How Zillow Built Its Business

Here's what's happening. If you're a consumer and you want to sell your house, your expectation is that everybody in the marketplace can see it. Once upon a time before the internet, everybody seeing it meant all real estate agents could see your house through our Multiple Listing Service. When we saw your house, we could then tell the people we worked with about your house. Now this happened whether it was in the book or it was in the internet system that we had that was controlled by the members of that system, which would be the REALTORS® who paid the dues and belonged to that marketplace. Because the MLS has always just been a marketplace. When the internet came along and many of the multiple listing services sold all of that data to the Zillows and the homes.coms and the realtor.coms and the Trulias, if you remember Trulia, they got gobbled up a while back. And all of these online marketplaces. Now, as a consumer, your expectation is not just that every realtor in the marketplace see it, but you expect the world to see it. Zillow built a business model on the information that came from the marketplace that the people who paid to be a part of the marketplace created. So the marketplace belonged to the members because it was good for the people they served, and then that marketplace sold access to all these other websites. Good, bad, or indifferent, that genie was out of the bottle. So what's happening right now is that Zillow's business model is very threatened by the fact that some companies want to pull part of their marketplace information out of that marketplace, which would keep it out of Zillow's hands. It's a very chicken and egg thing. So these lawsuits are Zillow fighting with the marketplace, fighting with the competitor who wants to pull stuff out.