Jeremy Wacksman

For free for us, but for free for the agents who work and for free for the buyers and sellers who use any site.

There are companies in the space that want to take those listings off the internet and hide them for themselves and not put them as part of the database.

And we don't think that's a good thing.

And if you look at the other real estate markets in the world, that's how they work.

Private databases where you have to pay for access leads to consumers having to pay more.

So we think that's a bad idea.

And so for us, it was easy to say, okay, well, what we can do as a audience in the industry is we can say, well,

We don't think you should be able to free ride and only give the internet the listings that you want and still get access to everyone else's listings.

So we won't let you do that on Zillow, right?

If you want to do that, then that's fine.

You can go operate that way, but we don't want to have that listing.

And it was more of a educational tool

so that people understood there was a trade-off if they did that, and ideally incense what we already see, which is the majority of sellers and sellers' agents, if given a choice, want their listing on the internet and want their listing on as many internet sites as possible, and that's what they'd choose.

Well, I think you should think about real estate more as e-commerce than as premium content, right?

And when you're selling a good, you want to advertise to as much demand as possible, kind of as quickly as possible.

I mean, the number one thing, the reason people cry is because it's so hard to buy and sell and it takes time.

weeks and sometimes months to do it.

And you have people traipsing through your house and you basically have to hire someone to be kind of a part-time job on your behalf to help coordinate all this stuff.

So the idea that you wouldn't try and maximize price when we ask sellers, most people say, no, no, no, I want to sell my house for the most I can in as short a time as possible.

So that doesn't really fit with trying to window or hold things out or take longer.