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New CEO, same mission. That’s the message Jeremy Wacksman delivered during his first Inman Connect appearance since taking Zillow’s helm amid intensifying portal competition, rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, the end of the National Association of Realtors’ cooperative compensation rule, and the beginning of a fierce battle over Clear Cooperation and what’s best for consumers in a fraught market.
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Jeremy Wacksman at ICNY | Credit: AJ Canaria Creative Services
“I think any leader in the room gets, when there’s a change, ‘What’s changing?'” he told a packed room at Inman Connect New York on Wednesday. “The reality for Zillow is nothing’s changing. The transition from Rich [Barton] to myself was really a reflection that the strategy of the company is working, and we really want to step on the gas and have the team accelerate what we’re doing.”
“That strategy, as you alluded to, is building technology to build a one-stop shop for buying, selling, renting and owning,” he said. “That sounds really simple, and when you all talk to your customers in the room, that’s what they tell you they want. They want more digital, more tech, less paper, less tears, less friction.”
Wacksman said the company is focused on building the next chapter of its ever-evolving Zillow Super App, which allows consumers to have a streamlined home shopping experience from home search to tour scheduling, mortgage pre-qualification, and connecting with a Zillow Premier agent. The CEO said buyers, sellers and renters have and will continue to be Zillow’s North Star — but that doesn’t mean agents aren’t equally as important in the company’s strategy.
“Anytime a brand is so well known for one thing, I think it’s natural to wonder if there’s a tension there,” he said. “Zillow, first and foremost, will always solve for the buyer, the renter and the seller. Our mission every day is to understand what they need and where it’s going.”
“Now that tension doesn’t have to come at the expense of the agent industry,” he added. “In fact, what we’ve learned through our 20 years is empowering the consumer can only happen if you actually empower the agent.”
Although the running narrative on tech suggests it will replace humans, Wacksman said Zillow survey data proves time and time again that homebuyers still want to work with agents. That trend, he said, has continued to get stronger, with the percentage of homebuyers who want to work with an agent being higher than pre-internet.
“Despite technology, despite the smartphone, despite all these media calls that your lives are going to change, that technology is going to change how everything works, all it’s done is elevate expectations,” he said. “That’s what the next technology revolution is going to do.
“Generative AI is the next headline that you’re all reading about, that we’re all reading about, trying to understand. Just like the internet, just like the mobile phone, consumers are going to change their behavior, and we’re going to help figure out what that is and how to do that for everyone in this room.”
Wacksman then pointed to Zillow’s growing tech portfolio — ShowingTime, Dotloop, Follow Up Boss, Aryeo and Bridge Interactive — as examples of the company’s dedication to helping agents deliver on what consumers want most. Echoing former CEO and co-founder Rich Barton’s “Portal 1.0” keynote at Inman Connect New York 2024, Wacksman said Zillow is focused on improving standards and interoperability in real estate tech by leveraging AI.
“What is missing is standards and interoperability. We’re going to build great experiences for our consumers. We’re going to build great experiences for our software that you all use,” he said. “We’ll make Follow Up Boss better and better all the time because it helps supercharge agents and teams to help our customers.”
“Whether those customers are Zillow customers or leads coming off of one of our competitors,” he added, “the interoperability of those things is the place where I think the industry could still make a huge shift over time so that every buyer and seller, no matter how they’re interacting, can do that seamlessly.”
In addition to tech, Wacksman said consumers have been clear about another hot-button topic: private listing networks.
“The vast majority of sellers want their home on the Internet,” he said, referencing a new Zillow study where 81 percent of consumers said they’d want their listing displayed on a free public website. “They want the broadest possible exposure for their home. And the vast majority of buyers want to go see all listings.”
With that in mind, Wacksman said it’s obvious that maintaining Clear Cooperation is what’s best for consumers and agents.
“If we all, as an industry, work backwards from giving the buyer and seller what they want, it would be whatever rules there are — whether it’s Clear Cooperation in its current form, whether it’s a listing access policy in the future — how can we help make sure sellers get what they’re asking for and buyers get what they’re asking for?” he said. “And, oh, by the way, that’s actually how agents do their best job. Because one of the great things about this country, unlike other countries, is the MLS structure provides a wonderful marketplace.”
“The MLSs are our local marketplaces, and that’s part of why Zillow supports the ability for all data to flow to the marketplace because transparency benefits everybody,” he added. “When buyers can see all the inventory, when sellers can market their homes broadly, when agents can see all the inventory and do the best job representing their clients’ needs, everyone wins.”
On the portal side, Wacksman expertly navigated questions about what the end of Clear Cooperation could mean for Zillow and its competitors and whether they’d be interested in sealing exclusive listing contracts with the nation’s largest brokerages should CCP fall. The CEO, once again, pointed to consumers as his North Star on what Zillow would do if a post-CCP world came to fruition.
“I think you have to always start from what do the buyers and sellers we’re all serving want. Do the majority of sellers want that experience? Do the majority of sellers want the ability to market their homes broadly on the Internet, available to all?” he said. “And so, again, we are going to ask buyers and sellers what they want and work really hard to give that to them and to work with the industry to give that to them.”
“I would say any sci-fi future that’s created around different structures that benefit one party over the other is probably not benefiting the majority of consumers, and this industry does well when we all look after the consumer,” he added. “We ignore the fact that in this macro environment right now, we have an availability crisis and an affordability crisis. Why would we want to exacerbate a listings availability problem and an affordability problem for the buyers and sellers that are trying to buy and sell?”