Zillow at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Revenue Goals

On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, Zillow Group (NASDAQ: Z) shared its ambitious financial goals and strategic plans at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company aims for significant revenue growth and profitability amidst a challenging housing market. While Zillow’s enhanced market offerings and AI integration present growth opportunities, maintaining cost discipline remains crucial.

Key Takeaways

• Zillow targets $5 billion in revenue and a 45% EBITDA margin.
• The company plans to expand its market offerings to cover 75% of connections long-term.
• AI integration is expected to boost productivity and consumer engagement.
• Zillow aims to double its rentals revenue by building a two-sided marketplace.
• The company expects to achieve GAAP net income profitability in 2025.

Financial Results

• Target revenue: $5 billion with a 45% EBITDA margin.
• Incremental revenue from for-sale properties: $1 billion.
• Incremental revenue from rentals: $500 million, with a goal to grow from $450 million in 2024 to $1 billion.
• Revenue from mid-cycle housing market recovery: $1.3 billion.
• 2024 revenue projection: $2.2 billion.
• Fixed costs are approximately $1 billion, with a focus on disciplined management.

Operational Updates

• Enhanced market offerings have expanded to 43 metros, covering 21% of connections by the end of 2024, with a target of 35% by the end of 2025 and 75% long-term.
• Early markets such as Phoenix, Raleigh, Atlanta, and Denver have experienced over 100% growth in transaction value since early 2023.
• Zillow’s rentals business aims to create a two-sided marketplace, with over 60% of single-family homes for rent listed on the platform.
• The multifamily segment is expected to grow to 50,000 buildings by the end of 2024.

Future Outlook

• Zillow aims for GAAP net income profitability in 2025 and inclusion in the S&P 500.
• The company anticipates low to mid-single-digit growth in the housing market.
• Revenue growth is expected to be in the low to mid-teens, with continued focus on fixed cost discipline.

Q&A Highlights

• Zillow remains focused on increasing supply and demand for rentals and has not seen significant impact from competition.
• The company is confident in maintaining a strong market position, with the majority of listings available online.
• While no changes in commission rates have been observed, there is potential for broader industry adjustments.
• Variable costs have increased due to growth in rental sales, Zillow Home Loans, and Zillow Showcase, with further growth expected in 2025.

For more details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our next Fireside Chat conversation here. We are very thrilled to have Jeremy Hoffman with us, the CFO of Zillow Group. Thanks for coming.

Yes. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Good to see you too. Before we get started, I’m going to read the disclosures.

Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morgan.com/researchdisclosures. They are also available at the registration desk. Some Some of the statements made today by Zillow may be considered forward looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Zillow undertakes no obligation to update them.

Please refer to Zillow’s Form 10 K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Check. Nailed it. Good to see you.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes, good to see you, sir.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: So far, so good. Okay. So there is a lot going on from a macro perspective with real estate. There’s a lot going on with Zillow specifically. So maybe let’s I want to start bigger picture with you with some of the long term targets that you’ve talked about.

So on the last conference call, you talked about a future year where you see $6,000,000 existing home sales, the potential to generate $5,000,000,000 of revenue with really healthy profitability, 45% maybe even higher percent EBITDA margins. That’s a lot bigger than the company is now. So when you sort of look at the key KPIs and what you have to execute on to sort of get to that point, walk us through what you’re most focused on this year and the next couple of years.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. And maybe I’ll just start with how do you bridge from $2,200,000,000 in 2024 to that $5,000,000,000 and what are the components? The first component is $1,000,000,000 of incremental revenue on the for sale side. So what we said when we say for sale, that is a combination of our residential revenue and our mortgages revenue. We think there’s 1,000,000,000 of incremental revenue in that collective line regardless of what macro does.

If housing stays flat, we still believe there’s $1,000,000,000 to go get. And that will be through a combination of continuing to roll out these enhanced markets, continuing to scale listing showcase and continuing to scale still home loans. Those are the three primary drivers. Then from there, so that’s the $1,000,000,000 you add $2,200,000,000 plus $1,000,000,000 We see $500,000,000 or so more in rentals as well. So rentals at the end of twenty twenty four was about $450,000,000 in revenue.

We see a pretty clear path to $1,000,000,000 in revenue on the rentals business. So that’s a $1,500,000,000 of pre any housing change. Housing stays at 4,000,000 homes sold. We still believe there’s $1,500,000,000 revenue to go out and get regardless. The last component is that mid cycle environment coming back.

And we define mid cycle housing as 6,000,000 home sales. Basically, take the existing home sales stock in the country today, take an average turnover rate based on historicals, that would impute a $6,000,000 home sales market. We think that drives another $1,300,000,000 of revenue when that time comes. When that time comes is not in our control, obviously. But those are the three components that we think about in terms of getting from the $2,200,000,000 that you see today or as of the end of twenty twenty four and the $5,000,000,000 at that mid cycle environment.

That’s the revenue side. On the cost side, it’s really going to be us doing what we’ve been doing the last few years, which is being really disciplined on fixed costs and then growing variable costs alongside revenue and being opportunistic on marketing spend depending on what we see opportunities to accelerate and or take off take foot off the gas where we see fit. I think the way to think about incremental margins primarily comes from that fixed cost base getting leverage. It’s about $1,000,000,000 today. That’s the vast majority of the cost base today.

And we think we’re well invested to grow based on all the things that we’re doing with that fixed cost base in the spot that it’s in. It will, of course, inflation exists, but we’re going to look to fight inflation as best we can as well. And when you net all that out, you get to $5,000,000,000 of revenue and 45% EBITDA margin. That imputes, obviously, strong GAAP profitability over time, too. One thing to just keep in mind as you’re thinking through our cost structure, as you get below EBITDA, stock based comp is another thing that we have to get leverage on.

Stock based comp, 90% of that stock based comp charge sits in that fixed cost bucket. So as we get leverage on fixed costs, we will inherently get leverage on stock based comp as well.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Got it. That’s It’s a very helpful bridge. There’s a lot to sort of dig into there. I want to sort of peel into a few of those more specifically. Maybe let’s start with that enhanced market offering.

You’ve expanded it now. You’re in 43 metros. I think it’s around 21% of connections. Maybe talk to us about what you’ve observed and learned from those markets? And how do you think about the slope of driving more markets and even further penetration of that business?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. I think we’ve been really pleased with what we’ve done in enhanced markets to date. So it’s 21% of all connections as of the end of twenty twenty four. We expect that to grow to 35% of all connections by the end of twenty twenty five. And then over time, we think a good mile marker is 75% of all connections when fully rolled out.

We don’t think that’s the upper bound, but we do think it’s important for you all to have a mile marker on what do we think fully rolled out is. And that 75% informs the $1,000,000,000 for sale opportunity we talked about earlier. Yes. What we’ve learned, we’ve definitely learned a lot along the way. It’s always fun looking to innovate on how we build product and how we go to market.

But we’ve been really pleased. The four most mature markets, Phoenix, Raleigh, Atlanta, Denver, have grown total transaction value over 100% since the start of twenty twenty three to the end of twenty twenty four. So that’s a great set of proof points in the earliest markets to say this formula feels quite good. And then as we’ve rolled out more and more markets, we’re seeing similar signal from those markets when we look at high funnel, mid funnel and then ultimately transaction share as well. The other great proof point that we felt internally is we see pretty consistent mid teens adoption rates of Zalba Home Loans throughout even as we’re rolling out more and more of those markets.

That’s a key component to the enhanced markets. And I think we’re quite pleased with the progress that we’re making. From here, we’re going to continue to be methodical. We think this is the container for for sale growth for the company for a long period of time, and we have to get that rollout right. The most important piece of the rollout that will take the longest to do is the relationship between the Zillow Home Loans loan officer and the Premier Agent.

That is a relationship that has to be formed human to human. We’re going to go as fast as we can, but we’re going to make sure we do it methodically so that we are setting those relationships up to be successful far beyond 2025. And then over time, build better consumer experiences, work with great agents and then bring more services online to build a more integrated transaction.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: That’s helpful context. I mean, I guess you yes, can you talk about any of the learnings you’ve had of these early markets that maybe can help in the go to market with the future markets to come with the way you establish those relationships? How do you sort of scale it faster than you did in the first three, four, five markets?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. And I think you’re seeing us do that. So in 2022 and 2023, we were primarily in those four markets. We went from effectively four to 43% last year. And then we’re going to continue to scale from that twenty one percent of connections to 35% of connections this year.

I think the learnings some of it was early days. We were honing go to market while we were also introducing new products, things like real time torrent. So your new products and your bit of a new go to market as well, that takes more time to test and iterate on. We do think that we found a playbook that has worked well, which has allowed us to move faster and will allow us to continue to move fast into the future. But the gating factor will be that Zillow Home Loans relationship.

And that’s where it’s not just software, where you can flip a switch and go. We have to build that right because we think the long term opportunity is really significant if we do.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role: Got it.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Okay. The next $1,000,000,000 potential business you talked about is rentals. Adding doubling the business effectively is sort of the way you think about the opportunity. In the near term, it’s growing really well, like 25% year on year in the most recent quarter. So maybe let me just start there.

So near term, what is driving the strength in that line and sort of just the overall rentals and the mortgage dynamics you’re seeing in that? Yes. Maybe step back on what

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: are we trying to do strategically for rentals and then it will lag into the revenue growth. We are trying to build a really interesting two sided marketplace in rentals. On the for sale side of our business, there’s the MLS. That means that there’s commoditized supply, and we build differentiated demand. In rentals, there’s differentiated supply and there’s differentiated demand.

So we love the idea of can we spin up a marketplace that has true two sided marketplace dynamics. How we’ve done that is we’ve looked to organize all of the rental supply, both single family homes for rent and apartment buildings for rent. That’s differentiated. We have over 60% of all single family homes for rent on Zillow today. That is vastly unique to us.

So that drives great traffic dynamics. And then over the last few years, we have been growing our multifamily segment. And the pitch to the multifamily property company that is looking to buy advertising is we’ve got a great set of supply here. We’re starting to build what we think is the one stop shop for rentals. And on top of that, we’re bringing great consumer demand.

And that’s been compelling to folks. We have grown that multifamily segment of our rentals business really well. You highlighted it, but we were 27,000 buildings at the end of twenty twenty two. As of the end of twenty twenty four, we were 50,000 buildings. The path from here is to continue to do much of the same, keep growing properties and keep delivering value to these multifamily partners.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Are there geographic areas that are sort of more in the near term greenfield to go after from that? Or how does it sort of break down of how you add the next 20,000, 30 thousand properties?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. It will be a combination of some geography. A lot of it is working our way deeper and deeper into these property management companies’ portfolios. It’s like, hey, let’s try it. Let’s start with some portion.

We’ll prove ourselves out. And then over time, we should have the opportunity to win more of your business. So that’s another interesting way to think about go to market is can we get deeper and deeper with the decider of the spend, who is the property management company.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Okay. And then you have the Redfin partnership. So maybe for everyone in the room, just walk us through the structure of the Redfin partnership. And then as a follow on, what metrics are you most focused on internally just to ensure that the partnership is sort of delivering on what you and Redfin both hope it does?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. So what we’re doing on the rental side, again, is as much supply as we possibly can get, both single family and multifamily. As part of that, we see opportunity to be basically take be the distribution center for supply and then distribute that out to folks like Realtor.com that we did a partnership last year and then Redfin, which we announced a few weeks ago. And the structure of the partnership is one that basically Redfin continues to operate Apartment Guide, Redfin, obviously, and Rent.com. They are well incentivized to drive traffic to those sites.

And then we pay them on a cost per lead basis for the demand they generate. So we go out, we go get the supply, we have to go do the sales effort for that, and then ultimately, we distribute that content. And for a property management company, we can go in and say, you know Zillow. We provide you Zillow truly a hot pad streeteasy. We now can provide you a great audience from Realtor.com, Redfin, Apartment Guide and Rent.com as well.

So that’s a pretty compelling pitch to a multifamily property management company. And it’s a pretty good win win for us at Zillow and then Redfin as well and Realtor.com for that matter too. I think great partnerships, in my view, are ones that everybody feels like they’re winning. So we think it’s great for us. We think it’s great for Redfin and Realtor.com.

We think it’s great for the multifamily property management companies because they’re getting really good ROI for us. We show up super partner centric. We want to be that way. And then for consumers, which is most important, they’re seeing more and more supply of rentals in more places on the Internet.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about share of transactions versus TTV. I mean, externally, when we all build our models for how big the company can get the next three, five, ten years. We have many models that sort of break down share of transactions.

And I know you’ve spoken about hitting 6% share of residential transactions potentially by the end of twenty twenty five. Is that the right way to sort of evaluate it internally? Are you focused on share of transactions? Are you focused on something else? What should we be focused on externally?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. I would say internally, the main focus is grow our share of the pie. We should get more revenue per transaction as well, but ultimately, our story is one that should be a transaction share gain story. And why we feel confident in that is we are anywhere between 65% to 70% of all audience stay in the country, and we expect to be 6% of all transaction share by the end of twenty twenty five. So we see a big gap between those two to keep going after for a long period of time.

Now externally, we want an easy way for you all to monitor us. Right. And we found that the easiest way for you all to check-in on progress on a quarterly basis is revenue per total transaction value. And that captures both transaction share and revenue per transaction. So we think that’s the cleanest way to go evaluate us.

Internally, the focus is going to be grow share as much as we possibly can.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Okay. I’ll keep using those models then. Let’s talk about generative AI and GPU enabled capabilities. I mean, with Zestimate, I think you had Zestimate since 02/2005, ’2 thousand and ’6 something like that. So you’ve been doing a lot of machine learning and sort of estimations on your leading data for a while.

But maybe with everything that’s happened with GPUs and changes the last two point five years, can you give us some examples of technologies you’re using either internally or on the customer facing side that have started to be integrated more into the company in the last two years that are really having sort of a meaningful kick?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. So AI, I think, in all forms, has been part of the company’s ethos for a very long period of time. You’re right. Zestimate launched on very, very simple AI comparatively, but it was an AI based model and machine learning model. So it’s been native to the company for a long period of time, which is great because as new innovations come, we’re ready to go capture them.

We felt that way when ChatGPT got announced a few years ago. We said, wow, we already have nicely staffed AI team, and now we’re going to go run at the newest thing out there. We think of the AI opportunity as opportunity for us. The reason we believe that or the reasons we believe that are, one, our consumer the health of our consumer asset, Zillow, is really strong. We are 6565% to 70% of all audience share in the country on any given day.

The term Zillow is more often Googled than the term real estate. So we really have become a verb in a lot of ways. And 80% plus of our traffic is direct. So and to put even a finer point on that, less than 5% SEM. So you think about where are there risks in the AI ecosystem.

I think it’s folks that are more potentially relying on different forms of traffic. So we feel really good about the strength of the consumer asset. We also feel really good about the unique data that we collect both from consumers and from the assets we own in the real estate industry as well. So that sets up the framework for how we think about the opportunity. And then within that opportunity, we organize ourselves in three ways.

We have a team that focuses on consumer. We have a team that focuses on operators, primarily agents and loan officers. And we have a team that focuses on employee productivity. I’ll work from employee productivity and up. Employee productivity, we are absolutely seeing the benefits, and it’s why we’re so confident in this fixed cost discipline that we talk about, one of the main reasons why we’re not.

On the

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: coding side or where are you

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: seeing employee productivity? Bunch of places. But coding, I think, primarily, we call product engineering, marketing design. You can see them in each of those places. So that would be one example of why we feel good on the employee productivity side.

On the operator side for loan officers and for agents, we think there’s a lot for us to go do. One of the most interesting things that we’ve been able to launch over the last year with Follow-up Boss is we ingest all of the calls that are running through Follow-up Boss, ingest that via AI and then distribute out call summaries with next steps and actions. That takes you talk to some agents that say we’re taking one to two hours a day of productivity back to them. Like that’s a really interesting feature. There’s a lot more that we’re going to go do there.

But you can the goal just being, let’s make these folks as efficient as they possibly can so that they can do the highest value actions. So that’s on the operator side. And then on the consumer side, there’s a lot that we have tried kind of behind the scenes. There’s a lot that we will continue to try. I think the big opportunity for us is probably going to be an engagement.

Like if you think about a usual real estate search, people spend a lot of time on Zillow. They spend a lot of time dreaming and shopping. If we can build a really interesting kind of co pilot there to help you through your search and find experience, that is highly likely to yield a higher intent buyer or higher intent renter or higher intent financer or higher intent seller for that matter. If we do that well, that’s much more kind of greenfield at the moment. But I think we’ve gotten to the place where we can say engagement is going to be a really important tool in the toolkit for us from an AI perspective.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: How long does it take to sort of build out and scale some of those external products? I mean, it seems like such a big opportunity on the consumer side to improve your engagement, improve your overall matching. And then the agent side, making them more productive and turning more cold beads into warm, warm into hot? Like how long does it take to sort of deploy those types of assets?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: I think it’s going to take time. I think anybody that’s working through the generative AI use cases will tell you there’s some stuff that works like that. Yes. Say, wow, we’ve got productivity there and we can easily measure that and fantastic. And then there’s going to be innovation that comes from the consumer perspective that’s going to take time and we’ll have to test and iterate our way through.

But we are we feel really well positioned and feel like it is a potentially really interesting opportunity. At the same time, we because the direct traffic is so good, we feel like we’re pretty well protected from potential threats as well.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: So what’s another way when you start thinking about that first bridge of the big revenue growth, the extent to which you can drive more engagement and higher conversion of that engagement, it’s more ways to get there even maybe upside. I’ll say that you don’t need to. But it seems like there’s a lot of torque that could come from that. Let’s talk about not as exciting as AI, let’s talk about clear cooperation. So we get a lot of questions about the NAR and sort of clear cooperation and sort of all their policy.

I guess, let’s just sort of start with your overall view of how where we are right now in clear cooperation and just sort of where let’s start there. Big picture of your view on it.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. Real estate industry is quite noisy always. It’s a really important category. People care a lot about houses and so too does the industry that supports it. So there’s always noise in real estate.

When I was here this time last year, we talked a lot about commissions. That’s less of a question right now. Maybe we’ll get to it, maybe we won’t. But my guess is every single year, we will have some conversation about what’s going on in the real estate industry. For us, we’ve been doing it for the last twenty years.

So we kind of get used to this and we navigate through it. I think the most important thing for Zillow I’ve talked about a lot, but the most important thing is the health of the top of the funnel. And the health of the top of the funnel is the thing that we hold most dear to us. Part of that is listings. We have to be the company that has the most listings because that’s what folks ultimately come to us when they’re ready to actually buy a home or sell a home for that matter.

So we will always find ways to get content. We’ve in the history of the company, we’ve done it in a variety of ways. So from 02/2006 to 2021, we worked directly with MLSs. We worked directly with brokerages. We had 99% of the content.

We switched the way in which we got listing supply through the MLSs, through something called IDX in early twenty twenty one because we thought it was a smoother way to get all of this content. But the amount of content we got didn’t really change all that much, right? The listings count was the same one way or another. We’re always thinking about ways to make sure we have the most content. I think where we are and how we approach it is we are highly confident in the consumer asset that we’ve built.

We are highly confident that sellers want to be on Zillow selling their home. Of course, that makes sense. You want the widest distribution. So if we think from just first principles, a seller wants to maximize the sale of their home and maximize the distribution by and large. There will be some odd cases where somebody wants to be private.

But by and large, the vast, vast majority of the homes in the country, you want max you obviously want max price, but you want max distribution. The Internet is the most simple way to go do that. The second dynamic is buyers are going to want independent representation. You want an agent that is representing you. You don’t want an agent that’s representing both you and the seller.

You wouldn’t have an investment banker work both the sell and buy side of a transaction. That would be a little bit weird. Same thing in real estate. So buyers want independent representation. Buyers also want the max amount of potential to go by.

So they want all the supply that they can see as well. It’s not a great consumer experience if not all the homes are you don’t know that all the homes that are for sale. And then the third leg of that stool, sellers, buyers, agents. Agents have a fiduciary duty to maximize the price of the sale of a home. The Internet is probably the best way to maximize the price of the sale of your home.

So when we think about all of that, we feel quite good about the business and the opportunity. We will be loud about it and we have been loud about it from a consumer perspective though because we just think some of the things that are being bandied about are just atrocious for consumers. So we will always stand on the side of the consumer and we will be loud about it because we think the consumer good the way The U. S. Real estate market works is really transparent.

It’s really good. We’re going to push to make sure that, that stays there.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Okay. That’s helpful. You mentioned commissions. You are correct that every year we ask about commissions. It is always a topic.

And with SITSR, it’s still a topic. So maybe now that we’re sort of through all that, has anything changed in sort of your approach on the residential side? How do you think about the potential for commission adjustments and commission changes going forward? The obligatory question.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Love it. Thank you. Yes, there and just for those that are less educated in the room on the comings and goings of the industry, there was a lot of news that came out last year that said that the way commissions are going to work on the buy side were going to change. We think that was a really good outcome for folks because it really increased consumer education around what is a buyer getting when they sign up a real estate agent to represent them. So we thought those were excellent changes.

From a business perspective, we have seen no change in commission rate. And we believe that a year ago, I probably said the exact same thing a year ago. We believe that because we work with the best of the real estate population. The top 20% of agents do 80% of the transactions in the country. And the top 20% of our premier agents I’m sorry, our premier agents are in that top 20%.

So we’ve seen no impact to commission rate. That’s what we had anticipated. All that said, industry, broader industry, there may be commissions coming down, etcetera. That would not surprise me at all. It’s just in our pocket with the folks we work with, they’ve been able to command price because they do a great job.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about competition and sort of the different housing portals across the web. We all sort of track the third party data for better or for worse of what we think is going on with traffic trends. Is there anything you see internally or hear from your agent population about incremental competition from some of the different portals and sites across the web or apps across the

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: phones? We have not seen impact. So that’s the very, very short answer. I think why is that the case? We always start from consumer first, right?

The way in which we’ve been able to build the audience asset that we have, the engagement that we have is really work backwards from the buyer, the seller, the renter and what do those folks want and need and can we build really interesting products audience share, 80% plus is direct traffic, and the brand means a lot to people. It’s been interesting for us to watch as we get that question a lot and rightfully so. We’ve actually expanded our share gains in the mobile app this past year. So we were 3x the closest competitor at the end of twenty twenty three, our mobile app usage. At the end of twenty twenty four, it’s 4x.

So that tells you that what we are doing feels quite good. And for us, the most important thing that we have to focus on is are we delivering value to the consumers and handle what we can control.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Housing is such an interesting market because the lead times and the research time of the actual transaction is long, right? Is there anything you can share about just the last few years as you’ve sort of had the multiyear lifecycle of those users on your apps? Have you gotten better at conversion? Have you gotten better at engagement? Are there signals that you’re seeing in your user base where you’re saying, yes, we’re actually making changes that are increasing the probability that when someone starts using the app two years ago, they use Zillow to buy the house two years later.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. I think if you look at how we’ve been able to outperform on the residential side, on the for sale side and ultimately at the total company level, the reason we’ve been able to do that or one of the main reasons has been driving conversion. So we’ve gotten smarter and smarter about segmenting user base, about finding the folks that are more ready to transact and building products around those things and services around those things. But ultimately, that is a lot of the name of the game for us. We have a really great set of engaged users.

Now how do we get them to ultimately transact with us and our partners? That’s been through things like you just highlighted. And I think the company focus around driving share of transactions and revenue per transaction has been great for us from a product development perspective because you inevitably get smarter and smarter about conversion if your North Star metric is around transactions.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Okay. We will take questions from the audience. Any questions for Jeremy, feel free to raise their hands. They’ll be mic runners. A couple more from me as we’re running mics.

On the cost structure, you talked about how in the near term, we should think about variable costs growing faster than revenue because of home loans and enhanced markets. How long does that take? When should we think about sort of more stability in the relative growth rates between revenue and the variable costs from those investments?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. We had 2024, we definitely forward invested in variable, and that was across rental sales, Zillow home loans and Zillow Showcase. Those are the three kind of primary drivers of variable cost growth. 2025, the variable cost growth will come from rentals and from Zillow loans primarily. And we’ll continue to this is good high margin revenue and we’ll continue to grow variable costs.

When they start to come in line, it it’ll be better this year. But when it comes in line, I think, to be determined, I think when we think about how do we drive incremental margins, it’s really off of the back of the fixed cost base. And then we’ll get smarter and smarter on the variable as we go. We’ve just tried to be really thoughtful around it’s important for us to continue to grow margins. It’s also important to us to make sure we’re well invested for all these nascent, really high growth potential businesses.

And we are really trying to balance that appropriately. We think we did a good job of it in 2024. We expanded margins 200 basis points while we forward invested on the sales front. And we also lit up rentals, apartment marketing campaign on the back of that as well. So there was a good amount of investment that happened under the hood.

But yet, because we were so disciplined on the fixed side, we were able to still drive incremental margins, and we got 400 basis points of incremental leverage on the fixed side throughout the year

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: as well. The incremental margins on the revenue on the platform are so healthy. Question in the back on my right.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role: Thank you. I walked in late, so I apologize if you addressed this. But on the rental side of the business, could you speak briefly about whether you think you can overtake your number one competitor in that space? What the strategy is to do that? And then specifically whether this agreement with Redfin is sort of material accelerant to that vision?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. I think we try to and there was a bit of a competition question earlier. We try to really focus on what we can control. I can’t really speak to the competitive space. I think it’s a big market.

So I think there’s opportunity for a whole bunch of people to be successful. What we’ve been thinking about is really using the same formula that we’ve used the last couple of years, which is drive more supply, both long tail single family and drive more apartment buildings and then build demand off of that. We’ve done quite well from 22,000 to 24,000. We increased the number of properties on the multifamily side by 23,000, so from 27,000 to 50,000. We want to continue to grow properties and then continue to grow consumer demand and ultimately deliver value to our property management partners, less so focused competitively on that strategy.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Eddie?

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role: Just a quick question. I’m not an expert on this, but I think that there’s some back and forth between I can’t remember if it’s the FTC or the DOJ and the MLSs about the need to for an agent to I think within the first twenty four hours post a listing when it comes up and that they’re saying that there would be a delay. I don’t remember if it’s sixty days or whatever. Can you just talk a little bit about that and what you see as the potential set of outcomes and what does that mean for the business?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Yes. So that would go back to Brian’s question around clear cooperation. The setup today is the National Association of Realtors, NAR, did a put a rule in place called five years or so ago that said it’s mandatory to put your listings in the MLS and you have one day to go do so. There are loopholes around that, but that’s the rule. There’s a chance that gets modified over time.

Now if it gets modified, what happens for us? We see it as opportunity, right? The marketplace tends to marketplaces form around the biggest audiences. So we know and are highly confident we will get all of the listings or 99% of the listings kind of regardless of what the regulatory environment or the industry setup is. Good proof point there from 02/2006 to 2019, Clear Cooperation didn’t exist and we did quite well getting that content.

To the extent there’s a change and it becomes optional, it’ll take time to play out because each of these jurisdictions are they’re all governed locally by these MLSs. So it’ll take some time to play out in any case. But I would just zoom back and say vast majority of listings are going to be on the Internet. That’s the most natural way to go sell a home and the best thing for buyers. And we have a great set of audience assets to make sure that, that happens.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Let me ask one more. At the start of the discussion, you used a four letter word that for a while was not used around Zillow in GAAP and GAAP earnings. So that’s exciting. So walk us through sort of how much has GAAP earnings and GAAP EPS become a bigger focal point now? And how do you think about sort of the timing when you could get to trailing four quarter GAAP EPS consistently?

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: So our twenty twenty five targets that we put out to you all for the full year are grow revenue low to mid teens against the housing market that we think grows low to mid single digits, expand margin continue to expand margins and be GAAP net income profitable for the year. So state goal for 2025, it’s one that we feel quite good about. I think the question on why and what’s the incremental focus, I think it’s important for us to continue to grow as a business. Like we have become a pretty big platform, and it’s about time for us to be GAAP profitable. I think internally, we would love to be an S and P 500 company over time.

That’s a great milestone for us. We think it would be a great milestone for shareholders as well. So that’s definitely a focus. And the way we get there is really continue to grow revenues like we’ve been talking about, be super disciplined on fixed costs to drive leverage. And that fixed costs that fixed cost discipline gets us leverage on stock based comp because stock based comp sits 90% of stock based comp sits in that fixed cost bucket.

So it’s a pretty simple formula so long as we execute well.

Unidentified speaker, Unidentified role, Morgan Stanley: Great. Jeremy, thank you very much. Looking forward to seeing you next year with a full year of GAAP earnings. There you go. Thank you, everybody.

Jeremy Hoffman, CFO, Zillow Group: Thank you.

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