How does this company make money?
The main source of revenue is Premier Agent: real estate agents pay a recurring fee for the right to receive leads inside specific ZIP code territories on Zillow's platform. Zillow also earns fees each time a mortgage closes through Zillow Home Loans. Landlords and property management companies pay commissions to list rentals on Zillow Rentals, adding a third revenue stream.
What makes this company hard to replace?
A Premier Agent subscriber holds exclusive rights to leads inside specific ZIP code territories that exist only on Zillow — those territories cannot be moved to a competing platform. Consumers who save searches and set up price alerts on Zillow would lose all those personalized notifications if they switched. Borrowers who start a mortgage through Zillow Home Loans are already inside Zillow's lending process, making it disruptive to move to a different lender mid-application.
What limits this company?
Zillow cannot negotiate MLS deals in bulk. Each of the hundreds of regional boards must be approached individually, and no single board can be bypassed — county assessor records or user-submitted data alone are too incomplete and too slow to replace an active MLS feed. So how quickly Zillow can enter new markets, and how fresh its listings stay in existing ones, depends entirely on the pace of those one-by-one negotiations.
What does this company depend on?
Zillow cannot operate without MLS data feeds from regional real estate boards, which supply the listings and transaction history the entire model runs on. It also relies on Google Maps API to show property locations and neighborhoods, public records from county assessor databases, mortgage rate data from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and AWS cloud infrastructure to run the Zestimate calculations and keep the website running.
Who depends on this company?
Real estate agents who subscribe to Premier Agent depend on Zillow for a steady supply of buyer leads — without Zillow's traffic, those prospects disappear. Home sellers use Zestimate valuations to decide how to price their homes and would lose that automated benchmark if Zillow stopped. Mortgage lenders working through Zillow Home Loans depend on the referral pipeline of pre-qualified borrowers that Zillow sends their way.
How does this company scale?
The Zestimate gets more accurate as more property records and transaction history flow in, so adding data makes the product better without proportional cost. What does not get cheaper as the company grows is managing MLS relationships — each regional board requires its own ongoing negotiation and local expertise, and that work cannot be automated or handed off to a single team.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, mortgages become more expensive, fewer people buy homes, and agent demand for leads falls — which directly cuts Premier Agent revenue. The NAR antitrust settlement is reshaping how MLS boards share data and disclose commissions nationwide, which could tighten Zillow's access to the feeds it depends on. State privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act restrict how Zillow can store and use property owner information.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
The NAR antitrust settlement is changing data-access and commission-disclosure rules across regional MLS boards at the same time. If individual boards respond by delaying their feeds, reducing how far back transaction history goes, or tightening sharing terms, the Zestimate becomes less accurate. If the Zestimate becomes less accurate, fewer consumers use Zillow. If fewer consumers use Zillow, Premier Agent ZIP-code subscriptions lose their value and agents stop paying for them.
CompanyGraph