Zillow Will Not Abandon Listing Standards Guidelines with 'Preview' Launch

Zillow executive Errol Samuelson says the announcement of the portal's pre-marketing offering will not interfere with the listing access standards initiative launched last year.

Zillow will allow over two dozen brokerages to directly upload listings exclusively to Zillow (and Trulia) without sharing them with the entire market via the multiple listing service (MLS). But Samuelson, Chief Industry Development Officer at Zillow, told Inman this week that the business will continue to back its listing access standards to ensure as many properties appear on the MLS as possible.

Samuelson said:

“The principle behind [the Listing Access Standards] was you shouldn’t be hiding listings.

"There are some brokers who, if you go to their website, you do a search, they’ll say, ‘Hey, there’s 37 more listings that we’re not showing you in the search results. But if you click here, we’ll show them to you.’ What happens when you click here is they require you to work with one of their agents. So essentially what they’re saying is, we’re going to hide these listings, and the only way you can see them is if you work with us.

Last year, the National Association of Realtors rolled back historical guidelines, forcing agents to upload new listings to the MLS within 24 hours of marketing the property to their private network for the first time, softening the ruling to allow regional MLSs to decide how long a property can be marketed without being uploaded to the MLS.

Zillow pushed back by enacting new listing access standards, sanctioning agents who do not upload listings promptly by banning the listing from Zillow. The new guidelines were created to block, or at least decelerate, the growth of private listings networks that sit independently of the MLS.

The most notable example of this battle is between the brokerage Compass and Zillow itself. Compass is pursuing an ambitious three-phase marketing process that will see properties coming to Compass exclusively circulated within the Compass ecosystem before trickling through to the MLS if the property doesn't sell. Compass sued Zillow (and recently withdrew the lawsuit) for Zillow's listing ban. Zillow says Compass is creating a 'black box' of listings, adding opacity to a market that ought to be public and transparent.

As Compass expands its private listings network, more listings will appear only via Compass. This violates Zillow’s policy, and those listings risk being banned from Zillow. However, Zillow also believes that pre-marketed listings are allowed as long as they’re shown on national consumer-facing portals like Redfin or Realtor.com.

Samuelson said:

"[Compass is] giving the seller less exposure—bad for the seller—in order to attract buyers, in order to recruit agents to these hidden listings. Those hidden listings would still violate our listing access standards. Listings that are widely displayed, whether it’s on Zillow or another national site, people have a fair shot at them. So those listings, going forward, would not violate our listing access standards."