Zillow Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:Z) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Brad Erickson: Hi. Thanks. This is Brad Erickson with RBC. Two questions, I guess, one for Jeremy, probably one for Allen. Just on the touring stuff you called out related to Atlanta and integration that you’ve rolled out there with the instant booking and all. It sounds like it’s going at least as well as the old sort of legacy touring product. Maybe if you could just expand on sort of what the early successes are going on there? And what do you think is driving hopefully maybe a better experience in terms of conversion and what have you? And then second, for Allen, just a clarification. I think you said you’re going to start reporting transactions at some point, not to like front run that disclosure, but maybe just how do you expect to sort of define that? Like is it all transactions you touch with PA conversions, or is it just transaction-oriented revenue streams, maybe just a little clarity there? And what are you looking for before you start from that? Thanks.

Allen Parker: Yeah, Allen, why don’t I start. So I’m touring a reminder for all of us on the call. Touring is so important to us because that a touring customer converts at three times the rate of customers that come in other ways on Zillow. And so it’s a high intent customer, someone who, as Rich said, it’s the point-of-sale. But even with the general touring experience, as you alluded to, there’s a lot of friction in that process, right? You have to €“ your really requesting a tour, you and your buyer’s agents have to coordinate with the seller’s agent than the seller on the calendar. And what ends up happening is a minority of the time, the buyer actually gets to go, see the home when they wanted to when they initially make their request.

So we have launched something called real-time touring, which is really intended to remove that friction, right, to make as Rich said, scheduling or going to see a home as easy as booking our restaurants online. And that is what’s live in Atlanta, and we’re now taking to the rest of our test markets. And the early signal that we’re seeing there is really positive from partner feedback as well as customer feedback and in our data. We are seeing higher connection rates and higher likelihood of the customer working with that agent. And so those are great leading indicators for us of transaction conversion. It’s obviously very early to see actual transaction data in one market on a lag basis. But those early indicators are what give us confidence and that plus the partner and customer feedback is why we expanded it across all of Atlanta and are now taking it to the rest of our test markets.

Rich Barton: Great. Thanks, Jeremy. And Brad, I’ll try to clarify for your question. So I think in my prepared remarks, I talked about we’re going to share our transaction share data — and so this is really just to provide where we are in terms of our share performance. So if you think back to the targets we provided, we went through the transactions or the size, the total transaction is the number of sites and what percentage we participated in either on the buy side, the sell side or through mortgage. And so you can kind of think about this as share percentage share data is what we would plan to share. And we would think of share on sell side, buy side, participate in mortgage for a transaction. If we had a mortgage and a buy side transaction integrated, that would just be one transaction, not two.