Zillow Group, Inc.
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Zillow Group, Inc.
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Zillow
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 2006 in Seattle, Washington, United States
Zillow was founded in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, United States by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, making it 20 years old.
The globally recognized $16 billion digital leviathan that is Zillow actually possesses a well-known, influential Silicon Valley lineage, originally founded in 2006 in Seattle by former Microsoft executives Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. The two effective tech veterans were intensely frustrated by their own opaque, complex personal home buying experiences. They recognized a lucrative structural flaw in the traditional real estate market: agents guarded property data and historical prices that rightfully belonged to consumers. They invented an influential, instantly viral automated valuation model (the 'Zestimate'), shattering the historic real estate data monopoly and arming normal consumers with amounts of free, transparent housing information.
Rich Barton is an absolutely legendary American technology entrepreneur, fiercely visionary digital architect, and the profoundly influential CEO and co-founder fundamentally responsible for architecting the massively dominant Zillow real estate empire. Operating as an incredibly successful serial entrepreneur who had already founded Expedia (within Microsoft) and co-founded Glassdoor, Barton aggressively recognized the massive, agonizingly opaque asymmetry of information crippling the global residential real estate market. In 2006, he relentlessly partnered with Lloyd Frink to completely launch Zillow. By fiercely engineering the highly revolutionary 'Zestimate' algorithm, which completely democratized incredibly dense property valuations by instantly publishing them online, his absolutely rigorous strategic leadership completely revolutionized how consumers interact with physical real estate. His massive corporate execution permanently established Zillow as an absolute multi-billion dollar platform monopoly.
Lloyd Frink is a fiercely brilliant software engineer, highly astute digital strategist, and the profoundly influential co-founder fundamentally responsible for programming the incredibly complex infrastructural bedrock of the massive Zillow real estate platform. Operating as a highly talented executive alongside Rich Barton at both Microsoft and Expedia, Frink aggressively spearheaded the highly complex backend engineering required to seamlessly aggregate massive, highly fragmented county tax records and property listings across the entire United States. By relentlessly building highly scalable, incredibly robust databases that could instantly process millions of algorithmic Zestimates without crashing, his absolutely rigorous technical execution completely guaranteed the platform's flawless operational survival. His massive engineering legacy permanently secured his status as a core titan of modern proptech (property technology).
Zillow Group was founded in December 2004.
Barton and Frink launch the influential site, crashing servers due to viral consumer demand.
Zillow goes public, raising capital to dominate the emerging mobile app landscape.
Zillow executes a $2.5 billion acquisition of rival Trulia, consolidating search dominance.
Facing algorithmic pricing failure, Zillow shutters its entire capital-intensive iBuying flipping business.
Under new CEO Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow transforms into a lucrative end-to-end transaction ecosystem.
To violently consolidate dominance over online real estate search traffic and eliminate its fiercest portal rival, Zillow executed a $2.5 billion all-stock acquisition of Trulia.
attempting to digitize and control the complex physical transaction workflow, Zillow executed a $500 million acquisition of ShowingTime, the industry's dominant home showing management platform.
To lock the highest-performing real estate agent teams directly into its lucrative software ecosystem, Zillow acquired Follow Up Boss, the premier real estate CRM platform.
Zillow was founded in December 2004 in Seattle, Washington, by former Microsoft and Expedia executives Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, officially launching its website in beta on February 8, 2006, with the major Zestimate home valuation tool.
In 2009, Zillow launched its first iPhone application, becoming one of the most popular real estate apps on mobile. In 2010, Zillow expanded beyond residential sales to launch dedicated rental marketplace search and listing tools.
On July 20, 2011, Zillow completed its initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange under ticker symbol Z (later adding non-voting Class C shares under ticker ZG), raising $69 million as shares surged over 79% on its first trading day.
In February 2015, Zillow finalized the $2.5 billion acquisition of Trulia following FTC approval, creating Zillow Group as the parent company operating a premier multi-brand portfolio including Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy, and HotPads.
In 2018, Zillow launched Zillow Offers to directly buy and flip homes. However, following unpredictable pandemic housing market volatility and inventory write-downs, CEO Rich Barton made the bold decision to shutter the iBuying unit in November 2021, refocusing on asset-light software.
To build the Housing Super App, Zillow acquired touring automation platform ShowingTime ($500M) in 2021 and leading real estate CRM Follow Up Boss ($400M) in 2023, equipping agents with premier scheduling and client pipeline software.
In August 2024, Zillow announced that longtime executive and COO Jeremy Wacksman was appointed Chief Executive Officer, while co-founder Rich Barton transitioned to Executive Co-Chairman alongside Lloyd Frink.
Today, Zillow Group is America's #1 digital real estate marketplace generating over $2.6 billion in revenue, serving over 200 million monthly unique users across buying, renting, financing, and selling through the Housing Super App.