Sustainability at Zillow
At Zillow, we’re reimagining the possibilities in real estate — and our world.
“We’re steadfast about our work to reimagine real estate so that more people can find and get the home they love, and sustainability is at the heart of this proposition. To unlock life’s next chapter — for our business, our employees, our customers, our communities and our planet — we need to do our part and contribute to a sustainable future.”
—Rich Barton, Zillow Group Co-founder and CEO
Our 2023 sustainability highlights
We strive to lead transformative initiatives that have a positive social impact, promote equity, support environmental sustainability and revolutionize our industry. Our sustainability strategy focuses on five areas: social impact and innovation, equity and belonging, employees and culture, environmental sustainability and responsible business practices.
Social impact & innovation
▪️ Racial Disparities in Housing dashboard: Launched online tool to illuminate the current landscape of racial inequalities in housing, at the local level, and how those inequalities have evolved over time.
▪️ Helping renters better plan their budgets: Created Cost of Renting Summary to give renters insight into the financial obligations of renting.
▪️ Expanding options to support renters: Launched new solutions to help renters, including one that enables renters to have their on-time Zillow Rental payments reported to a major credit bureau, and another that expands affordable rental listings on our platform.
▪️ Engaging employees in giving back: Employees volunteered 4,030 hours in 2023; 2,094 of these volunteer hours were through the Zillow for Good (Z4G) Hub Partner Program, directly in service of communities experiencing housing insecurity. Launched Z4G Community Grants, enabling employees to nominate 10 nonprofits to receive $10,000 grants each.
▪️ Corporate and employee giving: Zillow gave $1,013,019 in cash and in-kind donations, and employees donated $295,140.
Engagement & belonging
▪️ Representation by race and ethnicity: The ethnicity of our workforce in 2023 was 59% white, 20% Asian, 9% Latinx, 8% Black, 4% two or more races, 0.4% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 0.2% American Indian or Alaska Native.
▪️ Pay equity: We aim to ensure that all employees in similar roles and with similar qualifications are paid equitably, regardless of their identity. In 2023, Asian women, Latinx women and white men had controlled pay of $1.00. Black men, Latinx men, men of two or more races, and white women had controlled pay of $0.99. Black women and women of two or more races had controlled pay of $0.98. Asian men had controlled pay of $1.01.
▪️ 40% of Zillow employees belong to one or more of our nine employee resource groups (ERGs).
Employees & culture
▪️ 90% of employees would recommend Zillow to a friend.
▪️ 83% of employees believe they can be their full self at work.
▪️ 68,763 hours: The amount of time Zillow employees devoted to learning and development through Zillow University and other platforms.
Environmental sustainability
▪️ Reduced Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 95% compared to a 2019 base year, mainly driven by a combination of office space optimization and renewable energy credit purchases.¹
▪️ Purchased 13,913,300 kilowatt hours of renewable energy credits, equivalent to approximately 100% of our North America corporate real estate and estimated work-from-home electricity consumption.
▪️ Began the foundational work to update our climate targets — inclusive of Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions — and submitted these targets to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for validation.
▪️ Published our first Environmental Sustainability Policy, outlining Zillow’s ambition to reduce our environmental impact and drive sustainable practices across our business.
¹ CA AB 1305 Disclosure: In 2022, we set a goal to reduce absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 46% by 2030 from a 2019 base year. As reported in our 2023 Sustainability Report (the “Report”), as of 2023, we reduced Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 95% (this percentage reduction excludes Zillow Offers, which completed wind down in the third quarter of 2022) compared to the 2019 base year, mainly driven by a combination of office space optimization and renewable energy credit purchases (see pages 59–60 of the Report for more information on our historical emissions accounting, including methodology). As described on page 72 of the Report, our 2023 historical emissions data were subject to independent third-party limited assurance. We are currently evaluating our overall climate target strategy and are in the process of preparing new targets under the SBTi framework.