Zillow Group, Inc.

What does Zillow Group own?

Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads, Zillow Rentals, Zillow Home Loans, ShowingTime, Dotloop, and Follow Up Boss, plus the Mortech mortgage software business.

Is Zillow Group publicly traded?

Yes. It trades on NASDAQ under two tickers: Z for Class A common shares and ZG for Class C non-voting shares.

Who owns Zillow Group?

Public shareholders own the economic majority, but founders Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink hold supervoting Class B shares that control the company's votes. Vanguard and BlackRock are the largest institutional holders.

Where is Zillow Group headquartered?

Seattle, Washington, USA, where it was founded and maintains its principal offices.

How does Zillow make money?

Primarily by selling advertising and lead connections to real estate agents, plus multifamily rental advertising, mortgage origination fees, and software subscriptions for agents.

Why did Zillow shut down Zillow Offers?

The iBuying program bought homes faster than its pricing models could manage during the 2021 market surge. Losses estimated at $881 million led the company to shut it down in November 2021 and cut about 25 percent of staff.

The original Zillow, Inc. was incorporated in 2005 by Barton and Frink, who had built Expedia inside Microsoft and saw the same informational arbitrage in housing data. The site launched in February 2006 with Zestimates for tens of millions of homes, a publicity magnet that made Zillow the fastest-growing consumer site of that year.

Zillow went public in July 2011. The next four years were defined by acquisitions: Postlets and HotPads in rentals (2011, 2012), StreetEasy in New York (2013), and the transformative Trulia merger announced in 2014 and completed in February 2015, which created Zillow Group as the holding company.

Through the late 2010s the company layered on mortgage origination tools, agent CRM through Follow Up Boss (2015), and the premier-agent advertising model that drove the majority of profit. Barton's 2019 return as CEO brought the pivot to "Zillow 2.0," centered on Zillow Offers iBuying, which promised to turn audience leadership into transaction revenue.

The bet failed publicly. Algorithmic pricing errors during the 2021 housing surge left Zillow holding thousands of overpriced homes. In November 2021 the company shut Offers, took cumulative losses estimated at $881 million, and laid off about 25 percent of staff, roughly 2,000 people.

Recovery came through software and services: the $500 million ShowingTime acquisition in 2021 gave Zillow the dominant showing-management platform, Rentals scaled into a high-growth second engine, and Zillow Home Loans rebuilt mortgage origination. Wacksman, a longtime marketing and product executive, took over as CEO in August 2024 with Barton remaining on the board. In 2025 the company returned to full-year profitability with $23 million net income, though Q3 2026 produced a $158 million loss driven by restructuring, impairment, and elevated legal costs.

Zillow Offers remains the defining corporate controversy: the iBuying unit's collapse cost an estimated $881 million, eliminated a quarter of the workforce, and produced a settled securities class action. In 2025, Compass sued Zillow in federal court alleging its listing-standards policy, which limits agents who market homes privately before listing them, violates antitrust law; the case is pending. Zillow is also entangled in the industry's post-NAR-settlement litigation wave and faces continuing RESPA-related scrutiny over whether agent incentives inside Zillow Home Loans constitute illegal referral arrangements. Consumer criticism of Zestimate accuracy resurfaces periodically, particularly in markets where algorithmic estimates diverge from appraisals.