SEATTLE, July 20 — Fifteen years to the day after Zillow began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker Z, the company’s home-valuation tool has become a near-ubiquitous reference point for anyone trying to understand the cost of shelter in America. Inside the Seattle headquarters where the company started with just 20 employees and no outside capital, the Zillow Home Value Index — the automated estimate that launched February 8, 2006 — now feeds into affordability indexes used by economists, policymakers and home shoppers across the country.
The company’s origin story reads like a classic Seattle tech start-up. Rich Barton, Lloyd Frink, Spencer Rascoff, David Beitel, and Kristin Acker incorporated in Washington State in December 2004.
By the time the public-facing valuation tool went live in early 2006, the site drew so much traffic it crashed. By nightfall, the team was scrambling. A $25 million second-round investment in July 2006 pushed the head count to 118 employees.
From For-Sale-by-Owner Listings to a Mortgage Marketplace
The company quickly layered on features: for-sale-by-owner listings arrived in December 2006; a mortgage marketplace and an iPhone app followed in April 2008. The first profitable year came in 2010. In September that year, Spencer Rascoff took over as CEO.
The IPO filing on April 18, 2011, sought $51.8 million, and on July 20, 2011 — exactly 15 years ago today — shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker Z. Acquisitions became a hallmark of growth.
The first was Postlets in 2011. Rentjuice and Hotpads came in 2012. StreetEasy was acquired in 2013.
Then, in 2015, Zillow bought its primary competitor Trulia for $2.5 billion. Around the same period, the company also closed the acquisition of Mortech, Inc. for about $12 million in cash and 150,000 restricted stock.
After the Trulia deal, Zillow Group operated four brands: Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy and HotPads.
Shifting Gears: Zillow Offers, Canada, and a CEO Return
In April 2018, Zillow launched Zillow Offers, its home-buying business. Two months later, it expanded into its first non-U.S. market through a partnership with Century 21 Canada. Then, in February 2019, Rich Barton returned as CEO, replacing Rascoff.
The company expanded Zillow Offers in May 2019. By February 2020, stock had risen from a four-year low.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Zillow cut expenses and paused hiring. In July 2020, it became one of the first companies to take further unspecified actions — a signal of how rapidly the market was changing. The chronology of these moves — from a crashed site in a Seattle office to a data platform used by national economists — underscores what the Zillow Home Value Index has become: a widely cited metric for tracking median home values and housing affordability.
The same numbers that let a user compare prices across towns and states now inform policy discussions about the cost of housing in America. Fifteen years after its IPO, Zillow’s core valuation data remains the backbone of that conversation.
