Zillow

Bipartisan agreement on a major issue is rare, but housing affordability has created that window right now. The case for transparency reform is obvious, and it ties directly to affordability. Home shoppers should all have the same chance to compete for homes that are for sale that would work for their budget, and they shouldn’t have to sign on with a certain brokerage to get that chance. Transparency is the right move for homebuyers, sellers and agents alike. Wisconsin State Rep. Scott Krug put it plainly: if lawmakers don’t act on this now, the practice of hiding listings could remove buyers from homeownership entirely and permanently. States can’t afford to hesitate. Housing transparency reform is needed across this country today. Here’s what the data says about private listing networks: https://lnkd.in/e7xwUdHc

Sellers don't want exclusion. They want reach. New data: 85% of soon-to-be sellers are more likely to hire an agent who pre-markets their home to the broadest online audience. 61% say broad online exposure produces better sale outcomes than a limited private network. While parts of the industry push toward private listing networks, sellers are asking for more buyers — not fewer. https://lnkd.in/eKHU_PY7

Starting today, renters can find Zillow listings and book tours directly in Google Gemini. Most renters don't search in one place. They're bouncing between apps, tabs, and texts to friends, restarting the process every time they switch. This closes one of those gaps. Zillow Rentals is the first real estate platform with a connected app inside Gemini. A renter finds a tour time that works, and it gets booked through Zillow, no app switch required. Done. This works because we have spent years building experiences across live touring data, real-time scheduling and great relationships with our partners. Gemini is just a new door into all of it. Zillow shows up wherever renters are already looking, and this trend will continue! https://lnkd.in/g3ZSdzEu 

All-white walls are out. Nature-inspired color is in. New Zillow research found that buyers today are drawn to colors that feel warm and grounded: pale blue living rooms, chocolate brown bedrooms, charcoal gray kitchens. So if you're selling a home, what's on your walls matters more than you think. One paint color could add thousands to your sale price. Another could cost you just as much. "Buyers today respond to homes with soul, and paint is one of the easiest, most affordable ways to add personality and character to a space," says Amanda Pendleton, Zillow's home trends expert. "The right colors can stop an online home shopper mid-scroll and instantly create an emotional connection, which ultimately drives higher offers." Which colors performed the best in each room of the home? Take a look: https://lnkd.in/eHWri3bF

A federal court in Chicago is hearing evidence in our antitrust case against MRED and Compass this week. Here's what it's really about: in May, MRED (the Chicagoland MLS) cut Zillow's access to thousands of home listings, without sellers' knowledge or consent. And buyers lost the ability to find those homes on the most-visited real estate platform in the country. A federal judge issued an emergency order restoring our feed. This week's hearing determines whether that order stays in place through the full trial. Here’s what’s at stake: https://lnkd.in/e2hHFup6

Most home shoppers don't find out about a home until it's already on the market, and already competitive. Zillow Preview changes that. With Preview, buyers can discover homes before they officially list, right in their regular Zillow search. Save it. Book a tour. Get pre-approved and ready. No special access required. It’s all about an earlier start. For sellers, it's a pre-market window to build real demand with the largest online audience of home shoppers in America, with live data on views, saves, and tour requests before day one. Hear from VP of Product Nicholas Stevens on why Zillow built this 👇 Read more: https://lnkd.in/e6uTKXde

While there’s a lot of attention on rent growth and vacancy rates given lease-ups across the country, we’re paying even closer attention to renter behavior. Hiring is still (mostly) sluggish, affordability remains top of mind, and the economics of renting versus buying continue to evolve. Together, those trends are shaping demand in ways that every multifamily operator should be paying attention to. Zillow Rentals datasets give us a unique view into how renters are thinking, searching, and making decisions before many of those trends show up in the broader market, and I'm looking forward to sharing what the latest data tells us, what I'm watching for the second half of 2026, and what it all means for multifamily operators during my conversation with Multifamily Executive. To learn more about what’s happening in the rental markets, register to attend live or sign up to receive the recording: https://bit.ly/4f8sc0i

I dove into Claude Code back in November because I saw how it created a model that allowed me to curate context. Every braindump about our team and projects, every project we worked on, each piece of feedback could be learned durably and then referenced later, enabling an optimization loop. The loop only compounds if the inputs are precise enough for the agent to act on. That's where I hit a wall. For a while I couldn't figure out why some of our agent runs came back clean and others came back as mush. Same model. Same codebase. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to see the pattern: it tracked almost perfectly with the ticket. Vague ticket in, vague work out, and the agent never asks a clarifying question. It just fills the gaps with guesses. So we stopped treating the ticket as a pointer to the work and started treating it as the task itself. Acceptance criteria, technical scope, the reason behind it, precise enough that an agent can execute without coming back to ask. That's where most of our ~50% velocity gain came from. Not a better model. A better spec. But the curve started going exponential when we invested in validation. We gave Claude the skills to run our smoke tests, drive Playwright UX automation, and run load tests, and we taught it our team's coding standards and MR expectations so it could check its own work against them before a human ever saw it. The engineers getting the most from this aren't the fastest coders. They're the ones who can describe what good looks like precisely enough that nothing gets lost in translation. I'm hiring a Senior ML Engineer to build with us — harness innovation, evals, tracing, multimodal agents, the whole agentic stack. If that's your thing: https://lnkd.in/gsriUnRE #zillow