Zillow Group, Inc. (ZG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Great. I have the thumbs up there. So good morning, everyone. My name is Trevor Young. I'm one of the Internet analysts here at Barclays. I'm pleased to be hosting Jeremy Wacksman, CEO of Zillow Group. This is the first time that we've had you guys at the conference. So thank you for the opportunity.

Absolutely. Happy to be here.

So we'll dive right in. First, let's start with some high-level ones. Big picture, Zillow for a long time has been known for its brand and large audience. The big question has historically been how would you leverage into building a big, sustainable, profitable business from that audience. You've obviously been successful at executing on that. But can you bring us along and talk about where you are in that journey with the housing super app?

Absolutely. Yes. Thanks for being here. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Zillow is the brand that everyone knows for shopping, right, for dreaming and shopping. And for the first kind of decade plus of our company, that's really what we were. We were an advertising marketplace, right? We were a place to shop and start your home search, but we weren't really a place to transact. So the housing super app we talk about is really what our business strategy has been for the last 5-plus years, actually helping more buyers, renters and sellers transact, right? Use our software, use our loans, use the agents that you find with Zillow and participate in more of those transactions. And that's the business growth you've seen from Zillow has been really realizing that strategy more and more because while so many people know the brand and the audience share is so large, the transaction share is still single digits, right? And that's our big growth opportunity is simply to help convert more of the homebuyers and sellers to use Zillow services, the professionals they need on Zillow and the technology that we provide.

Got it. So don't just monetize the traffic, but actually get them to use some of your service.

That's right.

Got it. So that's actually probably a good setup to dive into the for-sale residential real estate segment and the big brand. Zillow is obviously synonymous with residential real estate, so much so that sometimes I do think the investment story does get a little bit conflated with broader residential housing market trends. I appreciate that you're laughing about it. I'm sure you hear the same questions. Can you help investors understand the strategy within your for-sale business and how that enables you to drive revenue growth irrespective of...

Yes. So we talk about a housing super app. What that really is, it's an integrated software system for a buyer and a seller and all the professionals they have to hire, right? That's what a buyer and seller want. So that's what we're building. That allows us to then help participate and help more of them buy and sell and rent with our software. We have to do that on both sides. We have to do that with the consumer. So you build great touring experiences, virtual touring, physical touring, real-time booking, you build great financing experiences, helping them get preapproved and eventually originate a loan for them. But you also have to build that for the professional side, almost like the other side of the glass that a buyer or seller is using is software we provide to agents and team leads and brokers really powering the industry with software. That spits out a transaction platform that becomes more desirable and more efficient for both the buyers and sellers who use it and for the agents. And that's what drives the growth you're seeing. That's -- when we talk about a super app, that's why we talk about it that way is it's trying to pull together all these disparate services for both sides of the marketplace.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. One of the narratives that you've dispelled in recent years is around your ability to grow revenue despite category weakness or as you said, a market that's kind of bouncing along the bottom here. At present, the path to lower interest rates still remains a bit unclear. But despite that, you do expect to deliver mid-teens revenue growth and expanding margins once again next year. Can you talk about the building blocks that you envision there between residential mortgages and rentals, kind of the 3 key segments?

Absolutely. So yes, this year, our goal was mid-teens revenue growth and margin expansion and getting to net income profits, and we're on track to do that this year with the guide we put out Q4. And you've seen accelerating growth in rentals. You've seen really strong growth in mortgages as part of our for-sale revenue. And as you point out, we've been able to outgrow the category. The category really has been flattish for multiple years. We do about 4 million homes, existing home sales seasonally adjusted in '25 and '24 and I think in '23. And the reason we're able to outgrow, I think, on a 2-year stack, like last 8 quarters, we've grown -- outgrown the category by 20%. It is really the strategy. Again, everyone thinks of the brand as a big huge brand and it is, but our market share of transactions is single digits. And so it's easy for us if the strategy works and we can roll it out to more customers and more agents, we can grow share even in a flat market. And that's what you've seen us do this past year, and that's what we expect to continue to do.

Right. Many people use Zillow to browse homes even though they're maybe not ready to buy or even rent. You get roughly 2.5 billion Zillow site visits just in 3Q alone. That's versus a run rate of the 4 million EHS that you mentioned. This behavior is a great tailwind for like the brand strength and marketing leverage. But at the same time, it does seem like a bit of a disconnect between all of that traffic versus ultimately the transactions. And maybe there's even a missed opportunity here to better monetize that traffic. Are there other ways to monetize the Zillow asset and traffic? Or would that risk the core value proposition to both end users and agents that you just outlined?

Yes, it's a great question. We get it a lot. The category is a really unique one. And part of what makes Zillow so successful is we basically welcome all comers, right? 10 million to 20 million people will make a move, more renters than buyers. We're happy to be a place for all them to shop, whether or not they raise their hand to transact. That's what -- that's basically our acquisition every year. So that's great, and we're growing our share, as we talked about, of that audience. There is on top of that an opportunity, I think, to grow our share of transactions, not just from the folks that are raising their hand on Zillow, but from those folks that already have an agent. And we talked earlier this year about the launch of Zillow Pro, which is really an evolution of all of our software offerings that we offer the industry into a subscription that allows them to grow their business. And what that does is really marry those 2 things together. It marries, okay, I might want to grow by working with Zillow buyers and sellers, people who raise their hand on Zillow and connect with a professional. But I also want to try and grow by converting my database of clients, my referrals, my previous clients and we provide them software and tools to help them do that. And so for Zillow, that's a way for us to just offer this super app to all customers, whether they're Zillow customers or not. For an agent, that's a way for them to grow both ways, right? It's a way for them to grow by accessing more customers from Zillow or by doing a better job with their existing customers. And so that's a way into that kind of TAM expansion in a way. And it is -- it remains this great opportunity where we kind of don't care if you're going to raise your hand on Zillow or not. We just -- when you're ready, we want to be there for you.

You want to be there.

And we want to help convert more of those customers.

Got it. Okay. Since you mentioned Zillow Pro, let's hit on that a bit. I think the initial launch is expected early '26 and nationwide, call it, maybe midyear or something like that. What is your big picture goal with this? Like how do we think about monetization and any incrementality of that versus what you offer to agents today? And what other future offerings within that are you really excited about?

Yes. I mean I think the road is really long and exciting for the software we can provide the industry. I'll just kind of give 2 examples, especially for folks who don't spend as much time with us. So think about we have 2 real offerings for agents, Preferred and Pro. And what Preferred is, is those are the agents that we are trusting to deliver this integrated experience for Zillow buyers and sellers. That organic growth path you see in our for-sale business that we talk a lot about, that's coming on the backs of just bringing more customers to Preferred and getting more agents to Preferred and driving transaction growth there. So the incremental for-sale revenue we talk a lot about just comes from that. We're only at about 34% of our customers get that experience today. We want to get that to at least 75%, and we think more over time, so that's one piece. That's going to be a subset of agents, right? It's not going to be all agents. It's going to be the best agents we can find, the ones that really want to work the way we want them to work, and we want to work with them. But there's a lot more agents out there that are trying to grow their businesses. And Pro is really the software platform for any and all. And so it allows them to use CRM, use digital marketing tools, use an integrated offering to be more efficient, to be better for their customers and grow their business. Well, again, whether that lead is a Zillow customer or not. It also allows us to really find the next great Preferred agents. So it's a software platform that provides value to them that we charge for, but then it's also almost like a proving ground for the next set of Preferred agents because as we get from 1/3 of our customers to as many customers as possible in Preferred, we're going to need a lot more agents to do that.

Got it. So it's kind of an onboarding mechanism. Got it. Okay. Let's shift to AI a little bit. Zillow was one of the few players included with the initial in-app integration with ChatGPT. Can you speak to the opportunity and how you balance folks assessing the Zillow experience in these nascent surfaces versus the desire to keep folks coming directly to your app and to your site?

We think about both of those as really exciting. One, these horizontal platforms are going to continue to grow and evolve and take time and attention the way search did forever, and we want to be there. And so you see our integration with OpenAI as just an example of us leaning in and innovating on what does that look like. I think you should expect to see more of that innovation from a lot of these platforms over the next couple of years. And we'll just want to make sure we're there. If there's a real estate question to ask, they're already asking it, and they're asking it and they're usually asking about Zillow and so how can we delight the customer even before they get to Zillow. But the other side is equally interesting to us, which is how do we actually build that kind of capability inside of Zillow. And we're working on that all the time, right? How can we make Zillow smarter and better because the real estate category is a really unique one. You asked earlier about the -- well, you have this huge audience and the small transactions here. That's because it takes about 6 to 9 months to move from I might do something to I'm actually going to transact. And you spend months and months and months on Zillow and sites like ours you spend even more time thinking about it. So it's not a one-click visit experience. It's a 1-year journey. And so AI's ability to be smart for that customer, learn from what you did, make the real estate experience better, like we get as excited about the potential inside of Zillow as we do as -- think about that as like traffic acquisition.

Right. So let's hit on that, the piece inside of Zillow. I think between Sky Tour, Virtual Staging, AI assistant and frankly, a handful of other tools that I'm probably not hitting on, Zillow, does have some rather interesting compelling tech features rolled out just in the last year alone. How are you using AI to achieve the steady cadence of product innovation, both internal tools as well as kind of outward facing while also being able to expand margins?

Yes, it's funny. We talk a lot to the agents in the industry about we help them analogize AI to mobile as this technology revolution that came that was foreign before and then became the default. And it's a little understates, I think, the potential of generative AI, but it's helpful as a framing mechanism. And what's interesting about that analogy is when Zillow -- when mobile came, Zillow knew nothing about mobile, and we had to really pivot our whole company and learn mobile quickly. AI is different. We've been doing AI for 20 years. So we have tons of great features that are AI-powered today. And so when Gen AI up on the scenes, we were able to really lean in and take advantage of it. And we've been doing that for a while, as you pointed out. So everything from the consumer features you all know, how does generative AI make the decimate better? How can you ask Zillow questions about the estimate, how can we consider more data to generating interactive media. So our Virtual Staging, our interactive drone flyarounds called SkyTour, that's all generative AI. So you get lots of those capabilities quickly because you're able to really pivot your engineering efforts to think about how to best take advantage of these things. But the part that I think goes less understood is, again, on the other side of that glass on the professional side. Because at the end of the day, the real estate transaction, you're spending a lot of time with the professional. And if we can make them more efficient, smarter, better, faster, that is better for the customer, and that's actually better for them to convert as well. And just to give a very simple example, we provide a real estate CRM called Follow Up Boss that hundreds of thousands of agents use, and they're using that to try and win clients and delight clients and respond to clients and follow up. There's a whole bunch of busy work in there that AI can start to automate. We rolled out something called Smart Messages, something incredibly simple. Hey, rather than you having to figure out how to follow up with that customer after you hung up the phone, let's generate a message for you and you can edit it and hit send. Millions of those are getting used every month now because it just helps them save time and effort. It helps them be a better professional. It seems very basic, but even those small capabilities of generative AI, it just lifts the floor of like what's the transaction experience like, which helps convert more customers.

Right. And I would imagine tools like that help agents not only be more productive, but also not miss out on that opportunity, that touch point where if they don't respond to that person, they may go with a different agent.

That's right. That's right. The leakiness of the funnel is typically not knowing who to respond to, not knowing what to respond or just not doing the job responding...

Yes. Got it. Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit. I do want to hit on some of the lawsuits. You've had a number of lawsuits this year. We appreciate this can be a little bit of a sensitive topic to hit on publicly, but is there anything that you want to share with the investment community regarding some of these ongoing cases?

I mean nothing new, just thankfully, it ends up not being too much of a distraction for the team, and I think you see that in the results. We're incredibly fortunate that the strategy we have is pretty unique and it's pretty durable and you're seeing growth of it, right? Build great software for buyers, renters and sellers, build great software to the professionals, marry those up and participate in more transactions. And we're able to stay focused despite the noise around us. And there's been noise in the industry in the past with commission lawsuits and with COVID mortgage rate -- radically changing mortgage rates. So we're able to stay focused through all those periods and keep growing, and we see that in the results, and that's what we plan to continue to do.

So trying to ignore some of the noise.

Yes.

Got it. Okay. Let's shift gears and hit on rentals, which frankly, in my view, is an underappreciated part of the business. It's been a real growth engine for Zillow and revenue is guided to accelerate further in 4Q on the back of both the syndication with Redfin and broader multifamily property expansion. How should we think about that rentals business going into next year as you potentially lap some tougher compares?

Yes. It's -- I think investors know Zillow so much for for-sale and the brand is so -- they don't realize that Zillow is actually the most beloved and known brand for rentals as well. We are the largest rentals marketplace. And I think the other thing that's less understood is how unique the strategy is in rentals. The rentals marketplace for those who haven't spent time in it, there is no commoditized database of all listings. We have that in for sale, which is a fantastic consumer benefit, but it commoditizes the supply everywhere. In rentals, that doesn't exist. And that ends up being a problem. When you're a renter, you scour the Internet because no one has all the listings. So our strategy was let's try and organize as much of the supply as possible, and we've done that, right? We now have the most listings. We don't have them all. No one has them all, but we have the most, and it's growing all the time. So 2.5 million rental listings on our rental network. That's the most out there. That's what drives the audience and the brand. So we are the #1 brand and the largest audience because that's what people are looking for when they come to search and they find it and they like it. And that's the setup then that allows us to drive revenue growth, right? The multifamily revenue, which is the largest source of our revenue, the big 25-plus unit buildings that are advertising and trying to manage and fill vacancies, well, they want to tap into that audience. And they're trying to find leases, and we have the highest quality and most folks for them to find. So that's what they want to tap into. So that's the organic growth setup, and we're now then able to take that and extend that value prop to partner sites. We did that with realtor.com a while back and now with Redfin sites, which are really well known in the industry as well. So what you see now is you see these large property managers telling us that we are the best ROI they have of all their advertising sources because we have this growing audience, we have this diverse audience. And again, that's the #1 problem they have. And that's what's driving the revenue growth you've seen this year and the acceleration.

And so as we look ahead in that rentals business, given that inertia that you have, it seems like you should be able to continue to put up really solid growth irrespective of tougher compares.

Yes. We feel great about the growth potential for rentals now and into next year. Obviously, the partnership we roll out with Redfin provided a nice boost, but we were growing incredibly nicely before that, and we're growing nicely now. And again, it goes back to that ROI. I mean that's the #1 thing we look at is, okay, are we delighting the renter? Yes. Are we delighting the property manager with the advertising packages we have and with the ROI we provide, and we hear resoundingly yes there as well.

Okay. So sticking with rentals for a second. Investors do ask a lot of questions about competitive dynamics in the multifamily subset of rentals specifically. Can you talk about how you differentiate yourself to drive that strong growth and how you think you can continue to compete in this market over the medium term?

Sure. I mean it does go back to that strategy differentiation. When you set out to organize as much of the supply as possible, you end up with the most engaged renters, and that is ultimately what a property manager wants. They need leads, but they want leases and leases are a high-quality audience. And Zillow is able to be the highest ROI source for them because we have the highest quality audience. And now with the partnership, we have a growing volume of that quality of audience as well. And you see that in the results. We regularly survey our property managers. The folks that are doing this at scale, they're very sophisticated marketers. And they're spending, yes, on apartments-focused sites, but they're spending on Google and Facebook and TikTok and they're remarketing their property websites, they're doing what great marketing teams do. How can I efficiently take my advertising dollars and attract customers I need? And they are the ones that routinely tell us, you guys stack up at the top. And so that to us is the ultimate signal that the organic growth that we've been able to build, will continue because we are delivering the ROI that they're looking for.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. Let's shift gears to kind of the margin side of things. You've guided to similar EBITDA growth and margin expansion next year for '26 versus '25. Can you walk us through that progression and what you see as the key drivers of margin expansion persisting, particularly when contemplating some of the investments that you've been making?

Yes. So we've been growing nicely. I think mid-teens revenue growth is the expectation for this year with 4Q guidance. And we've started to talk about next year. I know Jeremy did, and we'll talk more about it in February. But the growth formula is really similar. And the reason for that is the strategy is working. Rolling out these enhanced markets, rolling out more enhanced markets, right, more customers on this integrated experience, more preferred agents. That is organic for-sale revenue growth. That's mortgage and residential revenue growth. We talked about rentals and why rentals is going to grow as well. And we're doing that, and we're able to hold our fixed costs largely flat. So we've done that the last couple of years. It grows modestly with inflation. We expect that again next year. And so when you're able to grow your revenue and hold your fixed costs largely flat, with variable costs growing ahead of the revenue growth, that provides leverage. And that's what you're seeing in the P&L in this year, and we expect a similar formula for next year.

Okay. And let's take a step kind of more longer term. You have mid-cycle revenue guide of about $5 billion and a 45% EBITDA margin. That's predicated on getting to upwards of $6 million in EHS relative to what you did in 2024, where you did about $2.2 billion in revenue and EBITDA margins kind of in the mid-20s percentage territory. What needs to go right from here to achieve those mid-cycle targets as we bridge from that $2.2 billion last year to $5 billion? And can we parse out how much of that would come from category recovery versus factors that are really within your own control?

For sure. Yes. I mean it's definitely both. We put those targets out. We were in a normalized housing market of 6 million existing home sales, and we thought that was a nice conservative baseline. So how much has changed. But the good news is the growth formula is as much us as it would be macro recovery in that formula. You can think about it as there's about $1 billion of organic for-sale revenue go get just from rolling out this preferred this enhanced market experience from what is a little more than 1/3 of our customers today to 75%. So more transaction conversion, more adoption of things like Zillow Home Loans, that drives that organic growth, again, regardless of macro. And then rentals, we talked about, when we put that -- those targets out, we talked about getting to $1 billion in rentals revenue. So there's another $0.5 billion of rentals growth there. Then we said the rest would effectively be macro recovery. You get back to a more normalized housing market, our share against the bigger market. It's important to note though, we put all that out before we really started thinking about the SEM expansion of Zillow Pro. So you can think about Pro and the ability to tap into the rest of the transactions out there over time through our agent base as an additional lever of growth on top of that.

Okay. So it sounds like a lot of levers within your control, certainly, a component to get to that mid-cycle target would be a category recovery. I think some of the reasons why existing home sales remain under pressure seemingly well understood. That said, like many -- we and many other industry participants do wonder what will that recovery look like at some point? Not asking you to prognosticate when it happens or anything like that. But I'm presuming you spend a lot of time thinking about that. When does the recovery happen? What does it look like? What do you envision that path to look like from here over some...

I could predict that, I'd have a different job. But our economists spend a lot of time trying to best guess. And I think our point of view is that the recovery will come kind of slowly and more measured. It's not going to be some snapback. And it's exactly what you alluded to, it's a little bit of rate relief, a little bit of unlock of sellers wanting to -- not wanting to trade out of their mortgage, which helps ease inventory, prices moderating and staying flat so that wages can catch up, so volumes start to grow up. And you're starting to see that happen on the margin, right? There are markets where prices are actually down year-over-year because supply has come up enough. And so like you -- I think you'll start to see this coil unspring. We just think it's going to be sort of slow and measured. And that's what our economists are seeing in the data right now. I think we are seeing as many homes have home prices going down right now is going up, which is actually a very good thing, right? If you think about nearly 100% home price run-up from pre-pandemic, flattening out or staying stable or even easing a bit is going to help with affordability. And the demand of buyers is absolutely there and the demand of sellers to want to finally sell as opposed to being locked into their mortgage is there. So stability in the market, I think, will help lubricate the market, but we think it's going to be slow and gradual.

Okay. So just to summarize, you're seeing maybe some green shoots there, but you're also not expecting this major snapback. But to your comments in an earlier question, you also don't need that recovery to start making continued progress on your goals, both in '26 and medium term.

And I think that's the most important point, at least for this room is it sort of doesn't matter what macro does. It will be a tailwind when it comes, but our growth formula, which you've seen over the past couple of years, you've definitely seen this year and you should expect again is to grow against what we expect to be a fairly flattish housing market. Even if you start to see some recovery in the market, that ends up just being a tailwind for everybody.

Yes, just enhances things. Yes. Got it. Okay. Zillow in general, has been a CapEx-light business historically. How should investors think about the balance sheet structure and capital allocation from here?

I mean we've always been opportunistic. I think the way we think about it is we want to have a minimum net cash balance to be opportunistic, dry powder. You've seen us be very acquisitive when it makes sense for M&A. You've seen us use and tap our balance sheet for share buybacks when that's appropriate. So we'll always be, I think, strategic and opportunistic with the kind of guardrail of there's a min cash balance we want to maintain to just provide operational flexibility.

Okay. One last one before we wrap up here. We're just a few weeks away from 2026. What's the message that you'd like to leave folks with the Zillow story? And what are you most excited about for next year?

Yes. I mean we're really excited about 2026. Again, despite maybe a long, slow recovery in the housing market, what we get most excited about is the growth formula is working. And every year, I think those of you just spend some time with us see that because you're seeing it show up in the results. You're seeing it show up in the anecdotes when you talk to our partners. You're seeing it show up in the experiences we're delivering. And so the idea that we can get from 1/3 of our customers to 75% of our customers over time. That's a really great one for revenue growth and for mortgage growth. The idea that we can get Zillow Showcase, which is now 3.2% of all new listings, which is double what it was a year ago, more towards that 5% to 10% target and become more of the expected way that you list your home is an exciting one. The idea that rentals is going to keep growing on the back of this real great expansion organic plus partnership story we had this year is an exciting one. So there's a lot of exciting ways that Zillow is going to go grow next year. And we get excited about that to your prior question, kind of regardless of the fact that we're not expecting much macro help. And then you can think about the increasingly diversified ways we have to grow as working together in any market.

Yes. It sounds like a lot of levers across the business, frankly. And then once that macro recovery happens, it only enhances things.

That's right.

Okay. Great. Well, let's wrap it up there. Jeremy, thank you so much.

Yes. Thanks for having me.