The Hypocrisy Behind Zillow’s War On Private Listings

Zillow’s recent federal antitrust suit against Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) and Compass is being marketed as a defense of consumer transparency. To an economist, it reads as something more familiar: a dominant platform invoking the consumer-friendly language of open markets to protect its own turf.

This maneuver is not unique to real estate or homebuying interfaces. When a firm controls the dominant discovery layer in a two-sided market – buyers on one side and sellers and agents on the other – it makes a lot of money simply by standing in the middle. Anything that lets sellers reach buyers through alternative channels erodes that business model. And so the dominant company tends to describe any alternative as bad for consumers, whether it actually is or not.

Zillow is currently fighting to exclude private listings that originate outside its partner network – whether it’s Compass, MRED, or another brokerage willing to truly innovate. Zillow has consistently argued that the private listing networks are closed shops that hide inventory and disrupt the marketplace. This is clear in its explanation of its listing access standards that prevent listings “from being kept out of the broader market.”

If that’s truly the aim, broader access even to private listings, then why are they fighting to exclude Compass’s private listing from its platform? A more honest reading is that Zillow is fighting to maintain its profit model.

Zillow isn’t trying to make every listing visible everywhere. It’s trying to make sure the road to visibility runs through Zillow. That’s a rational business goal. It’s also, more or less, the definition of anticompetitive behavior by a dominant platform: using control over a chokepoint to shut out alternatives, wrapped in the language of consumer protection.

The pattern shows up all over the economy. Amazon has fought against sellers using rival fulfilment services while positioning itself as the customer’s advocate. In 2023, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued the company for hiking prices for shoppers and charging fees to online sellers, conditioning buyers to use Amazon’s own fulfilment service and effectively squeezing out competitors.

Meanwhile, Google has spent 20 years arguing that steering users to its own products is just convenience. In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized search. Then in 2025, Google was found liable for holding illegal monopolies in advertising technology.

Ticketing, food delivery, app stores — wherever one company sits between buyers and sellers, the same script plays out. The incumbent recasts its private interests as public goods and asks regulators and reporters to police the challengers on its behalf. Antitrust enforcers have spent the past decade pushing back on this pattern across industries, but the underlying incentive keeps resurfacing whenever a single company controls the chokepoint.

Which brings us to real estate. The Zillow case is a clean version of this. A company that has itself been investigated for antitrust conduct is now suing a brokerage and a data cooperative for coercion, because they insisted Zillow either show a rival’s listings or lose access to a regional feed. Called a transparency dispute, that sounds strange. Called a fight over who controls access to inventory in a market with only a few big players, it makes perfect sense. It’s the same playbook in a new industry.

The lesson is one antitrust experts have repeated for years: in markets dominated by a single platform, the loudest voice for “openness” is usually the one with the most to lose from actual openness.

Homeowners are better off with real choices about how to sell. Buyers are better off with real competition among websites. Zillow’s lawsuit will be judged on the law. But the story it tells is bigger.

Mike Feuz is a business economist and has a Master’s Degree in Economics from George Mason University.