Creating a Better Real Estate Experience

At Zillow, our Zillow Premier Agent partners and customers are at the heart of every decision we make. These decisions are grounded in two pillars: partnership and innovation. Keeping hyper-focused on these two pillars enables us to deliver value to you, your business, and your clients. 

It’s important that we keep you updated as we innovate, learn and evolve to create an exceptional experience for all home shoppers. Today we announced a key change:   

Streamlining Listing Information

We are simplifying the way we receive listing data by becoming participants in MLSs across the country. This will enable us to deliver a comprehensive and effective home search experience for our customers. 

For compliance reasons, gaining access to these IDX feeds requires us to make some adjustments, including how agent photos appear on listings. Towards the end of the year, your presence on listings will look slightly different than before, but helping you maintain your ROI and connecting you with active shoppers remains a key driver for the work we are doing to move to IDX.

Here’s how these changes will benefit you and your clients:

• Agent listings front-and-center. We know buyers come to our sites to get the most accurate and up-to-date listing information, so we’re introducing a new search toggle to make it easier to filter between agent listings and other listings.
  
• Quicker listing updates. We’re speeding up our listing updates so that shoppers looking for a new home will see the most up-to-date information on homes and price changes — which should benefit you when connecting with potential buyers on our platform.
• Reach millions of home shoppers. Providing access to for-sale-by-agent homes listed across the country, directly from the MLS, will help you ensure your clients’ for-sale properties can be displayed on the most visited real estate website in the US, with more than 200 million unique visitors every month. 

We believe these changes will help us deliver a better experience when we connect you to home shoppers. As customer expectations change, our dedication to adapting and innovating is steadfast — and we believe it’s core to adding value to our partnership as you help your clients unlock life’s next chapter. 

Thank you, as always, for your partnership as we continue to deliver an exceptional real estate experience, together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are there other big changes coming that could impact my business or relationship with Zillow?

The way we do business with you today will remain largely unchanged — connecting your expertise and exceptional customer service skills with home shoppers will remain a core part of our business going forward. You are essential to our mission to provide a better real estate experience for all our home shoppers. 

Now, to simplify and improve the way we collect listing data, we’re moving from thousands of disparate data feeds to MLS internet data exchange (IDX) feeds. For compliance reasons, gaining access to these IDX feeds requires us to make some adjustments, including how agent photos appear on listings; however, our solutions will continue to help you maintain your ROI and brand presence while connecting you with active home shoppers, and we will keep you up to date on what, if any changes will impact you. We want to reassure you that you can expect to see the same share of voice for leads and connections.

Will this impact how listings are displayed on Zillow.com?

Buyer’s agent photos and contact information will now be showcased in a different module on the listing. While the appearance of agent photos may vary based on your local MLS advertising rules, you should not anticipate any significant changes to your visibility or connections volume.

What does this mean for my listings?

Your listings will continue to be displayed for the millions of consumers who come to Zillow when searching for a home, and listing attribution will be consistent with current IDX standards and legal requirements. 

This shift of ours does mean that we’ll no longer offer Featured Listings on Zillow and Trulia. We’re committed to providing and are currently developing better ways of supporting your listings’ visibility for the future.

To comply with MLS regulations, the way your buyer’s agent photos and contact information are displayed on listings will change slightly. Our goal is to provide a simplified experience for home shoppers.

We fully believe that this move will be better for the business of you, our partners. We will give you ample lead time to prepare for any changes that impact you, and will work closely with you to make the transition as smooth as possible.

If you are moving to IDX and their display standards, does that mean that there will no longer be any prominent branding for me as the buyer’s agent like on other brokerage sites?

While a handful of MLSs have stricter advertising requirements, the majority of agents will not see a change to their presence on Zillow. Buyer’s agents’ photos will still be surfaced on the listing page, where home-shoppers can discover you and connect. 

You are essential to our mission to provide a better real estate experience for all home shoppers. As always, we will continue to arm our Zillow Premier Agent partners with the best tools, technologies and data to help you delight clients, and ultimately help people move forward into their new homes.

What other Zillow products and features will this impact? 

We have to make some product adjustments for compliance reasons, but we fully believe that this move will be better for the business of our partners. We will give you ample lead time to prepare for any changes that impact you, and will work closely with you to make the transition as smooth as possible.

The way we do business with you today will remain unchanged — connecting your expertise and exceptional customer service skills with home shoppers will remain a core part of our business going forward. You are essential to our mission to provide a better real estate experience for all our home shoppers. 

We’re investing in improvements to our Zillow Premier Agent program to get much closer to the transaction to satisfy today’s consumer expectations. We are committed to working with you, the best in class agents and brokers, which is why we launched Best of Zillow. We have also been vetting potential buyers more thoroughly before connecting them via live transfers to our agent partners. With the customer as our North Star, we have made these moves to deliver the experiences they expect in today’s world.