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Two weeks ago, Zillow co-founder and co-executive chair Rich Barton surprised the industry when he announced he’d be stepping away from the CEO chair for the second time in 14 years, handing the reins to longtime executive and COO Jeremy Wacksman. He said Wacksman was the perfect choice to lead the company into a new era, focused on accelerating the creation of the industry’s first “one-click nirvana” for consumers and agents.
Jeremy Wacksman
“Zillow’s business is firing on all cylinders and performing well through a challenging real estate macro,” Barton said. “… 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.”
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A week into his new role, Wacksman sat down with Inman to talk about what it means to be CEO, the value of portals in a post-settlement world, the benefits of artificial intelligence, and the opportunities and challenges that have come with the latest round of movements in the portal wars.
Inman: Thanks for taking the time to talk today. You’ve been with Zillow since 2009, and have cycled through a few key positions. What does it feel like to have Rich [Barton] pass the CEO baton to you? What parts of his approach would you like to continue? And what would you like to do differently?
Wacksman: I’ve been here 15 years this fall so I’ve seen a lot and worn a lot of hats, as you said. I’ve been really grateful and thankful to be able to work with Rich and [Zillow co-founder] Lloyd [Frink] and learn from them. I’m also grateful to have them still engaged in the business and as a resource to support me and the broader leadership team.
With your question on lessons learned, I’ve worked on a lot of parts of business. I came here to work on product and marketing. I worked on the early mobile apps and helping evolve Zillow from a desktop search engine to a mobile-first company. I’ve worn many, many hats since then. I worked for a long time on building the brand and the audience that many of your readers know and love. And even three years ago, as I started to get more involved in operationalizing the business around our housing super app strategy, I’ve been closely involved in connecting our consumer and agent businesses together.
The thing I’ve learned from Rich and the team is just this relentless focus on both the consumer, but also on innovation and innovating for the consumer and the real estate professional. We all have this dream of this housing super app that can get the transaction done more easily. It can be on your phone. It can be done over coffee, as [Inman founder] Brad Inman likes to talk about.
What I’ve learned is that we do the technology and build the technology for consumers, but also for our agents and the industry at large. [It] is a strategy that we’ve seen play out over the last two decades as a company. It’s the culture and DNA around that innovation and around that consumer empowerment that I’ve learned, and I’m excited to help champion and move forward into our next decade as a company.
Rich shared a bit of what Zillow’s next decade will look like during his latest Inman Connect Las Vegas session, and the focus on bringing order to and digitizing the real estate transaction. Then in an interview with Real Estate News, he said the company isn’t in the business of selling leads, which I thought was an interesting comment, especially as much of the conversation about portals this year has been about evaluating the strength of a buy-side model vs a sell-side model in a post-settlement world.
What are your thoughts on that? How does Zillow plan to shift the way agents and consumers think about portals and the value they offer in the marketplace?
You’ve heard us talk about the [Zillow] Housing Super App, right? Our vision is that buyers and sellers can use their phones to tour houses, start financing conversations, get connected with great real estate agents [and] bring all that together in an all-in-one platform to the consumer. They can go take tours with great agents, they can get financing questions answered, they can connect with professionals and learn more about them, and ideally, ultimately, go all the way through to signing, and buy and sell through the app.
To do that — to enable that vision, of course — you have to build great software for consumers. But you [also] have to build great software and tools to empower the real estate agents and the professionals that they’re going to work with. And what Rich talked about at Inman a couple of weeks ago is that doesn’t just mean software for the subset of agents that are Premier Agents or working with Zillow consumers directly. That means great software for the industry at large.
We have invested billions of dollars building and acquiring technology, products and software solutions that we offer to the community at large, to brokers, to MLSs, and to all agents, because the goal is to help professionalize and modernize the transactions across the industry. That’s things like ShowingTime, a reservation management system for home showings, making it more delightful for sellers and seller’s agents to organize and schedule showings and making it more delightful for buyers to click a button and book a tour to go meet a great buyer’s agent.
That’s software like Zillow Showcase, which is this new 3D-powered, AI-powered virtual home tour that buyers love, engage with more deeply, spend more time with — and it helps seller’s agents and sellers showcase the home better and get the home sold more quickly and for more money. So those types of things are all required.
We have to get more software and more technology out there in the hands of all the great agents to help the buyers and sellers sell their homes in the more modern ecosystem that’s coming. That’s what Rich talked about. That’s a key to our strategy. When we talk about the housing super app, we all think about it as the consumer, the buyer and the seller, but what’s behind the glass, what’s behind the scenes is all this fantastic software powering the real estate professionals.
Zillow has removed friction from the home search, touring and listing process. But what are those remaining pain points you’d like to solve for agents and consumers?
The biggest opportunity that remains for all of us is helping consumers get more educated and empowered and helping professionals get more efficient. When we talk to our great agent partners, we constantly are reminded of how much time they spend not doing the work they love to do, right? Not consulting, not advising, not negotiating, but paperwork and lead management and routing and all the things that are back office tasks.
We recently acquired Follow Up Boss, an industry-leading CRM for agent teams, and we’ve been investing with them to help provide more ability for teams to organize and become more efficient so that they can spend more time with clients, and less time on the busy work. I give that example because when I think about what the next frontier of technology is, it’s generative [artificial intelligence].
And when I think about what generative AI is going to bring to our industry, I think it’s going to help agents, loan officers, practitioners [and] be a great co-pilot to help elevate them to do what they do best and take away the busy work, the data collection, the things that they have to do to get done in the transaction that you don’t want to be doing as a great professional. You want the software to do it for you.
I think that’s still one of the big untapped pieces of potential to make this digital transaction happen, and I think technology has been moving us in that direction for a while. Now generative AI really has the potential to help get us even more elevated as an industry.
AI has been a huge theme this year, and the rise of generative AI has been met with, I think, equal parts excitement and fear. What do you think Zillow’s role is in raising the industry’s IQ about generative AI and learning how to use it to their benefit?
Any time new technology or a new platform comes, it is very natural to get scared. And I’m here to say — and I think Zillow’s strong belief is — AI has the potential to elevate professionals and is not to be feared. It’s to be used.
And just think about the dawn of the internet and then the smartphone revolution. Every time, technology has been something that you could fear and be scared of, but if you turn around and look in the rearview mirror, all it’s done is help inform and empower users and start to make people’s jobs easier and start to help elevate the professional. And I think that’s what you’re going to see with generative AI.
Our role at Zillow is to help pioneer and innovate and experiment with that software on behalf of agents, and we’re doing that right now. We have great AI teams innovating and experimenting on ways to help turn agents into super agents and find ways to delight consumers by empowering agents to be smarter, faster and better at how they respond with and work with customers.
So, I think it is a natural reaction to be fearful of what’s coming. And especially with AI, there’s a lot of, “will AI be good or will AI be evil,” right? There’s “will AI take over the world?” We don’t believe that. We’ve seen so many technology revolutions and the ability for it to empower and make our lives better tends to win out over time.
So, I think it’s exactly the right question to ask. And agents who lean in and use these new AI power tools, they’re going to find it’s going to help them do what they do best. They’re going to find it’s going to help solve problems for them in ways that they hadn’t even thought it could.
What about consumers? How are they experiencing the tech revolution in real estate? What is it going to take to help them stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the industry, especially with the commission changes?
We have been focused on consumers since our founding, and what we found is technology will make a consumer more empowered. It will raise the bar for what a consumer expects software to be able to do. That typically makes the consumer a smarter shopper, and a smarter shopper is typically a more transaction-ready shopper, right? I think you should hope and expect [AI] means consumers are even more ready to work with you when they raise their hand or press the button to connect with you.
We’ve published our kind of beliefs for consumers that we’ve had for a long time around making sure consumers and professionals have access to real estate information [and] making sure consumers can choose independent representation.
We firmly believe that the majority of buyers and sellers will choose and need independent representation to help them get this transaction done, and the buyers and sellers should have transparency regarding agent fees and their right to negotiate them.
Thanks for taking the time to explain that, and I guess all this — the Zillow super app, building and acquiring tech, creating a more integrated transaction experience — all feeds into the portal wars. Zillow is at the head of the pack, and with that position, you guys haven’t really jumped into the drama that’s unfolded over the past year.
CoStar has certainly gained attention with ‘Your Listing, Your Lead,” and Redfin and Realtor.com are upping their value propositions with new products. What are your thoughts on this new wave of competition? What are the opportunities and challenges in battling for the attention and loyalty of agents and consumers alike?
The great thing about our strategy at Zillow is that it’s ours to control. And it’s unique to what we’re trying to do. We’re really the only ones working on modernizing the real estate industry digitally for consumers and for agents.
We’re very fortunate that we built this great brand over 20 years. Consumers trust us. We have two-thirds of all homebuyers on Zillow, and the majority of those folks come to us organically. They come to us because we build great products and services that engage them and cause them to want to use us and come back.
Now our opportunity is how can we help more of them start to take that transaction step, you know, get a financing question answered, schedule a tour, spend time on a virtual tour, make the right decision for picking the right agent, connect with a great professional to start a conversation about buying a home. That’s a really hard, complex problem that requires a lot of software, a lot of innovation, and it requires a great partner network.
There’s so much innovation left to do in the industry, to deliver on that vision that we’ve talked about. We’re techies. That’s what we get excited about — building this amazing software and these experiences for customers and for partners. And we know if we do that, we will grow the number of transactions we help those consumers do, and we’ll grow the number of transactions that our great agent partners do from the customers that they meet on Zillow.
We’re heading toward the end of 2024. What’s on your mind for Zillow in 2025? Where would you like the company to be in terms of your major goals?
We’re focused on bringing the housing super app to more consumers and more agents. That’s our focus. That requires our software, the consumers on Zillow, and great agent partners using our software.
We’re still very early in delivering that integrated vision we all know can be done through the phone. We have years and years of innovation left ahead. And so you should expect to see more innovation from us on behalf of the consumer and more great software that, hopefully, agents and teams and brokers and MLSs are excited to get in their hands and start using.
