Today, I’m talking with Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman.
Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software: the company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become a vertically integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate.
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If you’ve been listening to Decoder lately, you’ve maybe already guessed why I was so eager to talk with Jeremy — a popular mobile app like that is really the front-end to a big series of databases, and the politics of who gets access to databases and how much that access should cost is newly up for grabs if you think the next era of software will be defined by AI. After all, you don’t need an app like Zillow if your AI agent can just go look at the multiple listing service, or MLS, database directly.
Or maybe you do — maybe you need an app like Zillow more than ever, which is of course the case Jeremy made in this conversation. And the politics of Zillow’s database access are as complicated as it gets — the company is involved in big lawsuits over when and how houses get listed in MLS versus Zillow, and realtor groups have an uneasy relationship with the platform as a whole. Jeremy’s argument is that the future of Zillow looks a lot like an end-to-end business platform for real estate agents, and we spent a lot of time talking about whether a business as local and as relationship-driven as real estate can benefit from platform-level scale in the way he’s proposing.
Yeah, there’s a lot of Decoder in this one — it’s going to surprise you, I think.
Okay: Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jeremy Wacksman, you’re the CEO of the Zillow Group. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
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