Peter Lohmann argues Zillow's rental listing fees are confusing and unfair, with a mix of per-listing and flat charges that lack transparency. Unlike Google, which built a sophisticated long-term monetization strategy, Zillow's leadership takes a lazy short-term approach with inconsistent pricing and ranking practices.
So like a better website's gonna rank better on, on the paid Google. And, and I feel like Zillow could do something so similar to this, just basically copy paste it. He who's willing to pay the most for rental listings gets to be on top of the search results. But instead there's like, nope, $2 a listing per month. But it's like they have so many different ways they price this out to different people. Sometimes it's per listing per month, sometimes that's just a flat monthly fee. Sometimes it's all over the map and. You get the sense that you, it's not a fair process. Can I make an observation about this? Yeah.
So what's remarkable is Google was in the same position Zillow was in, arguably a, a more dominant position, right? They were already the freaking monopoly. Yeah. On, on search. Yet they still did an excellent job at pursuing what would usually only reveal itself in a real competitive marketplace. They created something that was really sort of idealistic that for all the reasons you described, right? Like Zillow, it's a leadership problem. Who at Zillow is making these decisions? And, and it's almost the lazy path to like, well, who the hell cares? Like we've already got the market, whatever you want. What it's like not putting a lot of thought into it, not being really deliberate, not being like, like really long-term focused and being sophisticated like Google was.
