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

Allen Parker: Sure. Thanks for the question, John. Our PA relative revenue performance in Q3, Q4 and as you mentioned, implied in our Q1 outlook. I’d say it’s reflective of 3 elements. Our focus on the customer search experience, we talked about the mix of first-time homebuyers normalizing and continued efforts to work with better partners. And in Q4, this showed up as PA revenue growth down 20% year-over-year as compared to industry down 31% and according to the data from NAR. So our focus on customer engagement is to drive higher-intent customers to higher-performing Premier Agent partners. And we’ve seen consumers tend to flock towards the industry-leading brands during some uncertain times. So at the top of the funnel, we’ve been really pleased with the engagement and traffic we continue to get, and we continue to invest in improving our customer search experience.

And we’re seeing that show up as brand preference, which we believe is very important. As a result, as we called out, traffic growth for us outperformed the next top 15 real estate sites combined over the last several months for comScore. Deeper in the funnel, I won’t spend too much time on it was the normalization of mix first-time high homebuyers. We talked about that. And then lastly, was this focus also on improving customer engagement by working with better partners. And we’re continuing to test consolidating our partner base, we believe working with the best partners has been extremely supportive of conversions even in this tough macro environment. And this combination of high-intent customers from the top of the funnel to working with higher-quality agents has resulted in higher work with rates for us over the last few quarters, which we’re seeing as a positive.

Kind of with respect to going forward, we’ll continue to focus on these things. I did want to call out that our current performance is not yet reflective of the investments in our growth strategies. They’re still in test, they’re relatively small. So we’re going to continue to focus on growing our share from 3% to 6% as we test, iterate, launch and then scale these offerings and these strategies. And over time, we’d expect to see share gaining growth over this, but it won’t be linear from here to there. So hopefully, that helps provide a little color.

Rich Barton: And that’s a good — it’s a good segue, Allen, thanks in the answer to John’s first question, which is the 3% to 6% will provide a lot of a good growth profile for the company. But it would still only be 6% transaction share, which, to me, seems modest, especially given the length of the shadow that we cast here, the size of the audience that we have here. We do — more specifically on the question, we do believe that mover customers really want this magic application that integrates all of these disparate pieces of the move, all of these difficult and coordinated things that people have to track and do in order to move. And it seems very logical to us that we ought to be able to bring that all into a single application experience where we plug partners and services into that app in order to make that move much, much easier and more efficient and more enjoyable.