Zillow put a toll booth on the American dream

For two decades, Zillow has assembled the pieces of a real estate empire.

It acquired Trulia, StreetEasy, and ShowingTime in a series of deals regulators allowed to proceed. It launched mortgage and closing products. It drew buyers, sellers, agents, brokers, and lenders into the same expanding system.

Zillow calls itself 'the front door to the housing market.' Regulators should act before the company installs a turnstile.

This year, Zillow accelerated.

In March, five of the country’s largest brokerages agreed to give Zillow early access to listings without offering rivals the same terms. In May, Zillow sued a major multiple listing service after it lost access to some listings.

Neither move necessarily violates antitrust law by itself. Taken together, however, they show how a company can stop competing within a market and begin positioning itself to control the market.

Zillow describes itself as “the most visited real estate app and website in the United States,” with an “ecosystem” covering “the entire home journey, from dreaming and shopping to renting, buying, selling, and financing.”

Its year-end 2025 filings reported 235 million average monthly unique users, up 6% from the previous year. Its CEO has boasted that Americans search for “Zillow” more often than they search for “real estate.”

The company’s ambitions match its reach. Zillow openly promotes what it calls a “housing super app,” a single platform designed to occupy every stage of the transaction.

That combination of audience, listings, services, and leverage should command antitrust scrutiny.

In March 2026, Zillow launched Zillow Preview, a premarket listing product. Keller Williams, HomeServices of America, RE/MAX, Side, and United Real Estate signed on as launch partners. Together, those firms represent roughly 30% of residential brokerage.

More than 60 additional brokerages have since joined.

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Those premarket listings appear on Zillow and Trulia and, through a separate agreement, Realtor.com. They do not appear on Homes.com, Redfin, or the traditional MLS system.

The arrangement resembles exclusive dealing: A platform with enormous consumer traffic secures early access to inventory from major suppliers and denies comparable access to competitors.

Imagine a shopping mall with 70% of the region’s foot traffic persuading its largest retailers to display new merchandise there first and nowhere else. The mall would no longer be attracting customers through better service alone. It would be restricting the merchandise competitors could offer.

Zillow Preview raises another concern: a commission-sharing arrangement that echoes practices challenged in the litigation against the National Association of Realtors.

When a Preview listing closes through Zillow’s Preferred Agent network, the listing agent receives 10% of the buy-side commission, according to the company’s terms. Zillow sets that rate.

The NAR litigation produced a $1.78 billion jury verdict and settlements exceeding $700 million. The cases challenged practices that tied buyer and seller compensation together and helped normalize commission rates.

Less than two years later, Zillow has created a system that appears to reconnect those commissions on terms established by Zillow itself.

The company is also using litigation aggressively.

In May 2026, Zillow sued Midwest Real Estate Data, the large Chicago-area MLS, and Compass, alleging that the two conspired to restrict its access to listings. The lawsuit came only weeks after Zillow secured exclusive premarket inventory from dozens of brokerages.

The apparent message to regional MLS systems was difficult to miss: Zillow may reserve inventory for itself, but others risk litigation if they restrict inventory from Zillow.

CoStar Group, which owns rival Homes.com, filed an amicus brief accusing Zillow of hypocrisy and arguing that Preview is designed to divert leads and steer borrowers toward Zillow-affiliated services rather than neutrally match buyers with homes.

Should Zillow prevail, it may not merely compete with the MLS system. It could begin replacing it.

The company’s ambitions extend well beyond listings.

Zillow Home Loans is now the country’s 25th-largest mortgage lender, and Zillow has identified mortgage growth as central to its future. The company also faces several pending class-action lawsuits alleging undisclosed referral fees and steering toward its own, potentially more expensive mortgage products.

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Those allegations remain to be tested in court. But they point to the core danger of vertical integration: A platform that dominates home searches may use that position to channel consumers toward its own agents, lenders, and closing services.

Strip away the antitrust terminology, and mortgage steering is easy to understand.

It can mean a worse rate on the largest purchase of an ordinary person’s life, arranged by the same company displaying photographs of the kitchen.

A quarter-point increase on a 30-year mortgage can cost a household tens of thousands of dollars. For a generation already struggling to buy its first home, some of the market’s apparent friction may be a toll imposed by the platform controlling the route.

Antitrust scholars sometimes call this a “monopoly broth”: an accumulation of practices that collectively entrench market power even when no single ingredient is plainly illegal.

In Zillow’s case, the ingredients may include exclusive access to premarket listings, commission arrangements, litigation against suppliers, and the use of platform dominance to steer consumers toward affiliated mortgage products. Each practice strengthens the others.

More exclusive listings attract more users. More users give Zillow greater leverage over brokers. Greater brokerage dependence creates more opportunities to sell leads and mortgages. The wider the ecosystem grows, the harder it becomes for any participant to refuse Zillow’s terms.

That is the regulatory problem.

The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general should examine whether Zillow is using dominance in home search to foreclose competitors and extract revenue from adjacent markets. Private plaintiffs who successfully challenged the NAR’s commission system will likely examine the same evidence.

The question is not whether Zillow has built a successful product. It plainly has.

The question is whether success in attracting homebuyers now allows Zillow to dictate who sees listings, how agents are compensated, which lenders receive referrals, and how much consumers pay.

Zillow calls itself “the front door to the housing market.” Regulators should act before the company installs a turnstile.