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After nearly five years at the helm of the company he co-founded, Zillow Group CEO Rich Barton is passing the baton to Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Wacksman, effective immediately. Barton had stepped down once before, with co-founder Spencer Rascoff taking over from 2010 to 2019, while Barton focused on his duties as executive chairman of Zillow Group. Barton returned as CEO of Zillow Group in 2019.
Rich Button
“Zillow’s business is firing on all cylinders and is performing well in a challenging real estate macro environment,” Barton said in a prepared statement. “We have built and integrated our products and completed strategic acquisitions that strengthen our network of agency partners and significantly growing our mortgage and leasing businesses.”
“Thanks in large part to Jeremy Wacksman’s leadership, the past three years have been a particularly impressive period of innovation for the company,” he added. “Lloyd [Frink, Zillow Group’s executive chair] I have every confidence in Jeremy’s abilities as CEO, the broader team, and Zillow’s bright future.
Wacksman joined Zillow in 2009 as vice president of marketing and product management, a position that draws on seven years of previous brand and product management experience at Trilogy Software, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft Xbox.
Waksman has since been promoted to chief marketing officer in 2015 and president of the Zillow brand in 2018.
“With the strength of the Zillow brand, our highly engaged audience and a steadily growing portfolio of businesses, we are well-positioned to capture meaningful share of transactions in the coming years,” Wacksman said of his latest appointment. “We are working hard to make integrated transactions a reality by providing consumers and agents with superior technology solutions that will transform residential real estate.
“I love this company and its mission, and I’m honored to lead our extraordinary team into the next phase of Zillow’s growth,” he added.
Waxman’s journey has been a winding one.
Jeremy Waxman | Image Source: LinkedIn
As vice president of marketing and product management, he oversaw the growth of the Zillow mobile app; as chief marketing officer, he helped solidify the company’s status as a real estate and pop culture icon, making Zillow synonymous with the home search process in America. He oversaw the 2018 launch of Zillow Offers, the portal’s now-defunct iBuying business.
As chief operating officer, he began to focus on By strengthening the company’s key departments (Premier Agent, Zillow Rentals, Zillow Offers, dotloop, and Zillow Home Loans. Barton said he was “confident” in Wacksman’s ability to deliver a more cohesive consumer experience as the industry continues to intensify its pursuit of creating the ultimate integrated transaction process.
“You’ve heard us talk many times about wanting to create this more seamless experience for our customers; we call it [Real Estate 2.0]”, Waxman told Inman shortly after becoming chief operating officer. “[Our segments] They’re all growing well and starting to talk to each other, but they’re all growing relatively independently because they’re new things growing quickly. We find that when customers discover these services, they want one-click nirvana.
Market volatility caused by the coronavirus led Zillow and Wacksman to shut down Zillow Offers in November 2021. The demise of Zillow Offers didn’t send the company into a long-term slump, as Wacksman and other members of the leadership team turned their attention to maturing the Zillow super app, partnering with rivals Redfin and Realtor.com to jointly launch 3D home tours and rentals and through The partnership with Opendoor brings Zillow’s hat back into the iBuying circle.
The company is also focused on making a series of savvy acquisitions, including agency favorite ShowingTime+ in late 2021 and Follow Up Boss and Aryeo in 2023. ShowingTime+, in particular, has become a pillar of Zillow’s push to strengthen its value proposition for listing agents and buyer’s agents, respectively, as the industry heads toward several milestone changes in commissions as well as changes from CoStar-owned portal Homes.com and its “You “website” fierce competition. Go Public, Your Leadership” model.
“Zillow is a leading product innovator in residential real estate with features like live tours, listings and Zillow home loan pre-qualification,” Wacksman said in the first-quarter shareholder letter. “We believe that with our high-interest customers, Agencies that collaborate and use our industry software tools are best positioned to accelerate their share of any version of the industry’s evolution.”
He added: “Our business is built around the best team of agents – those who deliver a superior customer experience, have proven ability to scale and make the most money investing with us – allowing us to Well-positioned for potential shifts within the industry.
Last week at Inman Connect in Las Vegas, Barton delivered a prescient keynote about the next iteration of the portal experience, laying the groundwork for Wacksman to take the helm. He said this experience will focus on bringing order to the chaotic “multi-party, multi-partner, multi-stage” transaction process by investing in technology, collaborating with competitors and aligning with the needs of consumers and agents. It’s as easy as buying a latte.
“You may not know this, but less than half of our company’s revenue right now comes from buyer’s agency, lead generation or the original business model,” he said. “As a company, our growth and opportunities now come from investing in a range of digital workflows, tools and technologies across the industry.”
“We don’t build, invest and integrate these products to keep them in walled gardens,” he added. “We do this to make them widely available and power your business.”
Although Barton is no longer CEO, he will remain on Zillow Group’s board of directors and serve as co-executive chairman along with Zillow co-founder and current executive chairman Lloyd Frink. Waxman will also receive a seat on the board of directors.
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