Name: Why Zillow is Betting on AI to Disrupt Homebuying
Uploaded: 2025-04-02
Duration: 5 min 15 s
Description: Zillow wants to reinvent the home-buying experience using AI. Leveraging Zestimate and other new tools and acquisitions, the property platform is aiming to become a one-stop shop for renting and buying a home. But just how central is the Zestimate to Zillow’s strategy, and has it helped or hurt the company’s mission?

Zillow wants to reinvent the home-buying experience using AI. Leveraging Zestimate and other new tools and acquisitions, the property platform is aiming to become a one-stop shop for renting and buying a home. But just how central is the Zestimate to Zillow’s strategy, and has it helped or hurt the company’s mission?

Why Zillow is Betting on AI to Disrupt Homebuying

Zillow has invested over $4 billion in tech and product innovations over the past decade.

Real_Estate

Zillow wants to reinvent the home-buying experience using AI. 

This is the biggest financial transaction that most people will take in America in their lives. Zillow is betting on AI to simplify the path to homeownership. Boy, I'll tell you what's one of the most stressful things I've ever had to do, and that's buying a house. The real estate platform wants to be a go to for all. Parts of the home buying process and key to this is its signature estimate. I'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know what his estimate is. amid criticism of the tool's accuracy and its use of AI, Wills estimate and the company's use of AI tools help it maintain its dominance in the property tech market. So I think when a lot of people think about technology and Zillow, a first thought is estimate. Can you explain just a bit to start how that technology has changed over time? Zestimate is one of the first machine learning algorithms we ever put out at Zillow. It used to be this family of very interconnected, complicated models, and now at the center it's a neural architecture, and what that enables for us is. The estimate now looks at both structured information like the location, the beds, the bathrooms, as well as unstructured information. Think things like the images, the 3D walkthrough to get that deep sense of the quality of the home and the value of the home, and that's really improved the accuracy of the estimates. The estimate uses data points like tax assessments and sales transactions to provide a natural starting point for home buyers. I think this estimates the line in the sand. everyone's saying which side are we going to end up landing at when this transaction closes. If you really kind of look at this estimate, it's very good at kind of saying, hey, this is an estimate. This is kind of a potential range outcome, because the trick with residential real estate is what has kind of been done to the inside. We play Zillow as kind of a category winner who's been taking Sharon as essentially a ubiquitous dominant brand within a category, which is residential real estate competitively. Speaking, really no one's near Zillow in terms of traffic volume, the leads they can generate. Zillow's traffic volume is almost double compared to Holmes.com, with Zillow reporting an average of 217 million monthly visitors and Homes.com's reported 110 million monthly visitors. But the estimate has also faced criticism, frequently fluctuating home values, a lack of human touch and price predictions, and a failed. Home buying program and Zillow is currently edged out by competitors on price accuracy. Redfin reports their estimate has a 1.99% median error rate for on-market homes compared to Zillow's 2.4%. For them, if it's problematic, it's actually a much bigger risk to their brand. If there's a problem with his estimate, it's really distorting folks' expectations. The fact that their traffic volume is still leading. Still dominant in the industry, um, and this enabled them to add more tools which suggest that this estimate is a net positive for the company and consumers, you know, as a publisher of content, they understand if you put bad things out there, it can absolutely destroy. Your brand and all the data would suggest that they've done a very good job at making, making sure folks really understand what it is and it's a starting point. Some question whether tools like Zestimate take data at face value, ignoring local histories. These concerns are most acute in gentrifying neighborhoods where rising property values can overshadow the lived experiences of longtime residents. Zillow emphasizes that a critical aspect of building their technology involves. Programming it to be fair and equitable for all users, we make sure that people of different socioeconomic backgrounds or racial backgrounds aren't getting a disparate result. We're doing a lot with large language models and in real estate agents or digital experiences can't answer certain questions. We actually had to build a model that detects those kinds of questions and cuts them off. And we put that out as open source this last summer. Zillow's investments in AI tech include a $400 million cash acquisition of a customer relationship management system, a virtual staging company, and a media software and content management platform. The company has invested over $4 billion in tech and. The innovations over the past decade, I think AI can do a lot of the stuff that you just don't need to be involved in note taking, drafting what home to look at, seeing if it's available for a tour, but there's still that agent buyer human element of going, Hold on, I have unique needs, unique wants. They've changed over time. They really focused on a strategy of a super app. They are really creating a platform where you can find a house to buy. If you're not ready to buy, you can find an apartment to rent and maybe you're renting and now you're kind of between both. They're helping you figure out what you can afford and they can help underwrite mortgages or connect you to a mortgage broker. So they are solving all of the pieces for someone who essentially needs to figure out where. Live for Zillow, accuracy and customer trust is an important part of creating its AI tech. We want to make sure people are confident in the answers they're getting from us, be it, you know, the price or beds and bathroom stats or something that AI is generating. And so we do a lot of testing to make sure people understand and know how to interact, and we find that most people already expect AI is behind the scenes.