Love them or hate them, Zillow is a real estate powerhouse and its claim as the leading real estate and rental marketplace are no joke. Zillow’s database includes over 110 million homes, and has over two dozen apps in its suite. Zillow commanded an impressive second quarter revenue in 2018 of $325 million. Fun fact: Zillow recently started buying homes directly through Zillow Offers despite over a decade of swearing they’d never ever pursue a brokers license.
Zillow has grown by a series of strategic acquisitions since 2011.
Postlets was acquired in April of 2011. This service originally helped users post for rental and for sale notices.
Diverse Solutions was acquired in 2011 for $7.8M, which was an IDX company specializing in helping real estate professionals manage their brand with listing platform, mapping, and email management.
In 2012, Zillow acquired RentJuice for $40M, which was a rental relationship management for landlords, property managers, and rental brokers. They also acquired Buyfolio, a web tool to help brokers and clients streamline the home-buying process.
In November of 2012, both Mortech and Hotpads were acquired for $12M and $16M, respectively. Mortech is a mortgage pricing engine, and Hotpads is a rental listing site with specialization in heatmapping and creative mapping technologies.
NYC real estate listing platform, StreetEasy was acquired in August 2013, important given that the area doesn’t have an MLS and is known as the Wild West of real estate, making that data valuable.
In 2014, Zillow acquired Retsly, a platform for developers to access real estate listing. But that was completely undershadowed 12 days later when they acquired their direct competitor, Trulia for $3.5B
Real estate transaction system, dotloop was acquired in July 2015 for $108M.
Naked Apartments, which was another rental app exclusively for the NYC market, was acquired the following year.
Zillow’s latest acquisition was Mortgage Lenders of America in August of this year, which is an online mortgage lending service.
This is brings Zillow full circle into the ability to search, compare, and ultimately purchase your own home.
Calling Zillow the “Facebook of Real Estate” as some articles have, isn’t a far off assessment. As far as mergers go, Zillow is aggressive, and their M&A strategy doesn’t appear to be cooling.
To summarize, these are the companies that are now under Zillow’s umbrella:
- Buyfolio
- Diverse Solutions
- dotloop
- Hotpads
- Mortech
- Mortgage Lenders of America
- Naked Apartments
- Postlets
- RentJuice
- Retsly
- StreetEasy
- Trulia
Kam has a Master's degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and is an HR professional. Obsessed with food, but writing about virtually anything, he has a passion for LGBT issues, business, technology, and cats.
