After months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, Compass and Zillow brought their argument over private listing policies to court.
Attorneys and executives for the firms appeared in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday for the first day of hearings over Compass’ request for a court order to pause Zillow’s listing policy. The request follows Compass’ June lawsuit against the listings aggregator, accusing it of leveraging its monopoly power and implementing new listing standards to prevent competition.
The proceedings also drew Compass loyalists like Leonard Steinberg, Heather Domi and Eugene Litvak, who squeezed into the wooden benches behind CEO Robert Reffkin’s wife Benís and his mother, Ruth, whom he referenced often while on the stand.
Both sides have tried to paint the other as the power-hungry player that has grown to warp the homeselling and homebuying processes, which their respective attorneys added to in their opening statements.
“Zillow moved to quash the threat posed by Compass,” said Compass attorney Kenneth Dintzer.
In the view of Bonnie Lau, an attorney for Zillow, the platform’s standards ensure access to listings for all market participants and prevent brokerages from hoarding listings behind a “velvet rope.”
The hearings, slated for this week before U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, could hold the first concrete implications for private listings in the residential brokerage landscape as firms fight for survival and market share.
Reffkin on the stand
During testimony guided by Compass’ attorneys, Reffkin was asked multiple times to slow down as he got visibly excited explaining his perceived benefits of Compass’ three-phased marketing strategy and how opponents — in the form of the National Association of Realtors, multiple listing services and Zillow — had sought to squash the firm’s innovation.
In other moments, he paused to answer basic questions like what months marked Compass’ fiscal second quarter. He and Lau also refused to see eye-to-eye on a number of factual matters like when Zillow implemented its listing policy, to the point where Judge Jeannette Vargas had to ask the attorney to move on.
As part of its argument, Compass repeatedly referred to itself as a competitor in the home search space, something that Zillow tried to shoot down with internal documents and in its cross-examination of Reffkin.
Lau displayed a slide from an internal presentation for Compass’ board of directors in which Compass placed itself within the industry, highlighting boxes in the ecosystem where it was competitive, including brokerage and mortgage. Lau asked Reffkin if there was a blue box around the group of competitors in the home search category, to which Reffkin replied, “No, but this slide is incorrect.”
Lau also played a video of Reffkin’s deposition, in which he repeatedly answers “I don’t know” to questions about Compass’ market share in the home search space and how it would measure its market share. Lau repeated the line of questioning in the courtroom, eliciting at least four more “I don’t know” responses from Reffkin.
The two sides also disagreed over the harm Compass has faced from the implementation of Zillow’s listing standards and Zillow’s targeted attempt to throttle private listings.
Zillow “sought to make an example of Compass,” Dintzer said, showing internal documents in which the company lays out its carrot-and-stick strategy in an effort to protect its listing inventory, calling the proliferation of private listings a “contagion effect” started by Compass.
Reffkin did not mince words with how important he considered three-phase marketing to Compass’ long-term potential. “We would have grown much more if there was no ‘Zillow Ban,’” he said. “This was the whole strategy.”
Zillow responded by citing what has been Compass’ best financial year to date and pointing to statements made by Reffkin on earnings calls in which he said that Zillow’s policy has had no effect on three-phase marketing usage.
Lau tried to show that Reffkin and his executives knew full well that Zillow was planning to ban private exclusives and did not consider the ban a true risk to its business. Lau put up an April 15 email from Compass executive Ashton Alexander in which Reffkin is copied where Alexander writes that Zillow “took issue” with the black box Compass used to promote its private exclusives.
“I read the same words that you’re seeing,” Reffkin said of the email, refusing to admit that it was indicative of the standards Zillow would roll out over one month later. Lau then displayed correspondence from Reffkin later in the month, including an email to an agent where he claims private exclusives would not be affected by Zillow’s policy.
Reffkin insisted multiple times that Zillow’s listing policy was instituted with the intent to sow confusion and that it has expressly targeted Compass.
When questioned over an email he sent to his chief of staff outlining reasons why listing on Zillow is not necessarily in seller’s best interests, Reffkin claimed not to be the email’s true author.
“That’s ChatGPT,” he said.
Lau also put up internal company documents that show an April 2025 analysis by Compass, where it found that off-market deals were double-ended 31 percent of the time versus 18 percent of the time when listing publicly.
The presentation put forward results with the question of a quantifiable difference in using three-phase marketing and listing on the MLS.
“Pre-marketing appears to result in an increase in the percent of double-ended deals,” the presentation stated.
“This never went to the board,” Reffkin said upon seeing the materials.
What’s to come
The arguments on the first day centered around Compass’ claims that Zillow violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, in which Compass must prove Zillow has monopoly power and used it to exclude competition.
Remaining testimony will likely expand on both sides’ arguments on this point.
What was yet to be discussed in detail is Compass’ claim that Zillow violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by colluding with Redfin.
Dintzer hinted at this argument by teasing emails from Redfin executives discussing the impact of a ban and putting up a timeline of the actions taken by Redfin and Zillow and calls made between company executives.
On Zillow’s side, Lau will likely try to paint this as conjecture after stating in her opening argument, “there is simply no smoking gun here.”