How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
In short
Zillow makes most of its money from real estate agents. They pay for buyer leads (“connections”) and for software, and this Residential line brought in $1.70 billion, or 66% of $2.58 billion revenue in fiscal 2025. Rentals advertising sold to property managers rose 39% to $630 million. Mortgage lending through Zillow Home Loans added $199 million.
Zillow reports four revenue categories. Residential ($1,704M in FY2025) is mostly Premier Agent advertising. Agents get leads either by buying a share of voice in a zip code, or under Zillow Preferred, where they pay a fee only when a deal closes. Residential also includes software: Follow Up Boss, dotloop and ShowingTime.
Zillow revenue by fiscal year, FY2021 to FY2025, from the company's filings. Chart: The Business Engineer.
Zillow says Residential grew 7% because revenue per visit rose 4% to $0.178 and visits rose 3% to 9.6 billion. Rentals ($630M) comes from property managers paying per lead, lease, listing or impression, and from renters’ application fees. Mortgages ($199M) is mainly originating and selling loans through Zillow Home Loans.
How Zillow compares
Revenue against its own history: $2,132M in FY2021 (continuing operations, without the closed Zillow Offers iBuying unit), $1,958M in FY2022, $1,945M in FY2023, $2,236M in FY2024 and $2,583M in FY2025. FY2025 was about 21% above FY2021.
The mix is shifting. Residential fell from 71% of revenue in FY2024 to 66% in FY2025, and Rentals rose from 20% to 24%. Rentals revenue was $274M in FY2022, so it has grown about 2.3 times in three years.
Zillow turned a $23M net profit after a $112M loss in FY2024. Its operating loss narrowed to $34M from $197M. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, rose to $622M, or 24% of revenue.
Zillow revenue by line, prior year against FY2025, as reported. Chart: The Business Engineer.
In February 2025 Zillow paid Redfin $100M to become the exclusive multifamily listings provider on Redfin’s rental sites, and it pays Redfin per lead. Zillow says the extra lead costs cut gross margin from 76% to 74%. Zillow Home Loans origination volume rose 52% to $4.8B.
What to watch
In September and October 2025 the FTC and five state attorneys general sued Zillow and Redfin over the rentals partnership, seeking injunctive relief. Zillow denies wrongdoing and filed a motion to dismiss in January 2026. Compass and CoStar also filed complaints against Zillow in 2025.
For Sale revenue per TTV was 8.5 basis points in FY2025, against a recast 7.9 bps in FY2024. Zillow uses this figure to measure its share of US home-sale value. The Enhanced Markets push is the main test: the share of connections going through it ended 2025 above 40%.
Frequently asked questions
How does Zillow make money?
Mainly by selling buyer leads and software to real estate agents (Residential, $1,704M in FY2025). It also sells rentals advertising to property managers ($630M) and originates mortgages through Zillow Home Loans ($199M). Display ads and other revenue added $50M.
Is Zillow profitable?
Yes, narrowly, in FY2025. Net income was $23M, against a $112M loss in FY2024. On an operating basis it still lost $34M.
How many people use Zillow?
Zillow reports an average of 235 million monthly unique users in FY2025, with a peak of 259 million in July 2025. It reports 9.6 billion visits for the year, across its Zillow, Trulia and StreetEasy portals.
What is Zillow Preferred?
It is the new name, from Q4 2025, for the Flex program: an invite-only scheme for top agent teams. Agents receive leads and pay a performance advertising fee when a deal closes with one of them, generally within two years.
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace matching buyers, sellers, renters, and landlords through a massive platform with personalized search and discovery experiences and simple UI for both buying/renting and selling/listing. The company makes money by charging a fee for sales and additional services like premium agents and mortgage services for buyers.
Origin story
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace founded in 2006 by Rich Barton, Lloyd Frink, Spencer Rascoff, David Beitel, and Kristin Acker.
Key numbersChecked 6 October 2026
$2.6 billionZillow Group reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.6 billion, up 16% year over year.SEC EDGAR filings
$176 millionZillow Group's Q2 2026 Adjusted EBITDA was $176 million, with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 23%.SEC EDGAR filings
7,068 employeesZillow Group had 7,068 employees as of December 31, 2025.SEC EDGAR filings
18%Zillow Group's Q2 2026 revenue was up 18% year over year to $772 million.SEC EDGAR filings
In one lineZillow is an online real estate marketplace matching buyers, sellers, renters, and landlords through a massive platform with personalized search and discovery experiences and simple UI for both buying/renting and selling/listing.
It was former Microsoft employee and Expedia founder Rich Barton who would have the most profound impact on the formation of the company.
Barton noted that the real estate industry suffered from a high degree of information asymmetry.
Public housing data was difficult to access, locked away in various databases and archives. With this lack of transparency, realtors were able to maximize their profits at the expense of the consumer.
In the following years, Zillow would spend months collecting and digitizing housing data to make it publicly available on its website.
A feature allowing consumers to determine how much a property was worth caused the website to crash during the beta launch, attracting over 2 million hits in the first two days.
Zillow value model
Zillow is a massive online real estate website which leverages its platform to connects millions of potential buyers/renters and sellers/landlords.
Its technology is used to enable a massive listings, easily filtered and discovered by millions of users each month, and a mobile app that delivers the same kind of experience.
As a real estate company, value is enhanced also via real estate services, like premium, dedicated agents, home loans and more.
Zillow mission and vision
Zillow’s mission is “to give people the power to unlock lifeโs next chapter.”
Thus its visionconsists of “empowering consumers with data, inspiration, and knowledge around the place they call home and connecting them with the best local professionals who can help.”
Zillow value propositions
The primary value proposition for buyers and renters is a platform with a wide variety of listings (with a living database of approximately 173 million U.S. homes, according to Zillow Group's annual report for 2025) for both buying and renting.
And the ease of searching, discovering, and finding the properties that most fit the renter and buyer criteria.
For sellers, the platform enjoys a massive amount of traffic, with over two hundred million unique users each month and among the most known real estate websites in the US.
Over the years Zillow also launched various services.
FourWeekMBABusiness EngineerTimeline, as stated in the article
2006
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace founded in 2006 by Rich Barton, Lloyd Frink, Spencer Rascoff, David Beitel, and Kristin Acker.
2018
This data was incorporated into the Zillow Offers service in 2018.
2018
Starting in 2018, Zillow also started to model 3D homes based on the pictures uploaded by users on the platform.
2020
To gain a bit of context, by 2020, Zillow recorded over 200 million unique users, that led to more than five thousand homes sold via the platform.
2025
Zillow Group reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.6 billion, up 16% year over year.
Zillow technological model
The primary use of technology within Zillow is to power search and discover homes.
For instance, the engineering team uses advanced NLP models to create better recommendation systems for users:
Source: Zillow Engineering Blog.
Other technological applications comprise the development of models to build solid floorplans based on the house pictures uploaded by sellers/landlords:
Examples of floor plans generated by Zillow, based on the images uploaded on the listing (Image Source: Zillow Engineering Blog).
Other models yet, are used to refine search based on some contextual information related to the place/city of the search:
Example of how the search is dynamically adjusted based on the local context of the searcher. For instance, based on the search location, the model predicts the top filters and features requested for a house. Perhaps, searching from “Phoenix” might prioritize for a house that allows large dogs, it has in-unit laundry, a pool, and A/C (Phoenix it’s hot most of the year) compared to a search from “Seattle” where the model will prioritize on allowing small dogs and cats, in-unit laundry and on-site parking. (Image Source: Zillow Engineering Blog).
Starting in 2018, Zillow also started to model 3D homes based on the pictures uploaded by users on the platform. With a dedicated app, users can easily create 3D models of the house and upload them on the platform:
Example of how the Zillow backend does the automatic work of matching images and linking them up to generate a 3D representation of the house (Image Source: Zillow Engineering Blow).
Zillow distribution model
Zillow’s distributionstrategy consists of organic (continuous traffic on the website and mobile app) and paid advertising. Distribution is also enhanced by agreements with real estate agents using the platform.
To gain a bit of context, by 2020, Zillow recorded over 200 million unique users, that led to more than five thousand homes sold via the platform.
Precisely, these 5,337 homes got sold at an average selling price of $320K per home.
Zillow financial model
Zillow revenue generation
When Zillow launched in 2006, the company collected advertising revenue as the sole source of income.
Since then, Zillow has diversified into many income streams. We will take a look at some of these in more detail below.
Homes
According to Zillow Group's annual report for 2025, Zillow has a living database of approximately 173 million U.S. homes.
This data was incorporated into the Zillow Offers service in 2018. The service allows so-called “iBuyers” (instant buyers) to evaluate complex datasets to make near-instant cash offers to property sellers.
With speed and convenience a priority of most sellers, Zillow often purchases a property below market value. At some future point, it sells the property for a profit.
During the transaction process, Zillow also charges:
A selling fee of 6% to cover the transactional cost of purchasing the home.
A closing fee of 1-2% to cover expenses such as transfer tax, escrow, and title.
An average service charge of 2.5% covering maintenance work, utilities, and so forth.
IMT
IMT is an acronym for Internet, Media, and Technology. To bolster its business model, Zillow offers marketing services and other products for real estate professionals.
IMT can be divided into three core components:
Premier Agent โ encompassing the two SaaS products in Premier Agent and Premier Broker. These products allow agents and brokers to track leads or advertise their services on the Zillow platform. Here, Zillow makes money on a cost-per-lead basis which is determined by the services offered and the property price.
Rentals โ where Zillow sell advertising services to landlords and associated rental professionals
Other โ where Zillow sells similar services to individuals who play a role in the renovation or re-sale process. These include photographers, builders, home improvement professionals, and housing inspectors.
For the Rentals and Other components, Zillow is paid on a per-lead basis.
Mortgages
Through its Zillow Home Loans service, the company also makes money on mortgage interest.
The company also works with more than 50 other lenders who pay Zillow every time a customer is referred to them. This is usually a fixed fee depending on the nature of the agreement between both parties.
Cost structure
The cost structure is primarily skewed toward the resources to make both the desktop and mobile platforms (websites, and mobile applications) run smoothly. Together with part of the acquisition costs, that are critical to sell the homes in the first place (things like repairs and updates.
Cash flow generation
The company generated operating cash flows in 2020 primarily due to “cash received from real estate professionals, rental professionals, mortgage professionals, and brand advertisers, as well as cash received from customers for sales of homes through Zillow Offers and sales of mortgages originated by Zillow Home Loans.”
When it comes to investing activities, the use of cash primarily relates to “purchase and sale or maturity of investments, the purchase of property and equipment and intangible assets and cash paid in connection with acquisitions.
Instead of financing activities, incoming cash resulted from net proceeds from the issuance of convertible notes, net proceeds from and repayments of borrowings on for Zillow Offers, and proceeds from the borrowing of Zillow Home Loans.
Opendoor is a digital real estate platform for buyers and sellers. As a real estate company, Opendoor also purchases homes to sell them at a profit. Opendoor makes money via seller fees when homes are sold through the platform, profits from homes bought by sellers and resold on the platform, and home loans in the form of interest income.
Zillow is an online real estate marketplace, matching buyers and sellers and renters and landlords through a massive platform with personalized search and discovery experiences and simple UI for both buying/renting and selling/listing. The company makes money by charging a fee on the sales and additional services like premium agents and mortgage services for buyers.
Redfin is a real estate platform with a hybrid approach (automation with the human in the loop) to enable buyers’ and sellers’ deal flow. Redfin charges sellers a listing fee in the range of 1.0-1.5%. With RedfinNow, the company also purchases homes and resells them on its platform for profits. Redfin also makes money from its financing solutions and via its concierge services.
OYO’s business model is a mixture of platform and brand, where the company started primarily as an aggregator of homes across India, and it quickly moved to other verticals, from leisure to co-working and corporate travel. In a sort of octopus business strategy of expansion to cover the whole spectrum of short-term real estate.
WeWork runs a membership model that gets monetized via a set of packages that include ancillary value-added products and services to enable companies to scale or shrink their workspace on-demand. WeWork defined its revenue model as space-as-a-service and claimed to be more scalable than traditional commercial real estate.
Compass is a licensed American real-estate broker incorporating online real estate technology as a marketing medium. The company makes money via sales commissions (collected whenever a sale is facilitated or tenants are found for a rental property) and bridge loans (a service allowing the seller to purchase a home before the revenue from the sale of their previous home is available).
Offerpad is a tech-enabled real estate platform enabling users to buy and sell homes. The company makes money via service fees. Indeed, whenever a home is sold through the Offerpad platform, the company collects a service fee. And it also makes money via sales profits As a seller and buyer of homes, Offerpad is in a position to make a profit on homes they sell to members of the general public.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur, HackerNoon and Search Engine People. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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