Someone Tell the President: Zillow Is Quietly Torching His Housing Agenda

Housing affordability is one of the rare issues uniting Washington across party lines. This spring, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill from Sen. Tim Scott and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, by an 89-10 vote, and the House passed its companion bill in February by 390-9.

President Trump has matched that momentum. On March 13, he signed executive orders easing mortgage credit rules and cutting construction permitting barriers, following a January order barring large institutional investors from buying single-family homes. The stakes are obvious: the median home now costs nearly five times median household income, far above the old three-times rule of thumb, and the gap is a defining anxiety heading into the midterms.

Which makes it baffling that the White House, FTC, and DOJ have stayed silent on Zillow.

Zillow is not just a player in real estate; it is the market: roughly 80 percent of transactions involve an agent using a Zillow product, and 70 percent of buyers and sellers use its site. The company's stated "housing super app" strategy centers on Zillow Home Loans, and it's working: ZHL mortgage revenue jumped 56 percent year over year in Q1 2026 to $64 million, with purchase loan volume up 96 percent to $1.5 billion, making Zillow a top-25 purchase lender.

In December 2025, Georgetown's Steven Salop published a study analyzing federal mortgage data from 2022-2024. He found ZHL borrowers pay about 10 basis points more than other lenders overall, and 15 points more in 2024, translating to roughly $4,600 in extra cost on a typical $337,000 loan. Veterans and lower-income buyers fare worst: VA borrowers faced a roughly $7,279 overcharge, and ZHL borrowers earning under $60,000 paid an overcharge equal to nearly three percent of their loan.

Zillow has dismissed the study as funded by rival CoStar Group and lacking credit-score data. Salop says he controlled for geography, debt-to-income, and loan-to-value, and has invited independent review. Zillow hasn't offered a competing analysis.

The findings track with mounting litigation. Taylor v. Zillow alleges Zillow steered buyers toward its costlier loans using its Follow Up Boss tool to monitor agent communications; Armstrong v. Zillow raised similar claims, and the cases were consolidated in December 2025. A third suit, Dupuis v. Zillow, claims a Washington agent was penalized, then cut off, for refusing to funnel clients to ZHL. Together, the suits describe a system pressuring agents, who owe clients a fiduciary duty, into steering them toward a pricier lender: a toll booth on the biggest purchase most Americans will ever make.

The administration has pushed housing affordability harder than almost any other domestic issue, yet the dominant gateway to the housing market appears to be charging above-market rates while rapidly scaling its lending arm. It's the equivalent of launching a campaign to lower gas prices while ignoring that the largest gas station chain just raised its own.

The politics cut oddly too: about 84 percent of 2024 federal contributions from Zillow Group employees went to Democrats. That's not illegal, but it makes the administration's silence stranger still. No FTC inquiry. No DOJ statement. This despite extensive public coverage of the litigation and a bipartisan group of lawmakers asking the FTC to investigate.

One could argue the administration is simply wary of interfering in private markets. But this White House has named names before, including when the President championed the ban on institutional single-family-home buyers from the State of the Union podium. Lawyers in the class actions, the same firms that won over $1 billion in the NAR commission settlements, say Zillow is "wielding its monopoly power to exert enormous pressure on real estate agents."

Mortgage rates briefly dipped below six percent in February, a real win the administration touted, but they've risen since. Every point of markup from ZHL works against that progress, especially as its loan volume grew 53 percent annually.

Someone needs to tell the President. He is working hard to lower housing costs. Zillow is doing just the opposite.

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