Zillow, Realtor.com Partner on Pre-Market Listings

Zillow has a new ally in its fight against private real estate listings: Realtor.com

The two largest home-search platforms in the U.S. announced Tuesday that beginning this summer, listings that use the Zillow Preview program will also be syndicated to Realtor.com under a similar program titled Realtor.com Preview.

The move expands Zillow’s Preview program, introduced in March in an effort to push back on what it calls “hidden listing schemes” and provide its own option for marketing listings off the Multiple Listing Services. Compass launched a similar partnership with Redfin in February, syndicating its Coming Soon listings to Redfin.

“With this collaboration we’re not just expanding reach, we’re creating true seller choice while setting a new industry standard for what transparency in real estate actually looks like for buyers, sellers and agents,” Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in a statement.

Zillow Preview lets brokers display homes on Zillow before the listings hit the MLS. Preview listings are prioritized in search results and saved-home alerts. Zillow has so far partnered with more than 60 brokerages and franchisors on the program, including Keller Williams, REMAX, HomeServices of America and United Real Estate.

If a deal closes through a Preview connection, the listing agent can receive a share of revenue earned from the sale paid through the collaboration between the two companies, they said in a press release. There is no cost to sellers or agents at participating brokerages, and consumers can reach out to the listing agent directly or work with a buyer’s agent to inquire about a preview listing.

The partnership will extend those same terms to Preview listings on Realtor.com.

In a blog post accompanying the announcement, Realtor.com CEO Damian Eales said the move was aimed at combating fragmented pre-marketing strategies that make it harder to find homes and hide important data. Eales said he believes MLSs should remain at the center of home marketing and they should establish their own Coming Soon channels — something many MLSs, but not all, do.

“But pre-market inventory exists now,” Eales wrote. “Some brokers have chosen to syndicate their listings directly to portals and are asking for the broadest exposure for the benefit of their clients. In these cases, we have a responsibility to support them.”

The move will expand the reach of Zillow’s preview market beyond its roughly 235 million active monthly users to the roughly 70 million monthly users that visit Realtor.com, setting up a challenge to the off-market strategies pursued by Compass and other brokerages.

Zillow’s partnership with Realtor.com is the latest in its push to curb the marketing of homes outside public channels and its websites. The company has long argued marketing strategies that avoid broad access distort the real estate market and hurt consumers.

Compass announced its three-phased marketing strategy in 2024 that included starting some listings exclusively within the brokerage, before moving to “Coming Soon” listings and eventually broad MLS marketing.

In March 2025, the National Association of Realtors announced an exception to its Clear Cooperation Policy rules to allow agents to publicly market listings without entering them in the MLS for a period of time.

Then in April 2025, Zillow announced listing standards that blocked listings from their sites if the agent had marketed them elsewhere before they were entered on the listing giant. Compass sued Zillow over the standards before dropping the lawsuit after Zillow revised its standards. The new listing rules offer more leeway for pre-marketing, but still prohibit marketing that requires consumers to register with or contact a specific brokerage to see a listing.