Jeremy Wacksman: The Tech to Power the Industry

0:01 Hey everyone, I'm Mike Delprey and you're listening to Context, the podcast where I'm talking to industry leaders about the real estate tech space and the businesses and technologies changing it. My guest today is Jeremy Waxman, CEO of Zillow. Hey Jeremy. >> Hey, happy to be here. >> Yeah, awesome to have you in Boulder. And so Jeremy, you just spoke to my class a little while ago and did a great presentation. So that was awesome. >> Yeah, super fun.

0:25 >> Let me ask you this to start things off. So, how do you typically start your working day? >> My workday typically starts when I'm in Seattle actually with walking the dog with my wife. So, I have two teenage boys and so they're out of the house early on the way to school and I often will get time before the day starts kind of in all weather to get a quick walk in and we chat and we get the dogs some exercise and we get ourselves some steps to wake ourselves up for the day. So, that and a cup of coffee.

0:51 >> That's good. What kind of coffee? I mean I'm a Seattleite, so Starbucks is the easiest closest thing to get and that's usually what's in our house. >> Yeah. Thinking about the walk and clearing your mind and stuff. What inspires you? >> What inspires me? Well, I mean, I guess we'll come around to Zillow, but I find what I get most passionate about is solving customer problems. And if I look at my career, it's been led by chasing and working at companies that are trying to innovate sort of on behalf of the customer and usually the consumer.

1:24 That's really what motivates me. I was actually an engineer by training. I got my computer engineering degree to start. I thought I wanted to be a coder. I wasn't great at it. And what I fell in love with when I got my first job was really trying to figure out what to build. >> And trying to figure out what to build is like, well, what problem are you trying to solve? like what exists out there that needs to be made better and that the engineering part of my brain was the problem solving part of my brain >> but it was you know applying to like the what and I think that's kind of what motivates me in what I read in companies we study in business and how we talk internally and lead teams like I think that's sort of the common framework for me.

2:00 >> Is there anything that you do outside of work that brings you inspiration that you bring back into your work? >> I mean outside of work I do like to unplug. >> Good for you. finding activities that kind of force you to unplug. I'm a big skier and when you're going down a mountain, you kind of have to be present on going down the mountain and that's very, you know, freeing and clarifying and clearing of the head. So, I find that I like to find things that just force you to focus.

2:26 >> I love that. I think there's two kind of hobbies, right? And that's one of them where you're forced to focus. I recently picked up glass blowing. >> Whoa. >> And it's the same thing. If you start thinking about work, it's a disaster. >> I can't imagine what the learning curve is like on glass blowing. That's got to be pretty steep. >> It's not too bad. Okay. >> It's not too bad. If you come to my house, you would see about 30 port glasses.

2:47 >> Oh, wow. >> So, that's where I'm at. I'm just doing the same thing over and over and over and over again to learn. And you can see how they kind of change over time. All functional. Only a few of them beautiful. >> Okay. More becoming beautiful over time, I'm sure. >> Yeah, there's definitely a trend line there as well. In class, you know, I didn't get the the class was really engaged, so I didn't get this chance to ask you this question. So, I'll ask you right now. You're the CEO of Zillow.

3:10 Zillow's got 6,500 7,000 employees. Like, what do you do? What What does a typical week look like for you? How do you spend your time? The best way I can describe a CEO's job is to try and support others to make decisions. My job is to help my leadership team and their teams work through what their objectives are, work through what their teams are working on, which inevitably with humans involves conflict resolution, coordination, tax, collaboration, understanding, communication. And so that's, you know, humans are messy as they interact. So, we end up spending a lot of our time helping decisions get made, helping teams that are working together resolve a conflict or accelerate an effort or unlock an insight, but it's really helping the leaders do that versus doing it yourself.

4:01 >> Okay. In a typical week, is there one kind of most important thing that you do? >> No, actually, I think your job goes where it takes you. I mean, I think like water flowing, you know, you kind of flow to the area of impact and what part of the business you're spending more time on or what team you're spending more time with will vary based on the need at the time. So, and maybe that's part of what makes it really interesting for me. Back to the like, you know, what motivates me is solving problems is there's always a new or different problem to solve.

4:31 >> There's always something to work on and a team that needs help and I get to spend my time helping and I get to spend my time helping across the company. >> How do you help? Is it asking questions? Is it providing advice? What does help look like? >> Yeah, the best help is support. The best help is listening, understanding what the problem is and then whether it's going and removing a roadblock, whether it's providing clarity if two teams had a different point of view. The best help is like resolving conflict and inevitably enabling people to get their job done. Like that's the best help. But help sometimes can just be like clearing up a miscommunication or making sure team A knows what team B is doing or >> Mhm.

5:07 >> you know, so help help can take a variety of forms. >> In class, you've talked about the importance of taking big swings and part of that is not being afraid of failing. How do you encourage your teams to take big swings and not be afraid of messing up? >> It's hard because humans are wired to be scared of failing and they're wired to be fearful of change. Like we are creatures of habit. So we do as well as we can to celebrate failure through learning. You talk, you know, root cause analyses, AB tests, any AB test could be a failure. B failed if A succeeded, but you talk about them as what did we learn from that? How are we smarter today versus before because we did it. I think having that culture and understanding what you learned from something and then just being very focused on the future forward. It like sort of doesn't matter how we got here from here, we learned something. How do we improve from here?

5:59 I think setting that culture and tone and then trying to celebrate learning. >> Those are the things I think we at Zillow try and do. It is hard though because I think it's again you're kind of pushing against human nature to do it. >> Is there a way to institutionalize those learnings? Like how do you keep track of something you learned seven years ago? >> Yeah. I mean the cloud helps but but having a framework for how you evaluate things I think helps. When we run product experiments, you know, we have a ever maturing way our product and engineering teams and design teams work through trying something out or experimenting and that system building a system around it is as important as building the culture around it.

6:39 >> Interesting. How often do you talk to your customers? >> As often as we can. And we talk to our customers in a ton of ways, right? So there is surveys and research where you actually you literally have buyers and sellers in a room or on the phone or on a zoom or in a survey but we also talk to our customers by reading data and that happens at large scale and all the time. So the biggest way we at Zillow try and summarize all that up is we really codify and personify our customers and we actually name our personas illiteratively so that they are in the room all the time. And so one of the best ways is yes, you collect the data, you collect the insights, but you also sort of have the buyer and the seller and the renter present in the room and you name them when you're talking as a way to make sure that you are thinking about them, when you are building, when you're solving a problem, when you're evaluating data >> do you personally talk to customers?

7:30 >> Yes. >> How often? >> Not as often as I'd like. I mean, that's the most fun thing. both talking to the end consumer, but ultimately talking to our agents is some of the most fulfilling work because you get to >> hear what's working well for them and then you also get to hear what's not working well. and they're and they're great at giving feedback. Right now, it's actually in a really great spot because fall is our conference season. So, I'm actually on backto backtoback weeks of talking to our partners across our agent teams, our broker teams, our rental folks. Like, I've been to four or five in a row. So, I've gotten to really marinate in learning what's going well, what's not going well. the rest of the year doesn't always get this surge. So, I really like this time of year because I get to spend a ton of time with our partners and our customers.

8:10 >> Can you share one bit of constructive feedback you've heard from folks that you're kind of sitting with? You're like, "Yeah, maybe we could do something about that." >> The big theme for this year, and this is where the constructive feedback comes in, is around helping them navigate all these changes. >> Helping agents >> helping agents navigate. Yeah. So, so we'll talk about agents specifically. We can talk about buyers and sellers too, but as you know, we're probably undergoing a larger amount of change in this industry now than than I've ever seen in my 15 years here. Obviously, the macro environment is challenging, but the regulatory changes that came from the settlement and the business practice changes is big for the industry. And then generative AI is showing up and it's going to like rewire how the software works. So like we have all three of these kind of forces of change happening at the same time. Mhm.

8:58 >> And that change is scary to people because they're not sure what's on the other side. And it's easy to wake up and read a headline that says AI is taking your job or people are going to stop hiring buyers agents or everything's going to change. Like it's easy to wake up and get freaked out. And so the feedback we've gotten is basically help us, right? You're our software partner. We are, you know, we say we do tech so you can do real estate. And that's been our mantra for a long time with our agent partners. But we're finding ourselves increasingly not just doing tech, but also doing advocacy, also doing pioneering on forms, which we never thought we'd do to help educate the customer. So, we're finding our way into new spaces because the feedback we're getting is, you know, we need help. This is a big scary new world and we're trying to figure out how to navigate it.

9:44 >> Interesting. And then you also mentioned buyers and sellers. Are you hearing anything from them where you feel like Zillow could play a greater role? The big opportunity that's coming with all this is better education for the buyer and seller. And if you think about what the industry changes are, you can really sum them up as evolutionary, not revolutionary, and more education and transparency for the buyer and seller. Right? Just think about the two big changes that have happened. The requiring buyers to sign an agreement with an agent. That's a great thing because as we learned from talking to our buyers, most buyers didn't understand how this works. They don't understand how people get paid. Maybe they were told, many were not told, right? And then sellers having choice in how they offer compensation, not requiring them. Like that's a good change, too. Sellers should be able to choose that. Both of those things end up with a more educated consumer. And when you ask a buyer or seller, almost everyone is going through this transaction for the first time. So they don't know how it works. And so they usually are learning on the job. They're learning as they're going. And so more education is great for them. So a good example of that is we pioneered a touring agreement as part of these changes. We never had put an agreement that's our form in front of anybody. But no one was stepping up to put a form to meet this need that said, "Hey, all buyers have to sign something before they go to our house." We said, "Okay, well, we believe buyers should have choice. So, let's try and help codify a lightweight form." We call it a dating form before you get married, right? That yeah, >> you can go see a home with an agent, 7 days, non-exclusive for free, so that you can choose a great agent. We think that's better for the buyer. We also think that's better for the agent because that helps great agents win that business. they can show how great they are at what they do. That's a good example of us stepping in to help the buyer in a way that they wouldn't have known to ask for that a year ago because they didn't know it was a thing. But now we're here and fast forward a couple years and buyers are going to be used to signing an agreement to go see a house and date an agent before they marry an agent.

11:37 >> Yeah, there is a lot going on. One of the other things going on is this whole clear cooperation debate. And I want to avoid getting into it too much, but really what I'm asking is why do you think that's the debate right now? Like why did this get it's 2024, clear cooperation was brought up in March 2020. Like why is that the thing that's happening right now? You know, I wish I knew when this first started happening, we didn't expect this to be such a big issue because to us it's so obvious that private listing networks are bad.

12:08 They're bad for buyers, they're bad for sellers, and they're ultimately bad for agents, right? And so we looked at that and said, "Okay, the rules of clear cooperation largely ensure buyers, sellers, and agents can see all the inventory." And that's a good thing. And that's a wonderful thing that exists in this country that doesn't exist in any other market. If that goes away and private listening networks become more of the norm, well, buyers don't get to see all the inventory. That's not what buyers want. It's not good for consumers or buyers. Sellers also end up leaving money on the table, many of whom don't know that. And there's a bunch of studies that have come out that show that offMLS listings sell for less.

12:42 People don't understand they're trading visibility for price. And then that's bad for agents because agents ultimately then their value props diminish. They can't be like, I can take you to see all the homes. I can take you to see the homes I have. and consumers end up paying more, right? You have to like pay for access to listings. None of that sounds really good. So we said, well, it's unequivocally bad. This probably won't be a big thing. And then somehow it became this big next cycle. Maybe it's because there's this everything's up in the air because of the settlement and what else could get litigated and just fear of uncertainty. But to us, you never do wrong by doing right by the consumer.

13:18 >> And to us, transparency and access to all listings is right by the consumer. So we are hopeful that we come out of this with actually even stronger transparency and even stronger access for buyers and sellers and agents. But it definitely is a topic of the day. >> Yeah. Okay. Let's shift to brand a little bit. So you were the chief marketing officer at Zillow for a period of time. brand question and this is something I talk about in my class all the time. So I'm personally really interested in this. Zillow has a strong trusted brand and if you look at kind of the suite of products and services that Zillow offers now some of them are brand extensions where there's Zillow's in the name. Some of them are kind of you know powered by Zillow and others like Showing Time Plus. Loop are completely different brands. How do you think about brand extension versus challenger brands and kind of how far you can extend that Zillow brand?

14:07 >> Well, the answer I give won't apply to every brand out there, but from Zillow's perspective, when you have a brand that is so beloved and trusted, you have the ability to extend that brand and make it mean more things and deliver more things for the customer. And that's what you're seeing us do. So, as you know, we've moved from an advertising business to a transaction business. That requires us to offer more and different services. Mike asked us in class like, "How did we make the decision to put those new services under the Zillow brand versus create a new brand?" Well, we asked the customer, again, back to talking to customers and our buyers and sellers told us, "Yes, please offer financing. I would love to get financing, information, help, and a mortgage from Zillow."

14:44 >> And so, when you hear that, you hear you've earned the right with your brand trust to extend your brand. That's what you do. I think you see companies create new brands or separate brands when they don't have a brand that can extend into the new space. And so for us, the decision was easy, but I think it's the result of building a not just large and well-known, but pretty trusted brand with the buyer and seller. It's the same, we made the same decision six or seven years ago, I can't remember, when we went into rentals. You could have created a totally separate brand for rentals, but if you asked people coming to our site, they said, "Well, yeah, of course Zillow should offer houses for rent the same way they offer houses for sale because it's the same experience."

15:21 And I love that I can shop on Zillow. I want I want a one-stop shop. So, we listen to the customer, but we made the brand decision based on what the customer told us they would want or would expect from us. And I think other companies and other brands that maybe have a different place in a category maybe make different decisions. And ideally they're listening to their customer saying, "Oh, that brand can't be known for this new thing you want to do. You need to create something new for me."

15:44 >> I mean, you got a ton of experience in that over the past six or seven years. What's something you've learned from brand extensions that you kind of wish you knew seven years ago? >> It's a good question. I think that it takes as much effort to imbue new meaning in a brand as it does to create a new brand. so we had the right, but just look at our awareness that Zillow does mortgages is still very low.

16:07 Even though awareness of Zillow is kind of pervasive across the country. So we still have to go build the awareness that we offer this new thing. Even though the customer is willing to hear it, we have to go still tell them. >> And so I don't know if that's something new I've learned, but it's like a good reminder that the work is there. And it's why productled brands I think always do so well because the customer experiences it as a product as an offering first before you tell them about it. It's all like show don't tell.

16:34 If the product shows you that lets the marketing then amplify. I think that's a lesson that marketers like we learn over and over and over again through experience. >> Yeah. All right. Do you think the value of an online lead has changed over time? I think what the customer expects to have happen has changed. >> The consumer. >> The consumer. Yes. Sorry. The buyer and seller. We talk a lot about how consumer expectations are constantly evolving.

17:01 They're constantly changing. Like an innovation today becomes a table stakes very quickly, right? Think about the mobile phone and everything being an app. Went from novel to expected. You know, think about services like Uber where it's like, wait, I'm going to get in a stranger's car. and then like less than a decade later, you're putting your kids in an Uber without you, right? Like the expectation changes. So maybe reaching out to professionals on a marketplace 10 years ago might have been, oh, I'm I'm just meeting a company. Well, now they expect the brand to know what they wanted, help them get it, and they expect the services to really deliver for them. That's a big part of why we made this big strategy shift from an advertising company to a transaction company. And if you go look at what are the actions a customer takes on Zillow, well, they're increasingly book a tour the way you'd actually book a restaurant on Open Table. Not just reach out and try and schedule a tour, like actually just book it. Understand what I can afford, not just like, oh, I need to go offline and fill out a diary of information to even understand if I qualify, you know, can I just fill out some information and get a real sense of my budget? And we've pioneered products around that. That's what a lead quote becomes. It's can you help me with those starter experiences in the transaction and the category I'm in. And I think you you see that in kind of a lot of marketplaces. You see a lot of marketplaces move from just an inquiry to help me get more of the job done.

18:21 So related to online leads, you know, some of the research I've done recently around secret shopping, I think you mentioned it in class, right? Roughly kind of 50% of leads are not responded to. >> Yeah. And you know, let me assume that that rate is better for Zillow leads and leads to premier agents and flex. Is that correct? >> I don't have the math, but I have to imagine it is just because we take a lot of steps to make sure the customer gets an answer. In fact, we we provide services to make sure that we connect that customer with an agent who will talk to them to make sure that customer gets an answer.

18:54 >> How have you made that number better? Like why is if I go to Zillow and I fill out a form, why am I more likely to hear back from somebody than if I just went to a brokerage website? >> Yeah. I mean, if you go back to like what motivates me and I think what motivates us as a company, it's solving the problem. Like you ask yourself, why isn't happening? You look at the stack of reasons why it's not happening and you attack those with product and services and incentives. And that looks like one making sure the customer who made the inquiry meant to do it. So we validate that. That looks like making sure we get those customers to agents who want them, right? People who are the right agent for them. Make sure those agents are available, >> right? Are they going to teams that have staff that can take the call at that moment versus someone who might be at their kids soccer game and can't take the call right now? And how do we solve?

19:41 So, you got to build software and systems to do all those things. And that's what we've done. We've built a lot of technology and a lot of operations to make the marriage between a buyer or a seller and the agent more fruitful and happen more often because a bunch of the reasons why it doesn't happen. Sometimes it's, you know, the agent was busy or lost it or cherrypicked, but often times it's like they were on the phone, they were doing something else, they didn't have a staff, they didn't have a system in place, they missed, it's a misconnection, right? So, you can build software to solve all those things. And that's I think why again it all comes back to what's the buyer trying to do?

20:15 What's the seller trying to do? And then how can we use technology to help make that happen more often. >> What do you think is more important for the lead? Time to reply or getting them in touch with the best person possible for what they're looking for. >> I think the most important thing is understanding what the buyer or seller wants and trying to deliver that. And the reason I say that versus the timeliness or the responsiveness is because different questions need different things, right? to just take real-time touring. So, many of your listeners may not know like we have pioneered powered by showing time away for a buyer who wants to book a tour. We say the way you'd book a restaurant on Open Table. So, it's not schedule a tour. It's not a lead. It's not let me go get an agent to go talk to the other agent to go talk to the seller to figure out when I can see the house. And it's a big game of telephone. It's literally I'm going to go see the house tomorrow at 10:00 and Zillow's going to help me get an agent who's going to meet me at the house at 10:00 and we're going to tour and that's how I'm going to meet the agent because that's what I want to go do. That's a very different air quote lead than someone who's like I have a question about this house. So you have to build a very different product and experience and responsiveness to that customer is not like can the agent get on the phone fast enough. It's right >> does showing time have the availability for that tour? Did the marriage happen?

21:26 And by the way agents love that because they're meeting a high intent customer but it's just a very different product flow than I have a question. >> Yeah. >> So you have to build the right tool for the right customer desire. >> Okay. So, in the world of real estate, is there an opinion you hold that not many people agree with? >> I don't know if there's an opinion I hold. I would say maybe a misconception that we deal with is I think there's still a misconception that Zillow is not for agents, which is kind of confounding to us in this day and age, but we still get it. We still get, oh, Zillow is competing with me. Mhm.

22:01 >> And you just look at a our business and how we make money and how we share in revenue growth with our agent partners, but b also everything we build, right? I mean, not just we've talked about Flex and our solo customers, but we've spent billions of dollars over the last decade buying, acquiring, building, and developing software for agents. Whether those agents work with Zillow customers or don't, they work with our competitors leads or their sphere, it's just all software to digitize the transaction.

22:27 So, we are here to power the industry. And the reason we're here to power the industry is the only way to get the consumer the one-stop shop, right? The integrated transaction on your phone from dreaming all the way to signing the documents is if the agent has great software and tools on the backside that they can interact with those customers and delight them. So that's the why we do it. But it's just fascinating to me that 20 years in almost we still get this well but you're here to compete with me. It's like no, we're here to help you. We're here to make you better at your job because that's the only way we can get more transactions done, >> right?

23:01 So, as CEO, I assume part of your job is thinking about resource allocation. >> You know, Zillow's doing a lot of different things right now from the traditional lead genen and everything we've talked about to home loans to to rentals and and everything else. How do you think about focus to make sure you don't get stretched too thin? Focus really starts with strategy and making sure your strategy is clear and well articulated and communicated and well understood by the team. And so once you've articulated your strategy, then your resources and your resource allocation can fit in strategy. And then it's just a conversation of how much in each area and those are more manageable problems for the teams and they're more easily distributed to the teams make those decisions. Right? So for us, we think about our company as rentals, our for sale business and our agent software business. And those things are fairly complimentary and there's a lot of coordination to build this integrated transaction. But we can think about resource allocation, road maps, prioritization in those areas of strategy. And you'll see exactly what I just said on a strategy stack slide that walks around the halls of Zillow that drives our planning, that drives our prioritization. So, you know, it all comes from being clear on what you're trying to do and then it's just about how much of that are you doing at any given time.

24:16 >> You know, if I wrote you a check for 250 million bucks and said, "Here, invest this in your business." Is there a part of it you'd invested in today? >> I mean, I would do more of what we're doing. yeah. I mean, I think we are really pleased with the progress we've made over the last couple years. You know, we've made great progress growing our rentals business, growing our integrated transaction, our for sale business, and we're growing agent software and tools. We have a long way to go. And you can look at that a couple ways. You can look at that in terms of like number of transactions we participate in, right? It's still in the single digits.

24:48 >> We have 60 70% audience share. And yet we still only end up helping, you know, sub 10% of customers actually get a transaction done through one of our agents, through a mortgage, through some way you want to count transaction participation. That's growing and we have a lot of growth and excitement ahead, but we got a long way to go. So I think more money would be trying to make progress on that faster. >> Would it be more on the product development front or the marketing front?

25:13 >> we kind of think about those investments separately. Honestly, we have a very very healthy fixed cost investment in those initiatives. And I don't know that more goes faster there. Often times like more people in the room, you end up slowing down. It is really about making the right decisions and coordinating. There's always more things we could build, but the long pole in getting to where we want to go is actually more making sure the software works for the customer and for the agent and making sure we're enrolling enough great agents to help scale the strategy.

25:45 Like that is actually the long pole is our scale and development of our agent partners, our loan officers and our tools for all them as much as the customer stuff. I think advertising for us, you actually hear Jeremy Hoffman, our CFO, talk about it to our investors. We treat it as a discrete investment because it is an amplification because we're such a product first company. We build this brand and create this engagement with customers on the backs of great product. And product is the best way to not just create awareness but maintain preference and likability of your brand. And then we use advertising as a tool to amplify that, right? It's a great tool to solve a problem. Like people don't know we do mortgages. Okay, great. In our enhanced markets, we can start to teach them on the site, but also off-site that we do mortgages. It's a great tool to say, oh, we underindex in multif family apartment seekers because we have such a dominant brand in the single family space or a predominant brand in single family space. It's a tool you can use there.

26:39 So, it's a tool you can use selectively, but it's always used to amplify your business or amplify your product efforts. That's kind of why we think about it discreetly. >> Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. As Zillow's CEO, what do you hope that your legacy will be? >> Hard to think about legacy 60 days into the job. my goal both for now and into next year and really into the years to come is to get this housing super app into more and more hands to get it more fully functional to really get to what the buyer and seller want. You know, we talked about this in class. One of my favorite stats is that not favorite, one of the most stark stats from our research is that so many people cry during the process of buying and selling a house. And when you are a company that is trying to solve consumer problems in your category and you hear the people cry trying to do the transaction in your category, that's what you want to solve.

27:31 The solution to that problem is a one-stop shop from start to finish where you can do it all on your phone and you can do it all on your phone with great professionals and you win more often and it's delightful and in your control and transparent. We are a long way from getting it done end to end. We've made great progress but we got a long way to go. So my goal is to get us to that end of that rainbow of a housing super app that you can actually buy and sell a home and it can feel more like these modern digital services we fill in all the other categories. If we do that, we'll obviously help a lot more people along the way. We'll grow the business.

28:02 So, that will take care of itself, but we'll have actually changed how you buy and sell real estate, which is really what our goal is. What I'm hearing is you want less people to cry through the transaction. Yeah. Which is a noble goal >> for sure. Just kind of wrapping up with this. I don't know if you listen to my podcast or kind of read some of my research. Do you? I do. >> All right. Is there anything out of that that you find kind of, you know, past guests or anything I've written about especially compelling or or something you either violently disagree with or think I should take another look at? I don't think violently disagree with anything. The one thing that sticks out to me and I think it's changing it's also because it was new, but mortgage to us is not a standalone thing and I think you've written about Zillow Homes and it is it's a revenue line, but the reason we're doing mortgage is it's a part of that integrated transaction. everything I just talked about around our big vision and our goals. You cannot build an integrated transaction without financing. It's like one of the two most primary things. You need a great agent and you need financing amongst a bunch of other things. So when we think about building mortgage, it's about delivering that and that's how we think about investments. Back to your question investments, we are trying to build the consumer experience as an integrated thing, not as a standalone thing. So you'll hear us talk more about that, but I would say like as you learn more about and study us more with mortgage, thinking about it as part of our integrated forale business as much as a mortgage revenue line.

29:24 >> So how do I know if mortgage is working? >> Well, you'll see it in purchase mortgage growth. >> Okay? >> You'll see it in Zillow customer awareness and use and preference of mortgage. But I think you'll also see it increasingly in the consumer experience. You'll see, you know, fast forward some period of time, you'll see an integrated messaging experience between the buyer, the loan officer, their real estate agent, all the documents need to get collected. You'll see intelligence between getting your loan and making the offer. Like that's the real problem to solve.

29:57 >> But I won't see any of that. How do I see it? >> Well, you'll see it in outputs. I mean, we'll provide that as part of metrics and outputs. So, >> yeah. No, that's great. And then if I wanted to know if Zillow is able to do that, you know, in a financially healthy way, right, mortgage is a hard business. It costs a lot. Traditionally, it costs a lot to originate a loan. How do I look at that? Because it all just kind of rolls up. Does it just roll up and is that it?

30:19 >> Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately you want to look at total company profitability. And we've talked a lot about our goal is to become net income profitable as we scale our transactions across what we think is a proper fixed cost base. And that's where you'll ultimately see it. And again it goes back to the strategy because the goal is grow our transaction share and participation through a combination of delivering the customer what they want through agents through mortgage increasingly through other services over time. So that's where you'll see it. I think you're right and part of why I bring that up is mortgage as a standalone business I think is a tough business. I think it's the customer acquisition cost of a standalone originator is really tough. Trying to build a brand that you trust to start the mortgage process. getting that integrated into the agent and into the transaction is really expensive for a lot of standalone mortgage companies.

31:03 Those are all the reasons that we think mortgage is such a really important thing for us to do because we don't have as many of those challenges. We can think about acquiring the customer once and providing them as an integrated transaction. We can think about making sure the customer can choose do they want to start with shopping for a home or with financing and ultimately end up in the same place having to get both things. So, we think about it integrated and I think that's how increasingly how you'll see it.

31:26 >> Okay, great. Okay. Well, I'll keep my eyes open. We'll keep talking about it. I'm excited. >> So, that's it for time. Any closing thoughts? >> No, I'm really excited to be here. It was fun to spend time with your class and talk about the future. I think my parting thoughts would be, you know, we got a long way to go. really excited about the progress we've made, but we're really just getting started. >> Cool. Well, it was great spending time with you and thanks again for coming out.

31:45 >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> I'm Mike Delprey. You've been listening to Context. For more of my research that Jeremy doesn't violently disagree with, you can go to my website at mikedp.com. All right. Thanks.