PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – The State of Washington has reached a settlement with Zillow and Redfin, ordering the housing platforms to end an anti-competition scheme, officials announced.
The settlement was reached between the two companies and five state attorneys general in a lawsuit led by Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown and the Federal Trade Commission.
The settlement aims to restore competition in apartment advertising between Zillow and Redfin, which operate two of the three largest websites for renters to search for apartments and for building managers to list their units, officials said.
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"Today's settlement will restore competition by paving the way for Redfin to re-enter the market as a stronger competitor," Attorney General Brown said. "Most importantly, consumers will have more choices and won't be subjected to illegally manipulated prices."
In February 2025, Seattle-based Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to shut down its multifamily rental advertising business and transfer its clients to Zillow, the Washington State Attorney General's office said.
In exchange, Redfin agreed to use its websites to only display copies of Zillow's apartment rental listing and stay out of the multifamily rental ad market for up to nine years, officials said.
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Eight months later, however, the group of attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the companies for violating federal antitrust laws with their agreement, which led to higher prices and lower quality services, Brown's office said. The states' case was then consolidated with a similar FTC lawsuit.
The states claimed Zillow and Redfin's agreements effectively eliminated a major competitor for Zillow in the market for multifamily housing rentals. Officials also claimed that after the agreement was made, Redfin quickly dismantled its multifamily rental service by firing about 450 employees.
Now, under the settlement, Zillow and Redfin must restore the competition that existed before their unlawful agreement, officials said, noting the companies must also pay $2 million in costs.
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Redfin will also invest in rebuilding its apartment advertising business and will hire staff to acquire and maintain customers. The company will be able to post its own listings rather than Zillow's postings. The companies are also barred from entering future anticompetitive agreements.
Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown was joined by the FTC in securing the agreement, alongside the Attorneys General of Arizona, Connecticut, New York and Virginia.
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"Amid a housing crisis in Washington, ensuring robust competition in rental advertising is vital," Washington Attorney General Nick Brown previously said. "Enforcing our antitrust laws to keep the marketplace fair, protect consumers, and prevent companies from building monopolies is a priority for our office."
In response to the settlement, Zillow claimed the agreement is "good news for renters, housing providers and the rental market broadly."
According to Zillow, the company's partnership with Redfin will continue and its listings syndication with Trulia, HotPads, Rent.com, ApartmentGuide, Redfin and Realtor will stay intact.
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"And as part of this resolution, both Zillow and Redfin will also offer standalone multifamily advertising products — something we'll launch next year — which will give housing providers even more flexibility in how they work with us," Zillow said.
"When we launched our syndication agreement with Redfin, the goal was straightforward: help renters find more homes. Renting in America is fragmented. There's no centralized or consistent mechanism to search for apartments, so renters bounce from site to site trying to see all the inventory, missing listings that could be the right fit. Housing providers list on multiple platforms and pay for redundant reach. The whole system wastes time and money for everyone involved," Zillow continued.
"So, our partnership with Redfin is a solution to that problem," Zillow claimed. "By syndicating multifamily listings across platforms, we can get more properties in front of more renters — wherever they happen to be searching."
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Zillow noted that since its Redfin partnership launched, multifamily property listings on Redfin websites nearly quadrupled and multifamily properties on Zillow's websites grew almost 40%.
"The scale we've built in our rentals business confirms the results we're providing: in Q2, Zillow had 2.8 million average monthly active rental listings which is the most in the category and an all-time high of 79,000 multifamily properties. Rentals revenue was up 31% year over year in Q2, with multifamily revenue up 42% — growth that reflects the compounding value of what we've built on both sides of this marketplace," Zillow added.
"This is a massive win for Redfin," said Aaron Emerson, Chief Communications Officer for Rocket Companies. "We keep the listings, leads and economics that make this business work today, and we gain the ability to compete directly for multifamily advertisers. For millions of people, renting is the first step toward homeownership and helping them move from a first apartment to a first home is exactly what we're built to do."
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