In this monologue, property‑management veteran Peter Lohmann warns that Zillow has become an existential threat to rental‑industry operators by monopolizing renter demand. He explains how Zillow now aggregates the majority of renter eyeballs, delivering 70%+ of leads that turn into leases, and can therefore dictate pricing, application forms, lease terms, and security‑deposit policies. Lohmann cites recent FTC antitrust action that accused Zillow and Redfin of colluding to suppress competition, including a $100 million payment from Zillow to Redfin to exit the rental‑advertising market. He recounts his own firm’s decision to cancel its paid Zillow Premier program—despite threats from Zillow that visibility would plummet—and reports that lead flow remained unchanged. To replace Zillow’s paid exposure, he switched to CoStar’s portfolio (Apartments.com, Homes.com), paying for premium placement that he says yields measurable visibility gains. Lohmann urges other property‑management companies to cancel their paid Zillow accounts, experiment with alternatives, and collectively explore ways to reclaim control over direct access to renters, likening Zillow to a toll gate in front of a bakery. The talk blends persuasive criticism, personal anecdote, and a rallying call for industry coordination.
Chapters
Let's talk about the Zillow problem in property management. So Zillow has quietly become the biggest existential threat that we face. I think it's worse than regulators. I think it's worse than your most horrible nightmare tenant. So let me tell you a little bit about why this is and why I don't think you should be paying for Zillow whatsoever. And spoiler alert, we stopped paying for them. So the way I think about this is property management is a two-sided marketplace. So we function as kind of a middle marketplace between supply of rental homes and apartments, which we get access to through our agreements with our property owners, and demand, which is renters, people who are looking for places to live. And for a long time, we've been really focused on the supply. We do a lot of work to figure out how to get in front of property owners and how to convince them to sign up for our services. And we've really kind of taken for granted the demand side of this little marketplace that we run, which is these renters, we always just kind of assume that if we had the homes and apartments for rent, they would be there, we would have access to them. Well, what's been going on in the background is Zillow has kind of quietly gobbled up all of the listing websites and online portals where renters are actually looking for homes and apartments, and they've also drastically improved their own product. So if you're a renter and you go on Zillow and you start looking for homes for rent, their product is actually awesome. And that's a good thing for consumers. But what's really happened, and I think it kind of happened without anyone realizing, is Zillow has aggregated the demand of renter eyeballs. We now are completely reliant on Zillow for renter leads, full stop. In most marketplaces, Zillow delivers 70-plus percent of the leads that actually turn into signed leases. So if Zillow were to cut off that spigot, we're done. We are not going to be able to lease homes effectively whatsoever. You're going to see lead times go way up. It's going to take forever to lease homes and your owners are going to be angry and your staff's not going to know what to do. And so this problem of Zillow really being in control is really unsettling. It freaks me out because they can basically say and do whatever they want. They can put policies into place that we don't like. And I'll give you a few examples in a second. The other thing they can do is they can just start charging whatever they want. And a lot of you are already paying Zillow. I did for many years. Some of you may remember, you know, Zillow used to be free. Let's start with that. It used to be free and then they started charging. First it was a little bit and then it was more and now it's a lot. Some of you are paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month to Zillow for their Premier Program. And if you actually look in the details of what that gives you, there's not a lot of information and it's all supplied by Zillow. There's no independent studies that have looked at the effectiveness of their paid program or paid partner program or whatever they call it. So you can imagine that at this point, they can essentially charge whatever they want for that. And I expect in the future they will. They will require you to use it and they will charge, whatever they want for you to have access and get your listings up on their marketplace and get access to those renter eyeballs. I'm going to tell you about how we stopped paying and what happened when we did that. But let me paint another picture of some other things they could do, some other levers they can pull besides price. So Zillow could do a couple of scary things in the name of doing what's right for renters, right? They could require you to use their rental application. How's this? You only get to use Zillow's rental application. And guess what's not on there? No questions about criminal history, no credit report, no credit score, or maybe you can't charge anything for it, for processing it. This is just a couple examples off the top of my head of the direction they can and likely will go as they gain more and more control of this renter marketplace. They could also do things like require you to use their standard lease or require some specific type of security deposit arrangement. No more alternative security deposits, no more double deposit for high-risk tenants, no more risk mitigation fee. These are all things that Zillow could simply say, you're not allowed to list on our platform if you use any of these things or if you charge any of these fees. It's very easy for them to do that. And if you go and look on their website, they've actually started to put kind of a lighter version of these things into place. They have some specific requirements about what you can and cannot do and say in your listing and in your rental application already. So it's just a matter of degrees here. So by the way, the FTC has noticed. The Federal Trade Commission has stepped in and smacked Zillow around a little bit. I don't know if you guys saw this, but recently, just within a few weeks, the FTC came out and accused Zillow and Redfin of essentially colluding to suppress competition. It's actually a wild story. So a while ago, Zillow paid $100 million to Redfin, where Redfin would simply stop competing in the rental advertising marketplace. So basically, they illegally colluded to suppress competition is what the FTC is saying. And the FTC is not messing around. The famously, you know, anti-business Trump administration coming down and saying, you know, this is so bad that we actually want to go after it. That's really saying something. I just like all the signs are here that Zillow is willing to do basically anything and everything to win and compete and dominate in the markets they choose to enter. So much so, they're willing to pay $100 million to a competitor to silence them and keep them from competing. What do you think that means about what they're willing to do to you and your business? So that's really scary to me. And I got so upset about it that I've been writing about it. I've been talking about it. I've been talking on social media about it. And I decided to put my money where my mouth is. And I actually, earlier this year, I turned off our paid Zillow account, which had been in place for years. And when we tried to do this, the guy from Zillow got really upset with us and he was basically threatening us saying, you're not going to get visibility. You're not going to be verified. Your traffic's going to drop off a cliff. And by the way, if you cancel and you come back, the price is going to be like 3 times what you're paying now. So why don't you just go ahead and not cancel? So that actually scared me a lot. And so we didn't do it at first, but then I got mad about it again and I finally decided to pull the trigger on it. So we canceled and, uh, that was about 7 or 8 months ago and it has not impacted our lead flow at all. So my challenge to you is just cancel your paid Zillow account. I don't think you need it. I think it's a bunch of nonsense. It is not a fair and competitive marketplace. Like if you're familiar with Google AdWords, the way that works, it's a fair system. Like, You're bidding against other people who are interested in those keywords and like whoever pays the most gets the most visibility and it's like a competitive auction. The way this Zillow thing works, I don't think is anything like that. I think they make it up completely. There's no accountability for results. There's no way to track your performance. There's no way to benchmark it. So we just stopped doing it. And honestly, it made no difference in our ability to lease properties. Now, that doesn't mean someday they could require you to pay, and I think they probably will. But for now, you might as well take advantage of not needing to pay. And then I got further so upset about this problem that I decided to pay a competitor of theirs. So I got in touch with the friendly folks at CoStar, well known for their warm approach to business. So they own Apartments.com and Homes.com and a few other listing websites. And I worked out a deal with them where we're paying them now to get our listings premium placement. It's kind of their equivalent of whatever Zillow was claiming. But unlike the Zillow thing, it actually makes a huge difference in our visibility on their platforms. 'Cause we've been looking at this. I'll probably write a newsletter. We'll go into some more detail on exactly the results here. So we now are paying Apartments.com, CoStar, a monthly fee to have our listings promoted and, you know, in a premium location on their websites and on their platforms. And I'm pretty happy with the results so far. So I've been pretty outspoken here about Zillow and I've done so in writing as well, by the way. So if you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll see I go into more detail here. And it's just kind of been an ongoing theme that I've been revisiting time to time over the last year. It makes me a little bit nervous because if I get onto Zillow's radar and they do deactivate my account for whatever reason, saying I'm violating some blah, blah, blah thing they made up, you know, that would be a big issue for our company and for our clients. But I think this is important enough that I'm willing to go out on a limb here and kind of just get the conversation started within our industry and keep it going and be a little bit of a test pilot to see what happens if I do this, what happens if I do this, what happens if we start talking about this, what happens if we start working together as an industry. Industry. So pray for me. Hope they don't— hope the Zillow gods don't come after me, but I'm going to keep talking about this. So this is kind of a summary of my thinking on Zillow right now, but I want to challenge anyone who's watching and listening to this: cancel with Zillow and just see what happens. You can always sign up again if you have to. And I really want to challenge our industry to try to figure out what can we do about this? How can we take back control of access to our customers? I mean, Imagine if you ran a bakery and out front of a bakery there was another company that like your customers had to go through and pay a toll in order to get into your bakery. Like that's the equivalent of what we're dealing with right here. Someone standing between ourselves and our customers and deciding when and how and under what circumstances we can talk to those customers. It's actually outrageous. I don't have all the solutions, but I, I'm just putting out the warning bells. Those are my thoughts.
