Nilay Patel

That is just a public database, right?

This is just a thing that happens in your area, and you can have access to that database.

And I would say, broadly, the early internet and particularly early mobile, the innovation was often just exposing the database to people, packaging it up, making it pretty, saying, here's some information that's available to you that's certainly now on your phone.

You know, I'm at a restaurant in some town I'm visiting.

I can just see what the houses are worth.

So that's a big public database that created a lot of value for Zillow, created a lot of value for Zillow's users.

Over time, as you want to...

take control of more of that transaction journey, right?

You need control over many, many more amounts of data through the process.

Right next to that is the real estate industry in the United States, which is there's the National Association of Realtors.

They've been in some regulatory issues that I want to talk to you about.

But they maintain the multiple listing service.

That's right.

Where it's tempting to think of that as one database, but it's actually like hundreds of databases.

Maintained by little groups of regional realtors all doing their thing.

What's your relationship with that?

Because that feels like the most contentious back and forth of this all.

Do you think if I went and asked the National Association of Realtors or any of these small realtor groups that maintain these databases, if they think their product is a public good, that they would think it's a public good?

Because the transaction data is definitely a public good, right?

That's just literally public information.