Social impact and innovation

We expect everyone who uses our products and services to comply with federal, state and local fair housing laws. Externally, we represent this through our Good Neighbor and Conduct Policy, and Respectful Renting Pledge. Internally, we put fair housing first throughout the company. We enable this by requiring annual fair housing training for all employees, as well as tailored training for specific operations, such as Zillow Home Loans.

To prevent unlawful and discriminatory language from being published in rental listing descriptions, we deploy content filters that are consistent with our Respectful Renting Pledge and that align with federal, state and local fair housing laws. We also educate our customers about certain state and local antidiscrimination laws directly on listings. Additionally, we implement fair housing compliance controls to support a fair and equitable experience for buyers and sellers whom we connect to our agent partners.

We address affordability for both renters and buyers by mitigating upfront costs, increasing supply and reducing friction in the transaction.

For renters: To give renters clarity on costs and help them compare affordability across listings, we provide a detailed breakdown of all move-in and monthly expenses for property managers to include on rental listings. Renters can also use a single, reusable universal application to save time and money. Our platform features income-restricted and affordable listings, including options that support housing vouchers and other nontraditional income sources. To help renters build credit, we offer renters a way to report on-time rent payments to major credit bureaus.

For buyers: Our BuyAbility tool helps buyers explore listings that fit within their ideal monthly payment and their maximum buying power. In addition, we offer prospective home buyers personalized resources for down payment assistance. This resource also connects veterans and active-service military members to our lender partners to assist with their U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs loan applications.

We use our proprietary housing market data, research and analysis to empower consumers, industry professionals, policymakers, government agencies and academics to help support housing production, access and affordability. Our tools include housing metrics such as the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), which tracks changes in home values in a given area over time; the ZHVI-by-race metric, which links race and home values; the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), which tracks changes in typical rent asking prices over time; our forecast of rent inflation in the consumer price index; our rental market Dashboard; our New Construction Dashboard; our Affordability Dashboard; and other proprietary measures of housing market health.

We partner with public and private housing organizations and real estate data providers to publish monthly market updates, research briefs and in-depth reports that enhance housing market visibility. We share our research and regularly contribute to meetings with government agencies, as well as media and nonprofit organizations.

As a company that values inclusion and belonging, we integrate digital accessibility into our work in a number of ways. Our design system prioritizes accessible design elements. We equip teams with the training and resources to build accessible products and gather insights from people with disabilities through user research studies and our Accessibility Council. To help us design and build accessible products, we strive to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2, level AA). We’re also exploring the potential to use AI technologies to dismantle barriers to digital accessibility.

Our responsible AI work is guided by our cross-functional Ethical AI Working Group, which meets regularly to align with compliance requirements and evaluate opportunities to improve the equity, fairness and inclusiveness of the real estate marketplace with the use of AI. Our AI Principles inform the responsible development, evaluation and deployment of AI technologies. Our open-source Fair Housing Classifier is designed to detect language that goes against federal, state and local antidiscrimination laws.

We use fraud-detection processes and have taken other measures to identify fraudulent activity on our mobile applications, websites and internal systems. Our products use different mechanisms to ingest and identify risks, and we monitor activity on our platforms to reduce the threat of fraud.