How Zillow Makes Money—Key Financial & Business Statistics
A breakdown of Zillow's products, business model, and key business metrics.
Updated quarterly. Last updated: August 10, 2021.
Zillow Group Overview
| Industry | Real Estate Technology |
| CEO | Rich Barton |
| Year Founded | 2006 |
| IPO Date | July 11, 2011 |
| TTM Revenue | $3.9 billion |
| TTM EBITDA | $408 million |
| TTM FCF | ($408) million |
What Zillow Does
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace founded by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. Before starting Zillow, Barton and Frink founded a little travel company called Expedia.
Zillow 1.0 helped people search and discover homes for sale. It also created the much-hated, at least by realtors, Zestimate. The Zestimate made home values visible to everyone.
Now, they're kicking it up a notch with Zillow 2.0.
Zillow 2.0 helps people buy, rent, sell and finance a home all on one platform. Its mission is to make real estate transactions as simple as ordering a package from Amazon.
Zillow Group's brand portfolio:
- Zillow-Its original marketplace for buying or renting homes and apartments.
- Zillow Offers–Started in 2018. Its iBuyer program helps home sellers get a quick, all-cash offer for their homes.
- Zillow Rentals–Helps renters find an apartment for rent. Zillow also helps landlords post listings, screen applicants, draft leases, and collect payments.
- Zillow Home Loans–Helps borrowers find a mortgage or refinance their home.
- Zillow Closing Services-Its title and escrow service.
- Trulia–An early Zillow competitor. Zillow bought Trulia for $3.5 billion in 2014.
- StreetEasy–Zillow, but for the New York and New Jersey markets.
- Hotpads–Helps you find an apartment or home for rent.
- Zillow Premier Agent Program–Helps realtors connect with potential buyers.
Zillow Group's software products:
- Mortech–Helps price loans for mortgage professionals.
- Dotloop-Document software for realtors. It lets agents edit, sign, and share documents without using print, fax, or email.
- Bridge Interactive-Software for multiple listing services (MLS) and brokerage companies.
How Zillow Makes Money—Its Business Model
Zillow has three revenue-generating segments:
- Homes
- Internet, Media, & Technology (IMT)
- Mortgages
Homes
- Includes Zillow Offers (iBuying) and Zillow Closing Services.
- The Homes segment generates revenue primarily through Zillow Offers.
Internet, Media, & Technology (IMT)
- Includes Premier Agent, rentals and new construction marketplaces, dotloop, display & advertising, and business software solutions.
- Premier Agent generates revenue by selling ads, marketing services, and technology services to realtors, brokers, and other real estate professionals.
Mortgages
- Includes Zillow Home Loans, advertising sold to mortgage lenders, and its software product—Mortech.
- Mortgage revenue is generated through mortgage originations and selling loans on the open market.
- They also make money by selling leads to mortgage professionals.
Zillow's revenue breakdown
Zillow Offers: Unit economics
Zillow Offers: Profitability per home
Zillow's Key Business Metrics
Zillow tracks four metrics to measure the health of its business.
- Visits
- Unique Users
- Number of homes sold
- Loan origination volume (this is a newer metric. There wasn't enough data for a proper chart)
Visits and unique users
- Visits: Counted when a user does something—like view a listing—on Zillow, Trulia, and StreatEasy's mobile apps and websites.
- Unique users: Counted when a user accesses one of Zillow's mobile apps using a mobile device and accesses its website using a desktop browser for the first time during a calendar month.