Zillow’s critics may say that the company has never had the best interests of real estate agents at heart. But on the company’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call on Wednesday night, executives looked to set the record straight.
“As we work to streamline residential real estate transactions with our ‘Housing Super App,’ everything we build is designed to offer a benefit for both consumers and the industry,” Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman said during the call.
“Consumers and professionals experience a digital, streamlined, automated and delightful process in almost every other part of their lives, from rides and restaurant reservations to flights and lodging — and it’s reasonable we’d expect the same in real estate. That’s where Zillow comes in. We are building that truly integrated, digitized, end-to-end transaction experience.”
Growth in mortgage, rentals
Since flaming out of iBuying in late 2021, Zillow has gone all in on its “Super App” strategy, seeking to be a one-stop shop for home buyers and seller. In building out this plan, Zillow has expanded into mortgage, through Zillow Home Loans, and has grown its presence in rentals. These two sectors posted some of Zillow’s strongest growth during Q2 2025.
During the quarter, revenue from its mortgage operation was up 41% annually to $48 million, while Zillow’s rental segment posted 36% year-over-year revenue growth to $159 million. The residential for-sale segment posted 9% annual revenue growth to $434 million.
Zillow as a whole recorded quarterly revenue of $655 million, up 15% compared to the same period last year.
Additionally, Zillow recorded quarterly net income of $2 million, up from a net loss of $17 million in Q2 2024. During the first six months of 2025, Zillow has recorded total net income of $10 million, compared to its $40 million net loss during the first half of 2024.
According to Wacksman, much of this growth and improvement for the company is being driven by Zillow’s successful execution of its for-sale strategy.
“We know our strategy is working because consumers and real estate professionals like what we have to offer and because our for-sale revenue growth continues to outpace industry growth,” he said.
Capitalizing on momentum
Wacksman said Zillow is seeing this strategy come to life in its enhanced markets, where the company is working to connect high-intent consumers with Zillow partner agents.
“In Q2, 27% of connections came through the enhanced market experience on our way to a long-term goal of at least 75% of connections,” he said.
Wacksman added that other Zillow Group offerings — including Follow Up Boss and Zillow Home Loans — showed signs of strong adoption in these enhanced markets. Zillow Home Loans posted double-digit adoption rates in the enhanced markets.
“We continue to expand the Zillow Home Loans product suite. As of last week, we’ve broadened our down payment assistance program and enhanced our FHA loan offerings and select geographies in an effort to responsibly serve more qualified buyers,” Wacksman said. “These updates are part of our ongoing work to improve access to financing and scale our mortgage operations over time.”
Wacksman also highlighted the growth of Zillow Rentals, which he said is “scaling rapidly.”
“In Q2, Zillow Rentals had 2.4 million active rental listings, the most in the category. Multifamily properties are leading our rentals growth with multifamily revenue up 56% year over year and property count up 45% year over year to 64,000 at the end of Q2,” he said.
According to Wacksman, this growth has led Zillow to claim the No. 1 position in rentals traffic, with 36 million average monthly rental unique visitors in Q2 2025.
“We expect quarterly year-over-year rentals revenue growth to keep accelerating throughout 2025, with a clear path toward the billion-dollar-plus revenue opportunity in front of us,” he said. “We’re well positioned to keep capitalizing on the momentum we’ve built, scaling our marketplace and growing our share.”
Listing policy comments
While the earnings call was primarily focused on the strengthening pillars of Zillow’s “Super App,” company leaders also addressed the implementation of Zillow’s listing access standards policy. This bans listings that are not placed into the MLS within 24 hours of public marketing. The policy went into effect on June 30.
“We are quite pleased to see that the vast majority of the industry agrees with our listing standards, which were crafted to work alongside the listing cooperation rules that many MLSs and brokers already practice,” Wacksman said during the Q&A portion of the call.
“We love to see that the entire industry really has been encouraged to formally implement what most already believe — and that is, if you are going to market a listing publicly to some consumers, you should market it to all consumers.”
Wacksman said this practice benefits consumers and the industry as a whole.
“It’s a huge industry benefit, because if you’re an agent — whether you’re at a big brokerage or a small brokerage — to do your job effectively, you have to see all the content and be able to count on the MLS to have it all,” he said. “So we are really pleased that, early on, we’ve seen the majority of the industry largely adopt these standards.”
As Zillow and its leaders look ahead, they remain focused on growth, but they are not expecting any help from the macroeconomic environment.
“The story on the housing market is, it’s going to take a while to normalize,” said Jeremy Hoffman, Zillow’s chief financial officer. “The affordability challenge we have is really an availability problem, so mortgage rates easing helps on the margin, but we’re still dealing with the fact that we’re nearly 5 million homes underbuilt from not building out new construction inventory coming out of the global financial crisis.
While Zillow executives said they hope to see home prices come down, they are not factoring any “goodness” in the market into their projections.
“We are just planning to grow through that,” Hoffman said. “We are gaining share in for-sale (homes), in rentals, and we are doing that because the strategy we’re putting together allows us to build great products and services for the consumer and for the professional.”
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