Zillow

Zillow is the biggest home search site in the United States. Launched in 2006, it's where most American property searches start: type in a city or ZIP code and you can browse millions of for-sale and rental listings with photos, price history, tax records, and school information, all without paying anything.

The feature everyone knows is the Zestimate, Zillow's automated estimate of a home's value. It's computed from public records, tax data, and recent nearby sales, and it appears on nearly every property page, including homes that aren't on the market. It's a useful starting point, not an appraisal — estimates for off-market homes carry a much larger error than for active listings, and sellers regularly discover their Zestimate was optimistic.

Zillow keeps layering AI on top of its listings database. In March 2026 it launched AI mode, a conversational search where you can type something like 'three-bedroom homes under $450k with a fenced yard near good schools' instead of setting filters, then ask follow-up questions about affordability or push back on the Zestimate directly.

What Zillow actually does

At its core, Zillow aggregates listings from MLS feeds, agents, and landlords, then wraps them in data. Every listing page shows price and tax history, comparable sales, neighborhood details, and estimated monthly costs. Save a search and you'll get alerts when something new matches. When you're ready to see a home, Zillow connects you with a local agent — that referral business, along with rentals and mortgages, is how the free site makes its money.

Key features

• Zestimate — automated valuations for more than 100 million US homes, with value history charts.
• AI mode — plain-language conversational search, added in 2026.
• 3D tours and floor plans — many listings include interactive walkthroughs, and Showcase listings add richer media.
• Rental tools — search rentals, apply online, and pay rent through the platform.
• Mortgage tools — calculators, rate quotes, and pre-qualification through Zillow Home Loans.

What happened to Zillow Offers

Zillow no longer buys houses. Its iBuying arm, Zillow Offers, shut down in November 2021 after the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars overpaying for homes it couldn't resell profitably. If you want an instant cash offer today, Opendoor is the main remaining option; Zillow itself is back to being a pure marketplace.

Pricing

Zillow is free for buyers, sellers, and renters. Agents pay for leads through the Premier Agent program, landlords pay for premium rental listings, and Zillow earns fees on mortgages — which explains why the site nudges you toward its partner agents at every turn.

Our take

We reach for Zillow first when researching any US property, and so does nearly everyone else — the traffic and data depth are hard to beat, and small touches like price-cut history give you real negotiating context. The new AI mode is genuinely convenient for fuzzy searches that checkbox filters handle badly, like trading commute time against yard size.

Two annoyances worth knowing. First, the Zestimate gets quoted as gospel in negotiations when it's really a rough model output; on off-market homes it can be tens of thousands off in either direction. Second, the lead-gen model means that tapping 'request a tour' usually routes you to an advertising agent rather than the listing agent, and the follow-up calls start quickly. Use the data freely, but pick your own agent deliberately.