Nilay Patel

Happy to be here.

I'm excited to be in person.

I love doing these episodes in person.

Thank you so much for coming to our office here in New York.

Yeah, it's always a little looser when I'm in person.

So excited to do it.

I'm excited for this episode.

Zillow is one of those – it's a tech company.

There's platform dynamics.

There's a lot to talk about.

My favorite Decoder episodes are the ones where you point out that a database is very complicated and full of political machinations and big economic regulatory disputes.

And there is no more complicated database than the databases of houses that are for sale in America.

And so I'm dying to just dive into that.

So I think most people understand Zillow as the app where you judge other people's taste in interior design, especially in 2026 America, if it feels like its primary purpose.

You've been there since 2009, I want to say?

16 years, and you only just became the CEO, I think, last year or the year before?

That shift from, hey, we can put all the houses for sale in your area on your phone and you can just see what's happening, to, oh, we're going to transact a lot, to at one point I think Zillow was buying lots of houses, to now you're the CEO and the whole market has changed.

Describe the arc of Zillow briefly for people, what the app was, what the company is now, what you wanted to be a CEO.

I want to come to measuring transactions, especially in our current real estate market, where it seems like transactions are just going to stay low for a while.

That initial piece of Zillow, we're going to just show you what houses are available, how much they transacted for.