Despite a $22 million net loss for the quarter and 13% annual drop in revenue to $469 million, Zillow executives told investors and analysts that they were pleased with their firm’s first quarter performance.
“As I noted during our last earnings call, 2023 is critical for Zillow, and I’m pleased with how we’ve started the year,” Rich Barton, the CEO of Zillow, said on the firm’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday evening. “This outperformance is due to a combination of progress that we’ve made since reorienting the company in early 2022, along with favorable relative tailwinds in a tough housing environment.”
Even with the slower housing market conditions during the first three months of 2023, Zillow reported that traffic to its apps and site was at 212 million average monthly unique users, remaining flat compared to a year ago. But other metrics were not as strong, including Premier Agent reporting a 16% annual decrease in revenue and Zillow Home Loans recording a 43% year-over-year decline in revenue to $26 million. However, according to Zillow executives, both of these metrics come with a silver lining.
For starters, the 16% annual revenue decline was an improvement over the 27% drop in U.S. home transaction during the same period.
Furthermore, conversion rates with Premier Agents increased in the first quarter, going from one out of five Premier Agents in enhanced markets referring or sending a Zillow Home Loans potential customer back to ZHL, to now one out of three Premier Agents sending clients to Zillow Home Loans for their mortgage. This resulted in a 100% year-over-year increase in purchase loan origination volumes for ZHL.
Zillow executives attribute much of this improvement to the real-time touring feature added to the Zillow website in select markets last year.
“We have focused on many improvements in our customer funnel experience by offering clear call to action that quickly and efficiently help solve customer needs. These numerous incremental changes collectively have been adding up to make a real impact on our business,” Barton said. “This has resulted in less drop-off in our funnel, which is a key driver behind improved expected lead volumes of higher intent customers.”
Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow’s COO, added: “We see less friction, which plugs the holes in the funnel and increases both the customers’ ability to get the tour when they want. It also increases the ability for those customers to connect with our Premier Agent partners, and they report higher propensity to work with those Premier Agents.”
Looking ahead, executives said they will continue to focus on “smoothing the funnel” for customers and making the home buying transaction more seamless.
“This strategy of shifting our focus and efforts down funnel to the transaction is manifest in what we call our Housing Super App vision, an integrated end-to-end experience to help our customers move,” Barton said. “The expected output of this strategy is to grow our share of customer transactions from 3% to 6% by the end of 2025. On our road map, 2023 is about execution, steadily rolling out products in constrained geographies across our five growth pillars and integrating them to create a seamless experience for our customers and partners. Rich, smart integration within our ecosystem is crucial to our Housing Super App vision, be it connecting with the Premier Agent partner that tours homes with you; after you book it with showing time or working with the Zillow Home Loans Officer; who secures your mortgage. We are bringing this seamless, connected experience to various markets throughout the country with our first 4 in Raleigh, Denver, Atlanta and Phoenix.”
