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After almost five years back at the helm of the company he co-founded, Zillow Group CEO Rich Barton is passing the baton to Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Wacksman effective immediately. Barton stepped down once before, with co-founder Spencer Rascoff taking the reins from 2010 to 2019, while Barton focused on his duties as the executive chairman of Zillow Group. Barton returned as Zillow Group’s CEO in 2019.
Rich Barton
“Zillow’s business is firing on all cylinders and performing well through a challenging real estate macro,” Barton said in a prepared statement. “We’ve built and integrated products, completed strategic acquisitions, enhanced our agent partner network, and leaned in hard on our Mortgages and Rentals businesses.”
“This is due in no small part to the leadership of Jeremy Wacksman, with the past three years being a time of particularly impressive innovation for the company,” he added. “Lloyd [Frink, Zillow Group’s executive chair] and I could not be more confident in Jeremy as CEO, in the caliber of the broader team and in Zillow’s bright future.”
Wacksman joined Zillow in 2009 as the vice president of marketing and product management, a role that drew on his prior seven years of brand and product management experience with Trilogy Software, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft Xbox.
From there, Wacksman was promoted to chief marketing officer in 2015 and then president of the Zillow brand in 2018. Wacksman was promoted again in 2021 to chief operating officer.
“With the strength of Zillow’s brand, our highly engaged audience and a steadily growing business portfolio, we are in a great position to capture meaningful transaction share for years to come,” Wacksman said of his latest appointment. “The work we’re doing to bring the integrated transaction to life through exceptional tech solutions for consumers and agents will transform residential real estate.
“I love this company and its mission, and I am honored to lead our extraordinary team into the next phase of Zillow’s growth,” he added.
Wacksman’s journey has been a winding road.
Jeremy Wacksman | Credit: LinkedIn
As the VP of marketing and product management, he oversaw the growth of Zillow’s mobile apps, and as CMO, he helped solidify the company’s place as a real estate and pop culture icon, with Zillow becoming synonymous with the home search process in the U.S. As president, he oversaw the 2018 rollout of Zillow Offers, the portal’s now-defunct iBuying business.
As COO, he began focusing on making the homebuying process “one-click nirvana” by strengthening the connective threads among the company’s key segments — Premier Agent, Zillow Rentals, Zillow Offers, dotloop, and Zillow Home Loans. Barton said he had “full confidence” in Wacksman’s ability to deliver a more cohesive consumer experience amid an intensifying industrywide quest to create the ultimate all-in-one transaction flow.
“You’ve heard us talk a lot about wanting to create this more seamless experience for customers; we’ve called that [Real Estate 2.0],” Wacksman told Inman shortly after becoming COO. “[Our segments] have all grown really well, and they’ve started to talk to each other, but they’ve all grown relatively independently because they are fast-growing new things. What we’re finding is, as customers discover these services, they want that one-click nirvana.”
COVID-induced market fluctuations threw a wrench into Zillow and Wacksman’s plans in November 2021 with the closure of Zillow Offers. The demise of Zillow Offers didn’t keep the company down for long, with Wacksman and fellow members of the leadership team turning their attention to the maturation of Zillow’s Super App, teaming with rivals Redfin and Realtor.com on syndicating 3D home tours and rental listings and throwing Zillow’s hat back into the iBuying ring through a partnership with Opendoor.
The company also focused on making a series of savvy acquisitions, including the late 2021 purchase of agent favorite ShowingTime+ and the 2023 purchases of Follow Up Boss and Aryeo. ShowingTime+, in particular, has become the backbone of Zillow’s push to strengthen its value proposition to listing and buyer’s agents, respectively, as the industry barrels toward several landmark changes to commissions and heated competition from CoStar-owned portal Homes.com and its “Your Listing, Your Lead” model.
“Zillow is the leading product innovator in residential real estate, with features such as Real Time Touring, Listing Showcase, and Zillow Home Loans pre-qualified buyers,” Wacksman said in a first-quarter shareholders letter. “We believe that agents who work with our high-intent customers and use our industry software tools are best positioned to accelerate their share in any version of an industry evolution from here.”
“Orienting our business around the best agent teams — those who provide superior customer experiences, have a proven ability to scale, and make the most money to invest alongside us — positions us well for potential shifts within the profession,” he added.
At Inman Connect Las Vegas last week, Barton laid the groundwork for Wacksman’s time at the helm with his prescient keynote about the next iteration of the portal experience. That experience, he said, will focus on bringing order to a chaotic “multi-party, multi-partner, multistage” transaction process by investing in technology, partnering with competitors, and staying in tune with what consumers and agents need to make homebuying as easy as purchasing a latte.
“You all may not know this, but less than half of our company’s revenue now comes from buyers agents, lead generation or original business model,” he said. “Our growth and opportunity as a company now comes from investing in this array of digital workflow, tools and technologies for the industry as a whole.”
“We did not build, invest in and integrate these products to keep them inside the walled garden,” he added. “We did it to make them broadly available and to power your businesses.”
Although he’s no longer CEO, Barton will remain on the Zillow Group Board of Directors and will serve as co-executive chair alongside Zillow co-founder and current executive chair Lloyd Frink. Wacksman will also receive a place on the Board.
