Nilay Patel

You're just in whatever market you're in, and those are the houses, and every transaction is different in a way that maybe is not even remotely comparable to the next-door transaction that's going to take place.

Or maybe it is, but that's why everybody's mad about this estimate.

There's just something about this market, this business, where the presence of additional data might not actually be helpful.

especially if you have to collect that data on the national scale and then tell some local broker or some local agent or some local buyer or some local seller, hey, we know everything.

We can definitely close because the data says this national broker that we've partnered with, this national mortgage company we've partnered with is going to close.

How do you reconcile that?

Because this feels like in order to make the AI tools work, you definitely need to feed them lots of data, but the presence of the data might not actually matter at the local level.

Yeah, I'm just thinking about when you say we're going to build a bunch of software for the agents, or we're going to originate a bunch of mortgages, the value of the agent is perfect knowledge of their locality in many ways, or being able to stage a house.

It's in the atoms.

It's not in the bits.

It is in the atoms.

And those atoms are pretty local.

And I'm just wondering as you say, OK, well, we can definitely say the data shows we will make you more efficient on x dimension if that's actually convincing.

We have to take another short break.

We'll be back in just a moment.

Welcome back.

I'm talking with Zillow CEO Jeremy Waxman about how very highly regulated the housing market is and how that affects his business.

One of the interesting dynamics, again, of Zillow, it's been around for 20 years.

There's been a lot of acquisitions, there's been a lot of growth.

You're talking now about pretty much vertical integration in the stack, right?