House hunters spend about five months going from search to keys in hand. Zillow's CEO wants AI to cut most of that out.
Jeremy Wacksman - who has been at Zillow since 2009 and now runs the company - told NBC News this week that the firm is building toward a future where buyers find a home, tour it, decide to buy, and close all inside the app. The car still has a role. So does the agent. Wacksman wants software to handle the rest.
Zillow launched in the mid-2000s, and for most of that time, the actual buying process has looked like the routine your parents used.
A list of addresses, a car, two to three hours a week for five months - then somebody signs something.
Wacksman wants to shrink the middle. Zillow rolled out a full "AI Mode" in March that puts artificial intelligence at the center of how buyers find and evaluate homes.
Virtual Staging launched last September. It lets buyers see what a house could look like furnished, and Zillow labels every image clearly when AI is used.
The company also has a drone-based video product called SkyTour. The pitch is that the time to buy a house should shrink.
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Venture capital is paying attention. Proptech investment hit $3.3 billion in Q1 2026, up from $2 billion in the same quarter a year ago - a 64% jump in a single year.
Some of that money is going to Zillow's competitors. Opendoor buys and sells homes sight unseen with offers in minutes, while Propy raised $100 million this year to use AI and blockchain to handle real estate closings.
Plenty of smaller startups are aiming at narrow slices of the deal. The fight is over who owns the home-buying app of the future.
Whoever lands that wins one of the most valuable customer relationships in housing - someone in the middle of the biggest purchase of their life.
AI in real estate has obvious upside and obvious risk. The Government Accountability Office warned in December that the technology could brush up against fair lending, fair housing, and consumer protection laws.
Landlords have already been caught using AI to make old listings look new. Wacksman knows the line is thin - he told NBC: "AI can be used for great things, but it could also be used to misrepresent what a house looks like or what a listing photo looks like."
Zillow says it discloses every time it uses AI to alter an image. The next test is whether the rest of the industry follows.
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