whose antitrust cases against the real estate industry resulted in a $418 million settlement and rewrote the rules around agent commissions — filed a class-action suit against Zillow. They accused the company of effectively driving up real estate costs by directing buyers to work with agents who pay Zillow as much as 40% of their commission from a deal.
It's too early to say what will become of the FTC lawsuit. As for the other two complaints, there's a chance they cost Zillow a lot of money, but they're not really surprising. CoStar, which owns rival home-search website Homes.com, maintains a long-running feud with Zillow. The company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on technology and splashy ads to boost its search offering, but has so far failed to make a real dent in Zillow's market share. CoStar's CEO, Andy Florance, has publicly backed Compass in the fight over real estate listings and, in April, memorably bashed Zillow in a mass email to real estate agents.
As for the class-action suit, the plaintiffs' firms may have sensed an opportunity to strike at Zillow in a moment of weakness. Or maybe they simply spied more meat on the bone after scoring a victory against the National Association of Realtors and the industry's largest brokerages. Zillow, for its part, has vowed to fight these claims. In an emailed statement, a company spokesperson said the complaint "fundamentally misrepresents how Zillow operates and the value we've delivered to buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals for nearly two decades." The reaction around the industry has been mostly a shoulder shrug. One contracts law professor, writing on LinkedIn, said the suit is "going nowhere fast."
The war over real estate listings, by contrast, feels far more existential for Zillow. That's why the news last week that Compass had struck a $1.6 billion deal to acquire Anywhere Real Estate — one of the biggest real estate companies in the world and the owner of household names like Century21, Corcoran, and Coldwell Banker — overshadowed the legal threats. The combined entity, including franchisees and company-owned offices, would boast around 216,000 agents in the US and account for about 24% of the national sales volume based on 2024 figures, data from T3 Sixty shows. That kind of national market share is unheard of in a traditionally fragmented industry, and would almost surely give Compass more leverage in its showdown with Zillow. The advantage would be especially pronounced in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC, where the Compass and Anywhere brands easily combine for between 30% and 50% of the market, per data from T3 Sixty. Any player of that size in a local market "can absolutely change the rules," Miller tells me.
At its core, this battle is about access to for-sale homes: who gets to see them, and where they have to go to find them. Compass's Reffkin has spent the past year promoting a "three-phased marketing strategy" that encourages agents and their clients to market homes exclusively on the brokerage's website before sharing them with the industry databases known as multiple listing services. Those databases then funnel that information to agents, brokerages, and search portals such as Zillow. Most agents share homes on the MLS pretty much as soon as they're for sale. Compass, on the other hand, offers buyers who visit its website or work with one of its agents an inside track on some of its most desirable properties. The strategy, Reffkin argues, also gives sellers the chance to test the waters and tinker with pricing before sharing their listing on sites like Zillow, which tracks price cuts and the number of days a house has been on the market — information he claims puts sellers at a disadvantage in negotiations.
Zillow has a clear interest in stamping out the three-phased model: Its search portal suddenly looks a lot less valuable to buyers if big brokerages like Compass are hoarding listings on their own websites. Zillow also claims that Compass's strategy is bad for consumers, period. In June, Zillow tried to strike back at Compass, banning listings from its site that had been advertised publicly for more than one business day — via a post on a brokerage's website, say, or a sign in a front yard — without being shared widely in the MLS. Some executives I spoke to around this time likened the so-called "Zillow Ban" to a checkmate move, forcing agents to explain to their sellers why their homes would never appear on Zillow. Compass responded by suing Zillow in federal court, claiming the company was using its monopolistic power to quash an innovative business model.
Here's the thing: Zillow's supposed crackdown doesn't appear to have done much of anything. Reffkin and Co. are still going full steam ahead on their three-phased strategy. A recent analysis of Compass data by DelPrete, the University of Colorado researcher, found that the company's volume of "exclusive inventory" has held firm despite Zillow's new policy — Compass maintains a trove of more than 8,000 listings that can't be found anywhere else, roughly in line with May levels. Meanwhile, the company is poised to expand its walled garden with the Anywhere acquisition.
In this chess game of lawsuits and buyouts, each side has plenty of moves left to make. It'll likely be at least a year before the Anywhere deal clears regulatory hurdles and the ink dries. Even then, Reffkin will face the daunting task of spreading the Compass gospel to thousands of franchisees and agents, who work as independent contractors and are free to move to another brokerage if they clash with the exclusive-inventory strategy or any other facets of Compass's business. DelPrete has for years warned that the real estate industry could devolve into its own version of the entertainment streaming wars, with behemoths racing to gobble up content for their own platforms. Stacking up exclusive "content" in real estate, however, isn't as easy as it is in Hollywood. Disney can buy up Marvel, flip a switch, and make all those superhero movies available exclusively to Disney+ subscribers. But "nobody can force a home seller to list their home as a private exclusive," says DelPrete, referring to the listings held closely in Compass's internal database. "So the best that Compass can do is package it up, add value, and sell it."
The fact remains that sellers and their agents are accustomed to listing homes in the MLS and, by extension, on Zillow. A research note from analysts at Citizens Bank following news of the Anywhere deal estimated that Zillow could lose about 1% of listings on its site in 2027 as a result, but argued the company has yet to forfeit its position as the "dominant destination for home buyers." That's the resounding sentiment I hear from people around the industry. Zillow took its lumps this summer, no doubt. But it'll take a lot more to topple the throne.
That doesn't mean that buyers and sellers can afford to tune out this battle. At the very least, buyers should take an active approach to their home search by scanning a range of websites and, if they so choose, finding an agent with the connections necessary to unearth "hidden homes" in their local market. Sellers should consult with their agents and ensure they have a solid grasp on the pros and cons of any marketing strategy. Keep in mind, too, that the home-search landscape could look much different in just a few short years — for Zillow, sure, but also for anyone cruising the internet for their next place.
"Forget the minutia, forget the numbers, forget the data. Just go up to 40,000 feet," DelPrete tells me. "The fuel behind Compass's exclusive-inventory push is still there, and it's increasing."
James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.
