Hello, and welcome to Zillow's third quarter 2024 financial results call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today.

If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Brad, you may begin..

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Zillow Group's third quarter 2024 call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Zillow Group CEO, Jeremy Wacksman, and CFO, Jeremy Hofmann. During today's call, we will make forward-looking statements about our future performance and operating plans based on current expectations and assumptions.

These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and we encourage you to consider the risk factors described in our SEC filings for additional information. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events except as required by law.

This call is being broadcast on the Internet and is accessible on our investor relations website. A recording of the call will be available later today. During the call, we will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA, which we refer to as EBITDA.

We encourage you to read our shareholder letter and earnings release, which can be found on our investor relations website as they contain important information about our GAAP and non-GAAP results, including reconciliations of historical non-GAAP financial measures. We will now open the call with remarks followed by live Q&A.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Jeremy Wacksman..

Zillow. These efforts to create a more seamless and convenient experience on both sides of the rental process are paying off, yielding growth in traffic, multifamily property count, and revenue.

Our multifamily advertising campaign and our ongoing partnership to share rental listings with Realtor.com are also helping boost our success by contributing to increased customer awareness of Zillow Rentals. In Q3, our total average monthly rentals unique visitors were up 20% according to Comscore.

We continue to expect multifamily to be the main engine of rentals revenue growth. We now have 47,000 multifamily properties on Zillow, having added close to 10,000 year to date, and multifamily revenue is up 38% year over year.

As it stands today, with the combination of both long-tail and multifamily properties, we have the most rental listings in the country and consequently, the most users. With steady growth under our belts, we believe Zillow Rentals is well on its way toward the billion-dollar-plus revenue opportunity we see in front of us.

Across the entire business, I am proud of the progress we are making to improve the experience of getting home.

We have a much-loved and trusted brand, with the largest, most engaged audience of movers, a partner network made up of some of the best and most productive agents and teams in the country, a solid financial foundation, and deep tech expertise that allows us to invest in software solutions to benefit movers and the entire industry.

Our business is increasingly diversified, and we have continued to outperform the industry while maintaining strong cost discipline. Looking ahead, we are focused on capturing a more meaningful share of the $30 billion accessible TAM in residential real estate, while continuing to deliver on behalf of our customers and shareholders.

Thank you as always for being on this journey with us, and on that note, I will hand the mic over to CFO Jeremy Hofmann..

Aerial, Follow-up Boss, and Spruce. Looking at variable costs, we have intentionally increased these costs as a percentage of revenue during 2024 as we invest in our rentals and Zillow Showcase sales teams, as well as additional Zillow Home Loans officers to support future expected growth.

For marketing and advertising, we have been clear that we make discrete decisions to dial our efforts up or down based on the opportunities we see. The most obvious opportunity we have had on the marketing front has been for our rentals marketplace, and we have invested in a national campaign this year.

This investment in Q2 and Q3 has noticeably expanded Zillow brand awareness for apartment seekers, and we are pleased with the early results. To close, it is clear we are executing on our strategy, and we are very excited about the opportunity ahead of us.

We have a beloved brand with the largest, most engaged audience of movers, a partner network made up of some of the best and most productive agents and teams in the country, a solid financial foundation, and unmatched tech expertise to tackle the hard problems necessary to digitize this analog industry.

As I look forward, we are growing across every part of our business with investments in place to drive future growth. We are disciplined on our costs, and we expect to drive sustainable profitable growth on our way to strong GAAP profits over time. And with that, operator, we will open the line for questions..

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk, and then your name will be called.

Please accept, unmute your audio, and ask your question. We will wait one moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question will come from John Colantuoni from Jefferies. Please go ahead..

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a multipart question on real-time touring. Can you give us some perspective on how lead conversion for real-time touring is comparing to other types of connections? And I believe real-time touring generally lends itself to agents transitioning to the flex model.

So I am curious if you could detail how many agents are transitioning to flex in markets you rolled out real-time touring, and if that transition is providing additional tailwinds to revenue given you are now more directly monetizing the commission through a product that has a higher lead conversion. Thanks..

Hey, John. This is Jeremy Wacksman. On real-time touring, we have not broken out real-time touring versus other touring types, but we have for a while talked about how the touring customer in general converts to transaction at about a 3x the rate.

And the other color I can give is real-time touring is going to be north of 25% of our connections by the end of the year. That has been our goal, and we are going to be ahead of that. We did talk a bit in the prepared remarks about seeing conversion improvements generally.

Touring is obviously a piece of that, and so that is driving obviously the increased conversion generally as a component. In terms of payment model and kind of business model mix, real-time touring actually is available across both. And, again, it just goes back to our strategy of trying to help identify higher intent customers.

Real-time touring does a pretty big job of that. And then trying to help land them with our best agent partners. As a reminder, you know, we work with lots of agents, but they represent the top end of the industry, the top 20% of the industry is the majority of our Premier Agent base.

So we are really pleased as we are able to identify and hand them higher intent customers. You are seeing the benefits that play out in conversion..

Thanks, Jeremy..

Our next question will come from Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets..

Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I guess I have two. First on the kind of regulatory changes and just curious, you guys have obviously rolled out kind of a light version of the mandated buyer's agreements for agents.

Just curious if you are seeing any structural changes to conversion where, you know, particularly those markets where that is kind of a brand new practice. And just curious if that is maybe at all affecting your market share on everything.

And then second, just on Zillow Showcase, can you just remind us you gave the overall share of new listings, I know, in the prepared remarks and everything, but just remind us where you have kind of seen your market share of total listings or new listings go in some of the more mature markets, like the individual markets, if you could. Thanks..

Sure. So let me take Zillow Showcase first, and then maybe we will do in reverse order. So on Zillow Showcase, yeah, we said in the prepared remarks it is now nearly 1.5% share of new listings. We just rolled it out nationwide earlier this year, and so the growth while has some dispersion in markets. We have not given out any kind of market mix details.

I will say across the board, we continue to be really impressed that the product market fit holds as we grow that scale. So that higher engagements that we talked about, you know, 80% more page views, 75% more saves, 75% more shares, those stats hold across markets as we grow availability.

And we are continuing to see homes sell faster and for more money. So 2% more, which is about $9,000 on average per home. And we continue to see agents who use it, as we talked about in the remarks, win more listings. They are winning about 20% more than similar agents who are not using Zillow Showcase. So we are still really early.

You know, we just went nationwide earlier this year. And we see a long runway ahead of us. We talked about a 5 to 10% total active listing goal over time. And I think as we get to that level, Brad, I think we will have more maturity in markets to talk about the machinations across price points or geographies. But right now, it is still really early.

And then on the buyer's agreement, we do not have any concrete data to share other than to say, we look at it as really helpful friction for the buyer. It is an education process. It is getting them through a really necessary education step, and it better prepares them to meet the agent.

As we talked about in the prepared remarks, it is available on more than 90% of touring connections nationwide, and we have worked really hard to customize it where necessary by state.

And we see this as a really healthy evolution and processing all these settlement changes to help start to educate the buyers on how this process works to make sure when they meet these great agents, they are even more educated on what to expect both in the initial tour and then in what to expect in the relationship if they choose to move forward..

Got it. That is great. Thanks..

Our next question will come from Ron Josey with Citi. Please go ahead..

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Jeremy, I wanted to ask a little bit more just about residential revenue, and Q3 is another quarter where revenue growth outperformed the broader industry, and I wanted to understand just the drivers of this outperformance and obviously, enhanced markets now in 43 markets, showcase listings we just talked about.

Any insights on what is driving just the better overall outperformance would be helpful, I think. And then another sort of maybe bigger picture question on the overall go-to-market strategy. I think we saw a new head of agent sales was hired back in July.

I want to understand just how Premier Agent sales might interact with showcase listing sales and just the overall and also the software and services sales team and just understanding go-to-market strategy overall going forward. Thank you..

Yeah. Thanks, Ron. It is Jeremy Hofmann. I will take the first one, and then I will pass it to Jeremy Wacksman for the second one. I think across the business, we performed quite well in Q3. You know, we grew double digits in residential, rentals, and mortgages, and, obviously, total growth of 17% year over year, we are quite pleased with.

Within residential, the drivers are a few folds. So one, PA just benefited from continued conversion improvements.

You know, we have been investing pretty heavily in honing our funnel for a while at this point, and we are just seeing the benefits of those particularly as we go into more enhanced markets and we get more contributions from real-time touring.

And then beyond that, we had another strong quarter of growth from Zillow Showcase, which is now, you know, nearly 1.5% of all new listings in the country. And that was all supplemented by the new construction marketplace continues to perform well.

And the software solutions we are providing from ShowingTime Plus and Follow-up Boss are being well received too. So it really has been across the board, and something we are quite pleased with.

And then, Jeremy, you want to hit the second one?.

Yeah. On the new sales leader, yes, that is the start of maybe more integration and scale for our sales organization to offer just a more seamless go-to-market to our agent community. And so you should expect to see us scale some of our products across that larger Salesforce and start to bring them to market in a more integrated fashion to date.

We have been doing that in pockets and places, but our goal over time is to have, you know, one face to the industry to represent all of our products that will most notably show up in kind of our market-based pricing and showcase offerings. But over time, you can imagine that will scale beyond that..

That is great. Thank you, guys..

Our next question will come from Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI..

Okay. Great. Thanks. I want to ask two things. I want to follow-up on Brad's question about these NAR settlement changes. And you just talk about what you have seen in the market so far? I guess we are three or four months into this.

Does it from your perspective, has greater friction occurred in the market, or has it been largely immaterial so far? And then your comments also on stock-based compensation, you know, being down year over year.

What is your goal with stock-based compensation kind of going forwards, you know, the next two years? Asked that from a perspective of trying to figure out when you get to kind of sustained GAAP, you know, profitability and stock-based compensation will be one key lever for that. So just talk about how you plan to manage that going forwards.

Thank you..

Great. Thanks, Mark. It is Jeremy Hofmann. I will take both of those. So I think on the NAR settlement impact, we cannot speak to broad commission trends just because 80% of our Premier Agent base is in that top 20% of all producers. So we are really working with top agents versus a broad swath of folks in PA.

And for our agents across our PA business, we have seen commission rates stay in a tight band. Obviously, Q3 performance was quite strong. Being able to grow the total company revenue 17%, 12% across residential, and pretty substantially outperforming the category. We were really pleased.

Beyond that, I would say we have been pretty consistent here for a while. We believe we and our partners are the outsized beneficiaries of any changes in the real estate industry. You know, we have the most customers. We work with the best partners, and we provide the most technology.

So we expect our PAs will deliver value and get paid because they provide great service. And that we and they are sharetakers in really any evolution or dispersion of the industry. So that is how we are feeling on that front. And then the second question around stock-based compensation. We plan to leverage it going forward.

So just as a reminder, our fixed cost base is in about the $1 billion range on an annualized basis. And 90% of our stock-based comp sits within that bucket. So as we are controlled on the fixed cost front and grow revenue, we will get more and more leverage on the SBC line that will drive to greater GAAP profitability over time..

Okay. Thank you..

Our next question will come from Nicholas Jones with JPM Securities. Please go ahead..

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I guess, some follow-ups on the showcase.

As you roll this out, can you kind of speak to the demand you are seeing in the market for the product? And I guess, what are you learning about how you are pricing it today and potentially where that can go against kind of the intermediate or longer-term targets you have for that business? Thank you..

Yeah. Nick, happy to take that. So as we said a couple of times, it is early. We are really pleased at this early. We are at nearly 1.5% share of new listings. And the two things I would say we have learned so far is, you know, price which is variable by home price and geography, lands well with agents and teams.

The big challenge is helping them work through their workflow and operations to scale listings across them. Right? So we have folks who have a listing at a time. We have folks who have hundreds of listings on their team and across our agent force. And just working with them to operationalize the change, it is new media, new media capture.

It is a new client sales experience with sellers. That is what we are working through and doing that with different size types of teams across the country something we will continue to learn and mature as we go. We continue to see great results from it, I talked about the stats earlier.

It continues to remain really engaging with buyers and with sellers, and we continue to see agents benefit from it to win more business. That is why we remain confident in that intermediate-term goal. Right? Our medium-term target is 5 to 10% of total active listings, and that is a $150 to $300 million annual business for us.

And of course, we think there is potential beyond that. We want to give you all kind of a mile marker in the road. What excites us about Zillow Showcase and the tech powering it is once a buyer and a seller experience it, they do not really want to go back to traditional listing of just photos and text. They kind of have this expectation of that.

That is how a listing should behave. They should be able to really immersively tour the home that way as a buyer, and a seller should be able to show off their home that way. So we get excited about the ability to drive adoption of the tech and the product far beyond the goal we have shared with you.

That will, of course, take time to retrain the industry, but you can see the potential of it in the product. And as you guys do your channel checks with our agents who have experienced it, I think you will see the same..

Thank you..

Our next question will come from Chris Kuntarich from UBS. Please go ahead..

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just one on the market share doubling within the four oldest enhanced markets. I think if I am looking at the right chart from an investor deck a while back, that was closer to 3.5% in January of 2023. So that implies, I guess, we are closer to 7% and above that average now.

Can you maybe talk to us a bit about this oldest cohort of enhanced markets and how kind of the puts and takes we should be thinking about as it relates to using that as a case study for some of these newer cohorts of enhanced markets ramping? Thanks..

Yep. I can take that as Jeremy Hofmann. What we are referring to in the shareholder letter and then also in Jeremy Wacksman's prepared remarks is that we have grown in our oldest four enhanced markets. We grew revenue per total transaction value.

It is a combination of residential and mortgages, grew versus total transaction value in those markets by 50% through the course of 2023, by 80% in aggregate through the end of June, and then doubled by the end of September of this year.

So that is a really good proof point for why we have continued to roll out these enhanced markets at the pace that we have. We went from nine at the end of last year to 43 as of October.

And what we are seeing from a trend perspective in the earlier enhanced markets are quite consistent with the older ones, which gives us confidence to keep landing and expanding from here..

Got it. Thanks for the clarification there. And maybe just one on the Virtual Staging AI, the acquisition that you had made in early October.

Apologies if you touched on this earlier, but just could you maybe talk to us about how you are thinking about letting this value and integration into Zillow Showcase, like, how you may let that value accrue to the seller agents versus potentially offering different tiers of Zillow Showcase..

Yeah. This is Jeremy Wacksman. I will take that. We continue to look for ways to improve and expand our offerings, you know, for sellers and for buyers. And I just talked a bunch about Zillow Showcase as it exists today. Virtual Staging is a fantastic capability that we are excited to bring to both sellers and agents as well as their photographers.

Right? Because you can digitally stage listing images in seconds, we are not sharing any changes to go to market other than I think you should expect us to bring that to market on listings in a broad way. You know, I will comment.

We also announced an agreement to share our Zillow 3D home tours and interactive floor plans with Realtor.com this quarter as well.

Again, just back to trying to get the technology out there and well understood by buyers and sellers as they enter the category, experience content, and create this new norm and expectation for what a digital listing should look like..

Got it. Thank you..

Our next question will come from Michael Ng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead..

Hey. Good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I just have two. I guess, the first one is just on rentals. Really impressive rental's traffic growth. And it sounds like the marketing campaign that you are leaning into is working well.

As we head into 2025, do you see opportunities to further expand that marketing campaign or other advertising levers that you could pull that you see as potential high returns? I am just thinking about the OpEx outlook next year. Thanks..

Why do not I start on rentals, and then maybe, Jeremy, you could talk maybe how to think about the future. Yeah. We are, as Jeremy Hofmann said, we are really pleased with the results of our demand efforts here. That is both our multifamily advertising campaign and our partnership with Realtor.com.

It is really helping develop and mature our strategy, right, which is the sustainable supply of unique listings to drive the largest audience. Right? And that audience, like you mentioned, largest audience of renters in the country, up 20% year over year and well ahead of the competition.

And that in turn as a strategy bringing high-quality renters solving their major problem, which is finding as much inventory as possible. It is what is leading advertisers to want to get in front of that audience. And that is what is driving, not just the revenue growth, in rentals, but the multifamily revenue growth up 38% year over year.

So we expect that growth to continue, you know, we saw strong growth in Q3. We expect to in Q4. And, Jeremy, I do not know if you want to talk at all about how to think about 2025..

Yeah, Mike. All I would say there is we are pretty excited about the opportunity in rentals, not just towards the $1 billion-plus mile marker we gave you all, which we think will really be on the back of multifamily growth, but beyond that as well.

We just think the strategy that we are going after really aggregating both single-family homes and multifamily properties in one experience is quite unique and quite differentiated. So the long-term opportunity is one we think is well beyond the billion-dollar revenue mile marker we put out there. And I think marketing will be a mix.

We will be part of that mix. I think we have always been the types of folks that start with product and then add marketing to accelerate growth. And I would assume the same type of strategy going forward..

Great. Thank you. That is all very helpful color. And my second question, I was wondering if you could speak to any risks to changes in clear cooperation. I think you made some comments in your prepared remarks, but we just love your view on where we stand today and how you are thinking about any potential changes in the future? Thank you..

Happy to. Yeah. I outlined in our prepared remarks. I mean, our advocacy principles have been consistent for some time. They start with access. Zillow was founded to help turn on the lights and provide free access to buyers, sellers, and the real estate industry.

And changes to rules and cooperation that would pull listings off MLS's so that Zillow and others could not share as many of them, that is just not good for buyers or sellers. It is also not good for agents. Putting listings in private networks means buyer's agents cannot show all the available inventory.

So it is not as much of a business issue for us right now, especially as the largest audience and the largest brand, we will always find ways to get our share of inventory to create that experience for buyers, sellers, and connect them with great agents. It is more about the consumer good for the industry.

You know, the US real estate market is the most transparent market in the world because of policies like this, and we would love to see those policies strengthen so we can build great businesses and consumer experiences on top of them versus weakened so that some can benefit from trying to pull a pretty small share of listings behind a velvet rope for their own benefit..

Great. Thank you, Jeremy..

Our next question comes from John Campbell with Stephens Inc..

Thanks, guys. Congrats on a great quarter. Just want to stick on the Q4 revenue guidance. You guys have obviously provided some direction for pretty sharp growth, you know, continuation of growth out of rentals and mortgage. So just isolating residential, it seems like you have a fairly large subscription there.

So I am thinking the swing factor is probably going to be flex, but from just what you guys have given and if just kind of taking the back of the napkin here, I am thinking I am going to have to assume that Premier Agent revenue is going to be down year over year.

I know you guys do not report them out anymore, but maybe just directionally, if you could help us, does the guide imply a Premier Agent decline year over year?.

Yeah. Thanks, John. It is Jeremy Hofmann. I think of it as seasonality in the business from Q3 to Q4 and want to over-focus on that. I think, overarchingly, we are pleased with our Q4 guide. Twelve percent growth at the midpoint for the company in a continued challenged housing market we think is quite solid.

And the macro has been and we expect to continue to remain choppy just because affordability remains a challenge. And in the meantime, we are consistently outperforming the industry just given how many products and partner improvements we are making.

And then stepping further back, we are on track to deliver double-digit growth and margin expansion in both Q4 and full-year 2024. So assuming the midpoint of the range, we will grow revenue 14% year over year in 2024 for the company and 22% EBITDA margins, which implies 200 basis points of margin expansion. So, overarchingly, feeling quite good.

And then as you think about what we are doing on the residential side, which obviously Premier Agent is a huge piece of that, you know, we are really gaining our share versus total transaction value. We were up 800 basis points year over year in Q3, and we have had 2,000 basis points of share gains since the beginning of 2023.

We expect continued growth just on the back of the enhanced market rollouts we are having and the success we are having there along with things like listing showcase, rentals, follow-up boss, and ShowingTime Plus. So I think, overarchingly, I think we are well set up not just in Q4, but beyond that..

Okay. Makes sense. And then a quick follow-up just on Follow-up Boss. Seems like the adoption uptick has been pretty sharp of late. I do not know how much of that is due to the enhanced market expansion. So maybe if you could touch on that. And then I saw that you raised the contingent consideration for Follow-up Boss.

So it seems like you are doing really well there.

So maybe if you can talk about how you have been able to change, you know, to what extent you have been able to change the Follow-up Boss growth trajectory?.

Maybe I will hit adoption and Hofmann, you can hit the second piece. Yeah. John, we are seeing really great success with Follow-up Boss. As you remember, it is really a two-part strategy. One is just continuing to help the Follow-up Boss team grow. Their efforts to attract more agent teams.

Having the power of Zillow behind them and helping them grow and onboard more partners broadly. That is a big part of the strategy. And then the other strategy is to help get our enhanced market partners using Follow-up Boss as we start to build really good integrations between Zillow customers and them as our enhanced market partners.

And we shared, you know, 80% of connections in our enhanced markets now are flowing through Follow-up Boss. So you are just seeing the adoption of Follow-up Boss by the lion's share of those partners right alongside just healthy organic Follow-up Boss growth.

So it is just now coming up on a year since acquisition, and we are just so pleased both with how the team is executing on that dual charter mandate and how the integration has gone. And you know, we continue to hear just great feedback from our agent partners on how Follow-up Boss is helping them power their business..

Yeah. And then, John, on your second question around the contingent consideration, there is no change to expected payout. We just have a change in fair value based on the time value of money and getting closer to those payout dates. So I would not overlook that.

I think what Jeremy just highlighted is what we are most excited about, and we think it is a really great piece of software that our agents are really enjoying..

Great. Thanks, guys..

Our next question will come from Ryan McKeveny from Zelman and Associates..

Hey. Thanks, guys. Congrats on the results. Just one from me related to how you are thinking about expense growth going forward. So, you know, Jeremy, you have talked about the variable cost side and the investments outpacing revenue growth in 2024. Obviously, still resulting in margin expansion with low fixed cost growth.

I know it is early to give any, you know, 2025 guidance in terms of revenue or margin, but if we do assume mortgage rates stay high and we are in this kind of stuck, you know, slow housing market, you know, should we generally expect that trend to continue in terms of variable cost relative to revenue cost growth, or are you reaching a point where some of those initiatives have scaled to the point where maybe that will no longer be the case? Thank you..

Yeah, Ryan, it is Jeremy Hofmann. I will take it. You know, you said it right. No guidance on 2025. We are quite pleased with execution this year. I think 2025, you should assume more of the same strategy and go-to-market. Right? We are going to continue to land in new enhanced markets, expand into existing ones.

And that will drive residential revenue, drive mortgages revenue alongside showcase, Follow-up Boss, new construction, and then we keep executing in rentals as well. At the same time, we are going to continue to be disciplined on the cost side. We have been, I think, fairly consistent here that macro has been choppy.

We expect it continues to be choppy, and we will plan the cost structure accordingly. So you should not expect much different in terms of how we think about our cost structure. And, obviously, we will dial up and down opportunities on the variable and marketing side depending on what we see fit.

But that fixed cost level that we have been at, we feel comfortable with to go hit our 2025 share targets..

Sounds good. Thanks very much..

This completes the allotted time for questions. I will now turn the call back over to Jeremy Wacksman for any closing remarks..

I just want to close by saying thank you all. We really appreciate your time this quarter. Thanks for all the questions, and we will see you all next quarter..

Thank you for joining the Zillow Group third quarter 2024 call. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect..