FTC claims Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to dominate online rental listings

By Ramishah Maruf, CNN

New York (CNN) — Home-search website Zillow allegedly paid its rival Redfin $100 million dollars to stamp out competition in the online listing business, the Federal Trade Commission said in a lawsuit on Tuesday.

As part of their February 2025 deal, Redfin allegedly agreed that its website would be “an exclusive syndicator of Zillow listings,” meaning Redfin would essentially just copy over the listings from Zillow, the FTC said in a statement.

The FTC also accused Redfin of agreeing to end its contracts with advertising customers and stop competing in the advertising market for multifamily homes for up to nine years.

Zillow and Redfin are among the largest rental listing websites in the United States by traffic and revenue, the FTC said in the lawsuit. The agency alleged that the $100 million payment paved the way for Zillow to overwhelmingly take over an industry that millions of Americans use to find a place to live, as well as property managers procuring tenants.

The FTC alleged that this illegal elimination in competition would lead to higher prices and worse terms for multifamily unit advertising, and would also reduce incentives to attract would-be renters to use their service.

“This agreement is nothing more than an end run around competition that insulates Zillow from head-to-head competition on the merits with Redfin for customers advertising multifamily buildings,” the lawsuit said.

In a statement on Tuesday, a Zillow spokesperson said the syndication agreement is “pro-competitive and pro-consumer by connecting property managers to more high-intent renters.”

“Our listing syndication with Redfin benefits both renters and property managers and has expanded renters’ access to multifamily listings across multiple platforms,” the spokesperson said.

Redfin said that it strongly disagrees with the FTC allegations and that its partnership gave more access to visitors and advertisers.

“By the end of 2024, it was clear that the existing number of Redfin advertising customers couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining our rentals sales force,” a Redfin spokesperson said. “Partnering with Zillow cut those costs and enabled us to invest more in rental-search innovations on Redfin.com, directly benefiting apartment seekers.”

The lawsuit also noted that Redfin fired about 450 of its employees, at least some of which were associated with the internet listing advertising business. After those firings, Redfin allegedly helped handpick some of those employees to work for Zillow.

In Tuesday’s complaint, the FTC asked the court to end the agreement and weigh a potential divestiture of assets.

Meanwhile, Zillow is in the midst of other legal disputes.

In June, the company was sued by real estate brokerage Compass, which accused Zillow of engaging in an anticompetitive conspiracy to maintain its dominance over digital home listings. While Zillow said it was working in the interests of consumer transparency, Compass said Zillow adds costs to the home-buying process.

CNN’s Samantha Delouya contributed to this report.

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