Hey everyone, if you have not been to Zillow's Unlock conference, you're missing out. I got the opportunity to sit down on Noise Versus Signal and share a great conversation with Jeremy Wacksman, the CEO of Zillow Group. We talked about his rise through the ranks starting in marketing to becoming the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation. We also talked about the future of AI, how it affects Zillow, and yes, private listings. You don't want to miss this conversation.
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Everybody in the business of home has a pitch. Almost nobody gets asked a hard question. This show fixes that. Welcome to Noise Versus Signal. I'm your host, Inman CEO, Tom Bond. Each week, we sit down with the top producing agents, industry CEOs, prop tech founders, and the people shaping the future of the business of home. Then, we break down the week's biggest headlines and decide what's noise and what's signal. Let's get into it.
Hey everyone, welcome to a very special edition of Noise Versus Signal. I'm here at Zillow's Unlock Conference. What an incredible place. And I have a very special guest, the CEO of Zillow Group, Mr. Jeremy Wacksman. Thank you, Jeremy, for being here.
Happy to be here and thanks for coming.
No, it's a great show. It's an exciting show. The vibe here is outstanding. Congratulations to you and your team on everything.
Thanks. A lot of people see you in the news and talk, you hear about what you're doing, and you've been at Zillow quite a long time. Let's go back though, because I'm really deeply interested in your history. A lot of people who wind up as CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies don't come out of marketing. You're different. Talk to me a little bit about that trajectory and how you got to this point.
Yeah. We use a phrase at Zillow, the career jungle gym rather than the career ladder. And I think I'm a really good example of that. If you had asked my 20-year-old self what my career ladder was supposed to look like, it looks nothing like this, including getting into marketing. I started as a computer engineer. I wanted to be an engineer and that's what I studied. And in graduating and getting an internship and looking at that job for the first time, I quickly realized it was not my passion nor was I going to be great at it. And so I did my first ever career pivot right out of school and got into more software, product, and marketing. And started working on talking to customers and helping figure out customer needs. I did that at a software startup in Austin,
Xbox. You were with Microsoft.
Then went back to grad school to focus more on marketing and then took a marketing job at Xbox at Microsoft.
Small little brand. And somehow in 2009 while working at this great growing entertainment brand, decided to leave that job and come work in the real estate industry during the global financial crisis. Much to my family's chagrin. But at the time again it was falling in love with the team and the problem space. I met our co-founders. I met Rich and Lloyd. I saw what they had done before and what they were trying to do with Zillow and I just wanted to be a part of that and they were starting to grow and so I came to work on product and marketing and I've now been here, it'll be 17 years next month.
And I've had a bunch of different jobs and none of which I would have thought I would have had, you know, two or three years before I ended up taking them.
It's interesting because I think I read when you started at Zillow, the iPhone had just been introduced in the app store.
That's right. I mean, and think about what the brand has been built for.
I mean, you had no online or digital presence when you came.
We had no mobile presence, right? And so, yes. So, I was hired to help grow, help work on product and marketing. And that meant internet search. That meant desktop website search. That's what we were, right? And Steve Jobs held up the iPhone right as I came and we knew everything was going to change. We started playing with it. And you start when you put yourself in the shoes of what can you do with the technology, all of a sudden your eyes get open to, well, now real estate can be 24/7. Now real estate can be in your pocket. Now you can ask what's around. Now you have a mobile companion.
All now you can scroll in bed and you know do social media with real estate. All these things didn't exist then.
But it was a huge pivot for Zillow because we had no mobile experience, right? And so what did we do? We just ran in and we said, 'We got to figure this out and let's put a bunch of great people on trying to figure this out. We're not going to get everything right, but we're going to be early. We're going to learn and we're going to keep going.' And in many ways, that pivot and run at something is a culture tenet that we keep, you know, at Zillow. And it's even more important, I would say, in today's revolution with AI, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Yeah. Well, we'll definitely talk about that. Let's go back, though. You actually had mentioned when you first came on board that you were in the middle of the financial crisis, right, which we all lived through. It feels like in many ways we're kind of back in those weird times, you know, some days. You've been through a lot of inflection points at Zillow. What have you learned from that? What has been the most unique or most difficult? Because as difficult as real estate is right now, you guys are still growing significantly top line and bottom line revenue.
I think the thing to learn from every inflection point or every change is stay focused on your customer. If I think about when I came to Zillow, it was a really tough housing market, but Zillow was trying to solve customer problems with the internet that had never been solved before. And so, they were growing really well during that tough time. I think about the mobile revolution, as we talked about. It's about, wow, there's new customer problems to solve. The technology can now do things it couldn't do before. Let's go figure out how to make that available to customers and to agents. I think about the pandemic and the pandemic was this crazy run-up and then this crazy interest rate, but there was a lot of inflection and change in that and we learned a ton. I mean, virtual touring took off during the pandemic out of necessity. We had been building a bunch of tech getting ready for it and our rich media tech and others' rich media tech was very relevant all of a sudden. Agents needed it because they couldn't show homes and so that was a huge learning and that has accelerated a lot of what we've done in all the virtual touring and rich media space. So I think every inflection point, you can't control when the market comes at you, but you can control what you focus on and we try and stay focused on, okay, well, what problem is the customer having? How can we help solve the problem?
It's interesting because you mentioned AI and everyone's talking about AI. When I first came on board to Inman, one of the issues we were struggling with is really the meltdown of open web search. You know, people were no longer going through Google and finding Inman right away and it was like, how are they getting to us? How do you find us? And then how do you attribute the number of clicks or connections, right? Same types of things you deal with. You recently celebrated a year now in ChatGPT. Walk me through that. Are you concerned about losing control of the customer? But you also have AI within your... walk me through that dynamic and is that a fine line to balance between the two.
We don't really see it as a choice, like we see it as an 'and'. We're always going to run at new platforms because we want to be where customers are. So, if customers are going to start using horizontal AI platforms now, if they're going to start using personal agents, we want to show up there. They're going to ask things differently, they're going to find things differently, they're going to start their search differently. So, we want to be there. And so, that's why you see us run, that's why we ran at mobile. That's why we run at platforms that don't always pan out. We ran at the Vision Pro. We still think AR/VR is going to be interesting, but obviously it's slower, but that's why we also run at the AI platforms and we learn from that, right? So being the first app in ChatGPT, getting our rentals business into Gemini, like we learn from that and we take those learnings back to how do we make absolutely Zillow AI. And for us, they're complementary, right? Because so much of our traffic comes direct to us because our brand is so strong. We're going to have most buyers and sellers want to come to us directly because they're going to be buying and selling for five months and they're going to need all the data and all the insights and they're going to need the agents and the agent software that agents are using to...
Brand still wins no matter what. So, but as the top of funnel shifts, yeah,
You want to be in all the places to be there when the conversation starts so that you can win them over however their technology needs change.
Very smart. When people are on in chat using Zillow, but on your own AI, what types of things are they asking?
Yeah. So, Zillow AI mode is what we're still in beta, although now very broadly available to our users because we are learning and we are learning that this is very additive and very complementary to the way internet and mobile worked. They aren't just setting filters or consuming the content from an IDX page the same way they were before. They're asking new questions. They're spending more time doing comparisons. We look through the history of how people ask questions and it's just fascinating. They're asking stuff that they never would have asked Zillow before and they weren't asking Google before. You know, one example I thought was fascinating was there was a buyer who spent something like 200 sessions on Zillow using AI mode, was looking at a couple different properties, kept asking all kinds of deep comparison questions, asked a lot of financial questions like, 'Can I really afford this?' you know, and okay, are you pre-approved? Are you not? Let's set your budget. At one point, this is all AI, all talking to AI mode. At one point, asked about buying or renting, and so it helped with that question, right? And then eventually raised their hand, hired an agent, and closed on a home. And I haven't talked to that agent about that customer, but I have to imagine that buyer was one of the more qualified leads that agent got.
Because they had done so much research.
Or they could have been a nightmare, too, knowing.
Yeah. But I think in today's affordability challenge, a more educated buyer absolutely, like that's got to be, that is one of the number one problems right now is getting the financial picture, getting the reality of the financial picture is the biggest challenge.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Talk, when you think about AI in general, how are you guys using it internally as a company? Are you like, is there any particular tool? Like what is the one tool or the thing that you like, you got to grab this?
