Peter Lohmann argues that real estate professionals face a de facto duty to list on Zillow even if they object to the platform, because refusing could delay sales and hurt clients financially. He finds this emerging obligation alarming.
The thing that concerns me is if I owned a property and I wanted to, hey, forget Zillow, I'm not paying them, I'm just going to list on these other websites. Great. That's wonderful for me. If I'm representing a property owner in a fiduciary capacity, I can't get on my high horse about Zillow because now I'm interfering with my client's ability to rent out their property effectively, to just blanket say we're not using Zillow because I don't like their policies, I don't like their rental application or whatever. Now suddenly my client who owns the property is sitting vacant for 3 weeks longer than they should because I'm making a principled stand. That's not appropriate. But that's what I'm scared of is we've now gotten to that point where you basically have a fiduciary duty to, to use Zillow. Like, that's insane.
