About Company
Zillow Group, Inc., also known as Zillow in short, is a US-based technology real-estate market firm that came into existence in 2006. It was the brainchild of Lloyd Frink and Rich Barton, erstwhile Microsoft administrators and originators of Expedia, a Microsoft offshoot; David Beitel, present chief technology officer of Zillow; Spencer Rascoff, a co-originator of Hotwire.com; and Kristin Acker, the present senior vice president of experience design for Zillow.
Rich Barton serves as the present Chief Executive Officer of Zillow, Inc.
The Group is rethinking real estate to make it simpler for buyers and sellers to open the following episode of their lives.
As the most-surfed realty site in the US, Zillow and its associate companies provide consumers with an on-requirement feel for sales, purchasing, leasing, and funding with clarity and almost flawless back-to-back facilities. The associate loan provider of the company, Zillow Home Loans, offers consumers a simple opportunity to become pre-sanctioned and get funding for their upcoming home buy.
What type of Website is Zillow?
Zillow is a public website.
When was the Firm Established?
The firm came into existence on February 8, 2006, sixteen years back.
Where is the Headquarters of Zillow Located?
The central office of Zillow is situated at Russell Investments Center, Seattle, Washington, US.
Who are the Principal Originators of Zillow?
The key originators of the company are Lloyd Frink and Rich Barton.
To which Industry does Zillow Inc. belong?
The company belongs to the realty sector.
How many People Work for Zillow?
As of December 2021, the company has 8,005 employees.
Zillow Smartphone Application
Zillow smartphone applications permit subscribers to see close by residences with the help of the subscriber’s position.
- Android application– March 18, 2010
- iPhone application – April 29, 2009
- Blackberry application – March 31, 2011
- iPad application– April 2, 2010
- Windows 8.1 application– November 27, 2013
- Windows Phone application– July 13, 2012 (50)
- Apple TV application– November 2015
Zillow Advice
On December 16, 2008, the company unveiled Zillow Advice, permitting visitors to make realty-related queries online and obtain replies from the professional community of the site.
Zillow Mortgage Marketplace
On April 3, 2008, the company introduced a facility known as Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. This facility permits loan recipients to receive tailor-made loan quotes without disclosing private or confidential data.
GIS Information (Locality Border Maps)
The data squad of the company has formed a database of approximately 7,544 locality peripheries in the biggest American cities and offered their accessibility via a Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike permit.
Realty Marketplace Statements
Zillow manufactures residential worth statements for the country and more than 130 urban statistical regions. The statements spot marketplace inclinations, comprising five- and ten-year annual modification, short selling, negative equity, and foreclosure deals.
Besides, Zillow publishes a Homeowner Confidence Survey. Harris Interactive carries out this review and gauges householders’ insights regarding house-worth modifications of their residences and the neighboring marketplaces.
Zillow Inc. Management
The following are the key individuals playing an instrumental role in the success of the company:
Rich Barton, CEO
Richard Barton was born on June 2, 1967. He is a US-based Internet business tycoon and serves as the CEO of the Zillow Group. Rich is also the originator of the following firms:
- Expedia, Inc. – A Microsoft offshoot (online travel agency)
- Zillow – A realty Internet firm, and
- Glassdoor – A professional community and employment search engine.
Besides the above, Rich established Trover, the online tourism photo-sharing site and application Expedia took over in 2016. Richard also served as a business enterprise collaborator at Benchmark and is part of the board of directors for Artsy, Nextdoor, Avvo, and Netflix.
Barton is a member of the Board of Trustees of Stanford University.
In 2003, Rich got nominated as one of the ten leading trendsetters under thirty-five by MIT Technology Review. In April 2012, again, he got nominated as one of the Presidential Diplomats of Barack Obama for Continental Entrepreneurship.
Rich, brought up in New Canaan, Connecticut, is the child of a mechanical engineer and tutor. In 1989, Barton received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Stanford University.
Barton began his career with the Alliance Consulting Group and, in 1991, started serving Microsoft for MS-DOS 5.0 as a product supervisor.
John Barton and his child Horace Barton, Rich’s ancestors, were enlisted in the 1999 South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame.
Stan Humphries, Chief Analytics Officer
Stan serves as the Chief Analytics Officer of the Group, and he supervises the data engineering, data acquisition, artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, and financial survey squads of the firm.
Humphries was one of the oldest pre-establishment workers of Zillow and is also the originator of the earliest data product of the organization, the Zestimate home valuation algorithm. Besides, he played a key role in developing the industry-topping financial survey squad of the company, currently an extensively acknowledged resource of unbiased, data-oriented investigation on the United States accommodation sector.
Before joining Zillow, Humphries dedicated five years of his professional life to Expedia. There he was responsible for operating the sophisticated analytics group. Previously, Stan worked as an academician and investigator with the University of Virginia. Earlier than that, Humphries was a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Presidential Management Fellow in the Technology Administration inside the US Department of Commerce and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President. Besides, Stan has been associated with the US Peace Corps. He tutored chemistry and physics at the high school level in Benin, a West African nation.
2015 was a watershed moment in Stan’s life. He co-authored and released his debut book, “Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate,” a New York Times Best Seller. Presently, Stan is a part of the Department of Economics Visiting Committee at the University of Washington.
Humphries achieved his BA in Economics and Political Science from Davidson College. He also has a Master of Science degree from Georgetown University in Foreign Service and a Doctor of Philosophy in Government from the University of Virginia.
What is the Business Prototype Adopted by Zillow Group?
The company has affirmed that it is a media firm that profits by marketing commercials on its official site. In April 2009, Zillow declared a collaboration to provide its realty search engine to the portals of over one hundred and eighty US-based dailies as an agenda of the Zillow Newspaper Syndicate. The company distributes its commercial gains from the co-labeled websites with the dailies and widens its scope into the neighboring marketplaces.
In February 2011, Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow introduced a special collaboration generating the biggest realty promotion platform on the Internet, as stated by comScore Media Metrix.
Zillow permits tenants to make online rent payments to their property owners for real estate on the Zillow Rental Manager widget. Zillow takes a dealing cost from the tenants while utilizing credit or debit cards for paying their property owners. Nonetheless, tenants also have a no-cost alternative for paying their rent through an Automated Clearing House (ACH).
In 2018, the Group commenced business activities in the form of an all-inclusive recommendation-cost network with no requirement of a direct fee known as Zillow Flex. As agents conclude a housing deal with a customer, they disburse a recommendation charge further than a written agreement to Zillow.
In places where Flex collaborator agents function with agents paying for Zillow Premier Agent directly, links and leads run via the identical arrangement and are shared arbitrarily among collaborator agents.
Comprehensive recommendation charges disbursed to the Group are not made public to the clients. However, it variably stands between 30% and 40% of the whole commission of the agent.
The principal criterion for realty agents who participate in the Zillow Flex Program is compliance to disburse an all-inclusive recommendation charge as soon as the deal ends.
Labels, Associates, and Subsidiaries of Zillow, Inc.
The Group’s labels, associates, and subsidiaries comprise the following:
- Zillow Premier Agent
- Zillow
- Zillow Closing Services
- Zillow Home Loans
- Trulia
- Zillow Homes, Inc.
- StreetEasy
- Out East
- ShowingTime
- HotPads
Zillow Mergers and Acquisitions
- April 2011 – Zillow took over Postlets, an online realty registry formation and supply platform. The conditions of the transaction were not revealed in public.
- November 2011 – The Company took over Diverse Solutions at US $7.8 million.
- May 2012 – The firm took over RentJuice, a SAAS (software-as-a-service) organization that permits property managers and property owners to market and let out their leasehold belongings via a collection of online widgets. The takeover price for RentJuice was US $40 million.
- October 31, 2012 – The Company took over Buyfolio, a realty marketing and joint venture platform.
- November 5, 2012 – The firm took over Mortech, a Lincoln, Nebraska-oriented mortgage-tech firm at US $17 million.
- November 26, 2012 – The Company bought HotPads at US $16 million. Established in 2005, HotPads catalogs lease and realty items on a map-based web interface.
- August 19, 2013 – The Company took over StreetEasy at US $50 million.
- July 16, 2014 – The firm took over Retsly, a Vancouver, British Columbia-oriented small-scale business that aids realty developers in procuring realty info from various inventory facilities (MLS).
- July 28, 2014 – The Company declared an agreement to purchase Trulia at US $3.5 billion.
- February 17, 2015 – The Company proclaimed the conclusion of its takeover of Trulia and the creation of a portfolio of the Zillow Group trademark.
- July 22, 2015 – The Group declared it would take over Dotloop at US $108 million.
- January 3, 2016 – The Group asserted that it would take over Naked Apartments at a US $13 million valuation.
- August 2, 2016 – The Group took over Bridge Interactive.
- September 8, 2017 – The Group purchased New Home Feed.
- November 1, 2018 – The Group took over Mortgage Lenders of America, an Overland Park, Kansas-oriented countrywide mortgage loan provider.
- February 2021 – The Company declared it went into a deal to acquire ShowingTime. This firm had previously taken over Showing Suite at US $500 million.
Financial Performance
Zillow Group, Inc. Stock Performance
The common stocks of Zillow Group, Inc. are traded on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange with the following ticker symbols:
- ZG (as Class A)
- Z (as Class C)
Besides, the stock is a component of the Russell 1000 index (ZG and Z).
On January 25, 2023, Zillow Group, Inc. (Z) ended trading at NASDAQ GS at US$ 42.25 with the data furnished below at 4:00 pm EST (Eastern Standard Time).
Stock Chart
Disputes and Legal Proceedings
In 2014, a slew of lawsuits against Zillow was filed by erstwhile workers at the company’s businesses in Irvine, California. They accused there were infringements of the California Business and Professions Code and California Labor Code.
In 2017, the company mailed an injunction memo to Kate Wagner, who wrote McMansion Hell. The blog post satirized the demonstrations of deluxe residences viewed on the website. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stood for Kate in this case. Subsequently, the company published a declaration mentioning it had “settled against proceeding with court case” on the issue.
