The cost of renting a home has never been higher, and it’s not just renters who are struggling. Property owners face steeper operating expenses, increased regulatory costs, higher interest rates and record insurance costs — challenges that ultimately ripple down to the people searching for a place to live. Zillow’s approach to these challenges is simple: make renting more affordable and less complicated by expanding transparent access to listings, reducing friction and helping renters and housing providers connect more effectively.
That’s why Zillow partners with other trusted platforms, including Redfin and Realtor.com, to share multifamily rental listings. These partnerships give renters more visibility into available homes, a simpler search experience, and the option to shop for rental listings on the platform of their choice. Housing providers gain more efficient and cost-effective alternatives to reach more potential renters.
Zillow will continue to innovate on behalf of renters and industry partners to deliver more affordable solutions to Americans throughout their housing journey, including partnerships that encourage competition, lower costs and expand choice in a marketplace where both renters and housing providers benefit.
Making renting easier and more affordable for renters
Renters today face real challenges. Since 2020, rents for a typical U.S. apartment have climbed 30%, while incomes have grown just 24%. Nearly half of renter households now spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
Zillow is tackling these affordability challenges head-on by simplifying the rental process and helping renters save money:
- Apply once, rent anywhere: Renters can complete a single, secure universal rental application and reuse it across multiple listings, saving on repeated application fees that can otherwise total hundreds of dollars during a typical rental search.
- See the true cost upfront: When housing providers enable Zillow’s new “Total Price Display” experience, renters can clearly view upfront and ongoing fees, allowing them to budget and compare options confidently and avoid unexpected costs later.
- Build credit while paying rent: Renters can choose to have their on-time rent payments reported to major credit bureaus, helping them build their credit.
Our rental syndication partnerships extend these renter-first innovations by making the rental market simpler, more transparent and more connected. Today, renters miss options and lose time as they search far and wide to see what’s available — often paying multiple application fees and never even seeing homes that might fit their budgets and needs.
By enabling rental listings to appear seamlessly across trusted platforms like Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com, while each platform continues to operate and compete independently for renter audiences, our partnerships:
- Give renters a fuller picture of the market, so renters can view and compare more options faster and find the right home, no matter where they choose to start their search.
- Save time and reduce costs by cutting down on duplicative searches, repeated application fees and the frustration of chasing outdated and incomplete listings.
- Make competition work for renters, ensuring that platforms compete on service, tools and affordability rather than on who can hoard and control the most listings.
Unlocking efficiency for housing providers
For property managers and landlords, Zillow’s rental tools streamline every step of the leasing process — from listing and marketing units to screening tenants, collecting rent and signing leases. Our rental syndication partnerships enable housing providers to reach a broader audience of qualified renters without increasing their marketing expenses. That expanded reach drives faster leasing, lower vacancy rates and greater operational efficiency, helping housing providers reduce costs and reinvest in their properties as margins are tight.
Historically, the rental advertising space has been inefficient, allowing dominant players to control visibility, raise costs, and restrict choice — making it difficult for renters to find all available listings. Zillow has always been against that, and our partnerships flip that model on its head. By sharing rental listings across platforms instead of controlling and hoarding listings, we’ve enhanced competition, not limited it. That empowers both renters and housing providers with more choice, better data and lower costs. This is what a healthy, open marketplace looks like: one where collaboration drives innovation, transparency and affordability for everyone.
A broader commitment to affordability, transparency and fairness
Zillow is committed to addressing the housing affordability crisis and supports policymaker efforts, from the White House to city halls, to find real solutions on behalf of American consumers. Partnerships like ours directly advance this goal by helping renters find homes more efficiently and enabling housing providers to operate more affordably.
Across the country, we’ve led and supported forward-looking housing policies, from backing New York City’s FARE Act to eliminate hidden rental fees and reduce upfront costs for renters to co-developing the Build the Middle Playbook in partnership with the Casita Coalition to help expand affordable housing supply for working families across the country.
Just as those efforts increase affordability and expand housing supply, our rental syndication partnerships reduce search costs and expand access to information — complementary solutions aimed at the same goal: affordability.
At Zillow, we believe in a rental marketplace that truly works for everyone — renters, housing providers and innovators alike. This means providing renters with more transparency and choice, giving landlords greater efficiency and reach, and fostering the kind of healthy competition that drives affordability, innovation and consumer trust across the entire housing market.
The bigger picture for us is one defined by collaboration, not consolidation. Sharing listings doesn’t end competition, it raises the bar by forcing relentless improvement in an open ecosystem as we all compete for renters. By sharing listings and competing on the renter and housing provider experience and value, Zillow and its partners drive innovation. This is progress in action: a housing marketplace that’s fairer, faster and more affordable for everyone who calls it home. Because when renters can find a home more easily and affordably, the entire housing market works better for everyone.