Nilay Patel

Today, I'm talking with Zillow CEO, Jeremy Waxman.

Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software.

The company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned that into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become a vertically integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate.

Now, if you've been listening to Decoder lately, you have maybe already guessed why I was so eager to talk to Jeremy.

A popular mobile app like Zillow is really the front end to a big series of databases.

And the politics of who gets to access databases and how much that access should cost is newly up for grabs if you think the next era of software will be defined by AI.

After all, you don't need an app like Zillow if your AI agent can just go look at the real estate database, which is called the MLS, directly.

Or maybe you do need an app like Zillow

maybe you need an app like Zillow more than ever, which is of course the case that Jeremy made in this conversation.

That's because the politics of Zillow's own database access are as complicated as it gets.

The company is involved in big lawsuits over when and how houses get listed in MLS versus Zillow.

and realtor groups as a whole have an uneasy relationship with the platform.

Jeremy's argument here is that the future of Zillow looks a lot like an end-to-end platform for those real estate agents.

And we spent a lot of time talking about whether a business as local and as relationship-driven as real estate can benefit from platform-level scale in the way he's proposing.

Yeah, there's a lot of decoder in this one.

It's gonna surprise you, I think.

Okay, Zillow CEO, Jeremy Waxman, here we go.

Jeremy Waxman, you're the CEO of the Zillow Group.

Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.