Nilay Patel

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.

Right, but the MLS is a bunch of realtors who've all decided to share their listings together in very specific ways, right?

They have their own agreements.

There's stuff in those databases that I can't see as a member of the public.

That's right.

When you describe it as a public good, I'm pushing this for a reason, they maintain control of it, and there is friction in that relationship.

Yeah, that's right.

How do you think they see their relationship to you?

One of the themes on Decoder that comes up over and over again is obviously aggregation theory, where on the internet, particularly people that have the consumer demand get to set a lot of the terms.

Google, I think, is maybe the ultimate aggregator, right?

There's just incredible demand for whatever is on Google, and then Google gets to set a lot of terms for suppliers.

There's many, many other examples of this.

Credit to Ben Thompson, who came up with aggregation theory.

Zillow is one of those aggregators.

And so even in the case where there was another database of information, you're saying the real estate agents knew that the audience was on Zillow, so they should put their listings on Zillow as well.

At what point did you realize that you had the ability to go say to the MLS providers, hey, this is way more efficient?

Because at some point, they didn't think that was efficient.

When did you realize it would be more efficient, or when did they realize it would be more efficient to connect directly?