The Zillow Group Inc. application is displayed on an Apple Inc. iPhone in an arranged photograph taken in New York, U.S., on Monday, Feb. 8, 2016. The company announced the launch of its Zillow Home Loans arm earlier this week. Photographer: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg photo credit: © 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP
© 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP
Need to buy, sell or finance a home? Zillow can now help with all of it.
Earlier this week, the company officially launched its Zillow Home Loans arm, solidifying Zillow’s place at virtually every touchpoint in the home buying and selling process.
Buyers can use its property listings—as well as those on partner sites Trulia and StreetEasy—to find homes, condos and co-ops for purchase. Then, when they’re ready to buy, Zillow Home Loans can help with mortgage financing. Finally, when the homeowner is ready to sell, Zillow Offers can give them an instant way to offload the home without the hassles of the open market.
Erin Lantz, vice president and general manager of mortgages for Zillow Group, said the move into mortgage loans is the company’s way of easing “the hardest, most complicated part of buying a home.”
The announcement isn’t completely out of the blue. Zillow Group acquired Mortgage Lenders of America last fall. The company had approximately 300 employees at the time and logged $54 million in revenues in 2017.
The launch of the official Zillow Home Loans arm comes just six weeks after longtime CEO Spencer Rascoff stepped down.
In his announcement about the staffing change, co-founder and replacement CEO Richard Barton said, “We created Zillow Group in 2005 to make the real estate shopping and purchase process easier. Much of our original dream is just now becoming possible.”
Of the move into mortgage financing specifically, Barton said it “positions us well for the next generation of online real estate and dramatically increases our addressable market.”
“In the past year, Zillow Group has become a very different company,” Barton said. “We’re making strategic investments to broaden the Zillow Group portfolio to move further down the home-shopping funnel, giving today’s ‘uberized,’ on-demand consumers a full spectrum of options to buy, sell, borrow and rent on their terms.”
According to its Q4 earnings report, Zillow’s execs are aiming to originate 3,000 loans per month in the next three to five years.