Zillow focuses on consumers, agents to fuel future growth

It has been a messy few months for Zillow Group, including a copyright lawsuit from CoStar, a class action consumer RESPA suit, and antitrust suits from both Compass and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). While some of the listing portal giant’s competitors have said that it is a company of the past, Zillow executives are confident that their firm is well positioned to succeed for years to come. 

“Zillow is built for where the industry is going, not where it has been,” Jeremy Wacksman, the firm’s CEO, told investors and analysts during his firm’s third-quarter earnings call Thursday evening. “We’ve moved beyond home search and become a diversified, transaction-focused platform that integrates the disparate steps of the housing journey, connecting with an agent, touring, exploring financing options, and more, and equips agents to successfully guide consumers through it.”

Much of Zillow’s confidence comes from its belief that it has earned its past success by being a “consumer-focused, product-led company,” which is a strategy executives plan to continue relying on in the future. 

“We are delivering the seamless digital end-to-end experience that consumers and, increasingly, the real estate industry expect and depend on, and we deliver innovation quickly across our ecosystem and that crosses the customer journey,” Wacksman said.

Focusing on the future

While Zillow’s critics may believe its extinction is imminent, Zillow executives point to the firm’s recently announced app integration with ChatGPT.

“We take the strength of our brand and audience seriously, always looking for ways to meet consumer needs in an ever-evolving and competitive landscape,” Wacksman said. 

Wacksman called the ChatGPT app integration “another new doorway directly into our ecosystem,” and compared it to Zillow being one of the first companies to build an application for mobile devices.

“Being early matters and as we learned then, first mover advantage pays off when technology transforms how people use the internet,” Wacksman said. “We are still in the very early innings of how AI will transform consumer experiences, but we strongly believe that the critical differentiators between those that succeed and those that get left behind in our category will be user experience, quality of audience, unique insights and providing integrated transaction services instead of just top of funnel lead generation.” 

Strong Q3 results

It is perhaps easy for Zillow executives to be optimistic about the future as their firm produced strong financial results in Q3 2025. For the quarter, Zillow recorded $676 million in revenue, up 16% year-over-year, and a net income of $10 million, up from a $20 million net loss a year ago. All three major segments of the company’s business reported revenue growth during the quarter, with residential revenue rising 7% annually to $435 million, mortgage revenue growing by 36% to $53 million and rentals revenue gaining a 41% annual boost to $174 million. 

Mortgage strategy growth

According to Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Hoffman, Zillow’s mortgage strategy is “making it easier for more buyers to choose financing through Zillow Home Loans,” which he says is the main driver of the mortgage revenue growth. During the quarter, ZHL purchase loan origination volume rose 57% annually to $1.3 billion, but this growth has not come without scrutiny and allegations of potential RESPA violations. 

When it comes to Zillow’s rentals operation, which is currently under scrutiny from the FTC and five states’ attorneys general over its multifamily listing syndication deal with Redfin, executives attributed the revenue growth to the number of multifamily properties being listed on Zillow nearly doubling over the past two years to 69,000 properties.

“There is still room to expand, with an estimated 140,000 total multifamily properties across the country. Multifamily is a key growth driver, and we’re expanding both our property count and wallet share as more large property managers choose to upgrade to more comprehensive advertising packages with us,” Wacksman said. 

When asked how the lawsuits will impact Zillow’s rentals operation in 2026 during the Q&A portion of the call, executives said they expect things to be business as usual and stressed their belief in their ability to continue scaling this side of the business.

“We’ve been syndicating multifamily property listings to Redfin for about six months now and we are seeing the benefits to both consumers and property managers,” Wacksman said. “Consumers can see more listings on all of our sites and Redfin users now have access to three times the number of rental properties they had when Redfin was trying to acquire those on their own, and as a result of the agreement property managers are seeing increased ROI. It is obviously pro consumer

Executives also briefly touched on Compass’s acquisition of Anywhere, telling investors and analysts that they don’t see “any concerns to [their] business.”

“We do see maybe more noise around hidden listings and the potential to push more hidden listings onto sellers and to harm consumers,” Wacksman said. “For us, our listing standards help ensure that agents do right by their sellers, and if they’re going to market a listing, that they make that listing broadly available to all buyers. We continue to see the vast majority of the industry align with those standards.” 

Wacksman said the company expects this behavior to continue as “agents are trying to do right by their sellers.” 

Looking ahead, Zillow executives said the key to the company’s future success will be to ignore the noise and focus on the firm’s core goal. 

“Behind our strong financial performance is a clear mission of helping millions of people get a home and supporting the professionals who make that possible,” Wacksman said. “As a beloved consumer brand and a trusted partner platform, we’re proud of the work we’re doing to make the housing journey simple, more transparent and more integrated.”