Zillow is an American proptech marketplace founded in 2006 by former Microsoft executives Lloyd Frink and Rich Barton.
PropTech stands for property technology, is a relatively recent movement in the real estate industry. The movement is an innovative approach that uses technology to optimize how consumers and real estate professionals interact with property. PropTech, therefore, leverages digitalization to help property managers, owners, builders, and landlords to manage their assets.
Zillow is the most popular real estate website in the United States with the company offering an on-demand experience for the buying, selling, renting, and financing of properties.
A real estate brokerage company known for its online platform, which offers home buying and selling services, including agent-assisted transactions. Redfin competes directly with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Redfin provides an online platform for home buying and selling, directly competing with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Both compete in the online real estate marketplace, offering services for home buyers and sellers, but with different commission models and approaches to agent assistance.
Redfin’s focus on agent-assisted transactions and technology-driven solutions.
Realtor.com
A real estate website owned and operated by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), offering property listings and real estate-related information. Realtor.com competes with Zillow in the online property listing and information market.
Realtor.com provides property listings and real estate information, competing with Zillow in the online property listing and information segments.
Both compete in the online property listing and information market, but Realtor.com is associated with NAR and emphasizes accurate and up-to-date listings.
Realtor.com’s association with NAR and commitment to accurate listings.
Trulia (formerly)
A real estate website that provided property listings, neighborhood information, and tools for home buyers and renters. Trulia, while no longer operational, was a competitor of Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Trulia offered property listings and neighborhood information, competing with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace until it was integrated into Zillow Group.
Trulia is no longer operational, but during its existence, it competed in the online real estate marketplace by providing property listings and neighborhood insights.
Trulia’s focus on property listings and neighborhood information.
HomeAdvisor
An online marketplace that connects homeowners with home improvement contractors and service providers. HomeAdvisor competes with Zillow in the home improvement and services marketplace.
HomeAdvisor connects homeowners with contractors and service providers, sometimes overlapping with Zillow in the home improvement and services segments.
Both compete in the home improvement and services marketplace, but HomeAdvisor focuses on connecting homeowners with professionals for home projects.
HomeAdvisor’s emphasis on connecting homeowners with contractors and service providers.
Apartments.com
An online rental listing platform that offers a wide range of rental listings for apartments, houses, and other properties. Apartments.com competes with Zillow in the online rental marketplace.
Apartments.com provides rental listings for apartments and houses, sometimes overlapping with Zillow in the online rental marketplace.
Both compete in the online rental marketplace, offering rental listings and search tools for renters, but with Apartments.com’s focus on apartments and rentals.
A subsidiary of Redfin that offers mortgage financing services, including home loans and refinancing. Redfin Mortgage competes with Zillow in the mortgage financing market.
Redfin Mortgage provides mortgage financing services, competing with Zillow in the mortgage financing market.
Both compete in the mortgage financing market, offering home loans and refinancing options, but with Redfin Mortgage’s affiliation with Redfin’s real estate services.
Redfin Mortgage’s association with Redfin’s real estate services.
HomeLight
A platform that connects home sellers and buyers with real estate agents who have expertise in specific neighborhoods. HomeLight competes with Zillow in the real estate agent referral and matching market.
HomeLight connects users with real estate agents based on expertise, sometimes overlapping with Zillow in the real estate agent referral and matching segments.
Both compete in the real estate agent referral and matching market, but HomeLight focuses on connecting users with agents based on their neighborhood expertise.
HomeLight’s agent matching based on neighborhood expertise.
OpenDoor
A real estate technology company that offers an instant home buying and selling platform. OpenDoor competes with Zillow in the iBuyer (instant buying) and online home selling market.
OpenDoor provides an instant home buying and selling platform, competing with Zillow in the iBuyer and online home selling segments.
Both compete in the iBuyer and online home selling market, offering solutions for homeowners looking to sell their homes quickly, but with OpenDoor’s emphasis on instant offers and transactions.
OpenDoor’s focus on instant home buying and selling.
Estately (formerly)
A real estate search website that provided property listings and home search tools. Estately, while no longer operational, was a competitor of Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Estately offered property listings and home search tools, competing with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace until it was integrated into Zillow Group.
Estately is no longer operational, but during its existence, it competed in the online real estate marketplace by providing property listings and search features.
Estately’s property listings and home search tools.
Movoto
A real estate brokerage and online platform that offers property listings, home buying, and selling services. Movoto competes with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Movoto provides property listings and real estate services, sometimes overlapping with Zillow in the online real estate marketplace.
Both compete in the online real estate marketplace, offering property listings and real estate services, but with Movoto’s focus on connecting buyers and sellers.
Movoto’s emphasis on connecting buyers and sellers in the real estate market.
Realtor.com
Realtor.com is owned by News Corp subsidiary Move and is based in Santa Clara, California.
Realtor.com is not as robust as Zillow, but it does show the most recent information about homes for sale and explains how certain features impact the sale price such as the presence of a pool or garage.
Users also have the option to chat with an actual real estate professional via text if they so desire.
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.
Opendoor is a San Francisco-headquartered company that buys and sells residential properties.
In essence, the company makes a cash offer on a home, makes repairs if necessary, and then relists the home on the Opendoor platform.
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.
Founded in Seattle in 2004, Redfin is a full-service brokerage company whose business model is to undercut the competition.
Redfin’s map-centric platform allows users to search properties according to various metrics such as square footage, home appreciation, homeowners association fees, and even details about the sewerage system.
Unique to Redfin is a team of real estate agents whose compensation depends on the reviews they receive from customers.
HomeLight is a real estate company that liaises with a network of 28,000 brokers in multiple markets to which they refer customers.
To that end, HomeLight analyzes millions of real estate transactions to identify the best agents who sell homes quickly and for a more attractive price.
The company also offers free access to an extensive network of pre-approved cash buyers to make the process of selling a home easier.
Homesnap is similar to Realtor.com in that it provides an intuitive, map-based search function with detailed, real-time information about various properties.
However, what sets this company apart from other Zillow competitors is its mobile app.
With this app, users can share homes with family, friends, and agents – even if they are not on the Homesnap platform.
It also shows the property value of homes, condos, and apartments that are not currently on the market.
For houses that are on the market, users can take a photo with their smartphone and Homesnap will pull up the pertinent listing information.
Key takeaways:
Zillow is an American proptech marketplace that was founded in 2006 by former Microsoft executives Lloyd Frink and Rich Barton. Realtor.com is perhaps its largest competitor in terms of traffic, but the platform has a less robust feature set.
Opendoor is a competitor with the most comparable business model and is available in over 50 major markets in the United States. Redfin’s full-service brokerage model also rates a mention and is established in over 100 such markets.
Other Zillow competitors include HomeLight and Homesnap, with the latter known for its intuitive and useful mobile app.
Key Competitors of Zillow:
Realtor.com:
Owned by News Corp subsidiary Move, Realtor.com is the second most visited real estate website in the US after Zillow.
Provides up-to-date information about homes for sale, with features like pools or garages impacting the sale price.
Offers the option to chat with real estate professionals via text.
Opendoor:
A digital real estate platform that buys and sells homes, making money through seller fees, resale profits, and home loans.
Makes cash offers on homes, repairs if necessary, and relists homes on the Opendoor platform.
Available in over 50 markets across the US.
Redfin:
A full-service brokerage with a hybrid approach that combines automation with human involvement.
Charges sellers a listing fee, purchases and resells homes, offers financing solutions, and concierge services.
Utilizes a map-centric platform with real estate agents compensated based on customer reviews.
HomeLight:
Works with a network of 28,000 brokers to refer customers to agents who sell homes quickly and at good prices.
Analyzes real estate transactions to identify top-performing agents.
Offers access to pre-approved cash buyers and supports over $1 billion in annual transactions.
Homesnap:
Offers an intuitive, map-based search function with real-time property information.
Differentiates with its mobile app, allowing users to share homes and access property values.
Users can take photos to retrieve listing information for houses on the market.
Zoominfo is an American software-as-a-service (SaaS) company founded by Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown in 2007. The company sells access to the most comprehensive B2B database in the world to help sales and marketing teams better communicate with prospects. Zoominfo held an IPO in June 2020 raising $935 million. Like similar software companies that are valuable to remote teams, demand for the Zoominfo platform increased because of the coronavirus pandemic. It is now used by over 20,000 businesses, with clients including T-Mobile, Zoom, Amazon, and Google.
Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming platform with over 381 million users across 184 markets around the world. The company was founded by Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek in 2008 in response to the shutdown of peer-to-peer music service Napster. Spotify became a success because it was the first company to determine how to distribute music legally and compensate the music industry at the same time. The platform now offers various curated music discovery services, music stations, audio customization, and private listening. In recent times, it has also ventured into the streaming of audiobooks, podcasts, comedy, poetry, and short stories.
Poshmark is a social commerce marketplace where users can buy and sell new or used clothing. The company was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala, and Chetan Pungaliya. Poshmark is one of many companies looking to profit from the explosive growth in the second-hand clothing and resale industry, which is expected to be worth around $51 billion by 2023. Scores of women, in particular, are opting to sell their unwanted fashion items online instead of donating them to charity or thrift stores.
Afterpay is an Australian fintech company operating in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. Founded in 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, the company enjoyed a first-mover advantage in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space. Less than seven years later, the company reached 13.1 million active customers with gross sales amounting to $10.1 billion. Despite its success, some suggest the company has lost its edge in the buy-now-pay-later space with the emergence of several high-profile competitors exerting their influence and giving merchants more choice.
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.
GoodRx is an American healthcare company known for its telemedicine platform and a website and mobile app that track prescription drug prices. As part of this service, the company makes drug coupons available for free to consumers. GoodRx was created by Trevor Bezdek, Doug Hirsch, and Scott Marlette. Hirsch, an early employee at both Yahoo and Facebook, got the idea for the company after picking up a prescription with private health insurance and still having to pay $450. Given the high variability in prices between different pharmacies, Hirsh went on a mission to make prescription drug prices more transparent and affordable for ordinary Americans. Revenue in the second quarter of 2021 amounted to $177 million with over 7.5 million app customers using the GoodRx app. While the company was the first to provide a comprehensive list of pharmacy drug prices, new players have entered the market. The rest of this article will be devoted to looking at the main GoodRx competitors.
DoorDash is an online food ordering and delivery platform founded by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore in 2013. Together with its subsidiaries, DoorDash has a 56% market share in food delivery and a further 60% in the convenience delivery sector.
In 1965, PepsiCo acquired Frito-Lay in what the chairmen of both companies called a “marriage made in heaven”. The resultant company transformed PepsiCo from a soft drink organization and set it on a path to becoming one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. Today, PepsiCo claims to operate in more than 200 countries and territories around the world with seven distinct divisions and many successful brands.
The Coca-Cola Company has 21 different billion-dollar brands or brands that generate more than $1 billion or more in revenue each year. The company also sells its products in nearly every country in the world, with Cuba and North Korea the only two countries where it is not sold officially. What’s more, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $87.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable among all companies. Though these figures allow Coca-Cola to enjoy market dominance in many countries, the company is nevertheless subject to intense competition.
Headquartered in Burbank, California, Disney has global reach and influence with its universally popular resorts, movies, streaming services, video games, and merchandise. But as one of the largest media conglomerates in the world with a diverse range of products in multiple marketplaces, Disney is no stranger to competition.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company. It was founded in New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 by Charles Ranlett Flint. IBM is a diverse company with a similarly diverse portfolio of products and services. It produces and sells hardware, middleware, and software. It also offers hosting and consultancy services in nanotechnology and mainframe computers. What’s more, IBM has a strong culture in research and development, filing the most U.S. patents of any business for the past 28 years.
Starbucks is a multinational coffee chain headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker in 1971. From a single and very humble bean roasting store in Pike Place Market, the company is now a global giant operating almost 33,000 stores around the world. This large global footprint obviously increases the competition for Starbucks in many different markets. The coffee industry itself is also highly competitive, with established players including McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Boeing is best known for designing and manufacturing commercial aircraft, but the company also produces helicopters, rockets, satellites, spacecraft, missiles, and telecommunications infrastructure. Founded in 1916 by William Boeing in Seattle, Washington, the company is one of the largest aerospace manufacturers and defense contractors in the world.
While Google (now Alphabet) has been born as a search engine, it is now a diversified company, even though its core business remains search, as most of its revenues still come from Google, the search engine, and YouTube, the “video engine.” However, as a tech giant, which business is primarily based on advertising, the company does compete with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft (with Bing), and Amazon (with e-commerce search and its advertising machine).
Peloton is a media and exercise equipment company primarily making money making money via its fitness products. The idea for the company came from John Foley, who argued that technology could help time-poor individuals get a full workout at home. The company competes with other players like Bowflex, NordicTrack, Life Fitness, MYX Fitness.
IKEA was founded in 1943 by Swedish businessman Ingvar Kamprad as a mail-order catalog business. The company is best known for selling affordable flat-pack furniture, but it also sells home accessories and kitchen appliances. Today, IKEA offers approximately 9,500 products across 445 stores in 52 countries. With such broad reach, IKEA is not immune to competition.
The Airbnb story began in 2008 when two friends shared their accommodation with three travelers looking for a place to stay. Just over a decade later, it is estimated that the company now accounts for over 20% of the vacation rental industry. As a travel platform, Airbnb competes with other brands like Booking.com, VRBO, FlipKey, and given its massive amount of traffic from Google. Also, platforms like Google Travel can be considered potential competitors able to cannibalize part of Airbnb’s market.
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) provider, allowing businesses to build meaningful and sustained relationships with their customers. With robust, customizable software that integrates with social media, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, the Salesforce CRM platform is rated highly among businesses of all shapes and sizes. Recent data has shown that the company has captured 19.5% of the global CRM market.
In just fifteen short years, Shopify has grown from humble beginnings to become one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms online. The Shopify eCommerce solution is perhaps best suited to users who desire an easy, flexible and affordable starter solution for their online store. The provider now has upwards of 820,000 stores accounting for 20% of the total market share. However, the continued success of any company in the dynamic digital market is never guaranteed.
Netflix is the largest streaming video subscription service in the world. Created by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997, the company has revolutionized the video content subscriptionmodel with over 139 million subscribers in 190 countries. The success of Netflix is due to two factors. The first is a recommendation system that gives suggestions on what customers should watch based on their viewing history. The second is the vast catalog of content on offer – produced by third parties and by Netflix itself. These factors have resulted in Netflix competing against influential TV networks and film producers for viewership.
YouTube is the most popular online video platform, a hybrid between a video search engine and a social media platform with a continuous feed prompted by social interactions and engagement. In fact, the platform is so popular that YouTube.com is the second most visited website on the internet. After being acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the platform now boasts over 2 billion registered users. Collectively, these users upload 500 hours of video every minute. The platform competes with other video engines like Vimeo, Dailymotion, and social platforms like IGTV, TikTok, and Twitch.
Zoom is a video platform, which enabled remote working. As such it competes with other large tech players like Google and Microsoft for the productivity space, and other startups like Slack and Go-To-Meetings.
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with the self-driving software.
Amazon is a consumer e-commerce platform with a diversified business model spanning across e-commerce, cloud, advertising, streaming, and more. Over the years, Amazon acquired several companies. As it operates across several industries, Amazon has a wide range of competitors across each of those industries. For instance, Amazon E-commerce competes with Shopify, Wix, Google, Etsy, eBay, BigCommerce.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
