ZILLOW GROUP INC CLASS A Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sure. Yeah. We've been in existence for about 20 years now. I'd say the first 15 years were really around building what I'd call the dream and shop layer for our business. So what most people know us for today is you go on Zillow and you dream and shop. That has yielded great benefit to us. So our brand is quite strong. We're anywhere from 70%-75% of category share in real estate online. The term Zillow is more often Googled than the term real estate, and 80% of our traffic is direct to us. That comes from great product and innovation and really building that dream and shop layer. And it comes from having more content than anyone else across existing homes for sale, rentals, and new construction. So the shopping experience is more robust than you'll find anywhere else.

That was, I'd say, the first 15 years and the mission around really building a big consumer brand. Over the last five years, we've been building out, as fast as we can, a transactional layer and underlying operating system for real estate. I'll click into each of those because I think they're important. They're the things that are driving the revenue growth but probably less understood to a day-to-day consumer. On the underlying operating system front, we now power 90% of all tours in the country with Zillow through ShowingTime. Dotloop sees 50% of all offers in the country, another piece of software that we own. Our Rich Media, which is proprietary technology that we built and developed around floor plans and 3D media virtual walkthroughs, that's on more than 10% of all listings in the country today. In our biggest markets, it's upwards of 30%.

Last but not least is Follow Up Boss, which is a CRM that we bought now about three years ago. That is the CRM for the most productive real estate agents in the country. That is the first thing they log into on a day-to-day basis. We have about 138,000 active users of that on a monthly basis, which is up over 20% year over year. Within the most productive real estate agents, the folks that we work with, that we call Preferred Agents, who really work with our consumers, pretty much all of those Preferred Agents who are the most productive agents in the country use Follow Up Boss. We have the dream and shop layer, we have the operating system layer, and then we have the transactional layer. That transactional layer has been the big set of bets that we've made over the past few years.

It's really been around move the brand from just dream and shop to buy, sell, rent, and finance. Underlying those words has been really good growth. Zillow Home Loans has become a top 25 lender in the country. We continue to take share both in buy-side and sell-side transactions with Preferred. We are rapidly growing our rentals business on the back of that strategy as well. So that's been the strategic evolution. Started with dream and shop, moved into operating system for real estate professionals, and a transactional layer. The biggest challenge we've had in the category, and the biggest challenge with the real estate category online is it is a long shopping cycle, it is an infrequent purchase, and a lot of it still happens offline. Now we fast-forward to today.

AI gives us the opportunity to really accelerate and reinforce all three of those layers and give people so much more advice than we were able to do when it was solely map-based search. In each of those layers, dream and shop, we are now able to marry a really comprehensive and good visual search with a conversational assistant to learn more about what you're doing from a dreaming and shopping perspective than we were ever able to do before. We can answer so many more questions with AI and having an assistant guide you through that process. On the operating system layer, we are great builders of software. We have made the products better with AI, and we are the most capable technologists in the real estate space. The software strength that we have from those assets I highlighted earlier get only stronger with AI.

Last but not least, the transactional layer. There's so much more advice we can give people using AI in the transactional layer than we were ever able to do when it was solely map-based search. We look at today and say in the way that we've built the business and the underlying layers that we now have, AI becomes a reinforcement mechanism and an accelerant. To finish all that off, we've been executing quite well through this period of time as we've been on this strategy. The company's grown revenue 29% annually since being public at a 29% CAGR. Last few years, we've grown revenue mid-teens in a housing market that's been as challenged as it's ever been. We're growing profits faster than revenue.

We're growing net income faster than both EBITDA and revenue, and we've shrunk the share count by, call it, 10% over the last, call it, three or four years as well.

Yeah. It's been a pretty seamless transition. I stepped into the role about a month ago, alongside our last earnings call. I've been at the company for almost a decade now. I've been heavily involved in the strategy and operations of the company through that period of time. Know the leaders well, I've worked with the management team. I think combining the roles, what I look forward to and what I've enjoyed even in the first month since, has just been, can we move with more speed? Are we able to-- The strategy feels pretty well set. The structural growth algorithm is intact, and now it's how fast can we go and capture that? Going back to the first question, how much can AI really accelerate the business strategy as well?

Yeah. For those of you that may not be as familiar with Zillow, what we're doing is we are moving the primary monetization model with real estate agents from a pay upfront ad-based model to a success-based model when a transaction closes. That is the move from market-based pricing to Zillow Preferred, which Mike just called out. That is a better business model for us because it allows us to more tightly integrate with the real estate agents that are working with our customers. It allows us to be more directive on the software and tooling that they use in service of those consumers. Then it allows us to better integrate services like Zillow Home Loans because we are working with the real estate agents in a more tightly integrated manner. So that's the reason why we're doing it.