Zillow's Listing Ban and Violation Metrics

Zillow began enforcing its new listing access standards in July of this year, the lynchpin of its strategy to fight back against private listings, and last week’s courtroom hearing revealed new metrics on the number of listing violations and bans.

Why it matters: These metrics are evidence of how aggressively Zillow is enforcing its listing policy.

• The data reveals that, through November 14th, Zillow has banned a total of 48 listings nationally.

Zillow banned its first listing in July of 2025.

• Data for August and September wasn’t revealed, but by October 15th, Zillow had banned 28 listings before nearly doubling that number by November 14th. 

The vast majority of these listing bans, about 90 percent, were Compass listings.

• The remaining 10 percent were Howard Hanna listings, another brokerage that appears loosely aligned with Compass’s strategy and has a private listing network of its own.
   

• As of November 14th, these are the only two brokerages with listings banned from Zillow – which roughly correlates to the amount of effort different brokerages are putting into their private listing programs.

Before a listing is banned, an agent receives a series of violation notices.

• According to the documents reviewed in court, as of November 14th Zillow had sent out a total of 1,202 listing violations to 24 different brokerages.
   

• The brokerages receiving at least two violation notices are listed below.

Compass agents are the recipients of the vast majority of these notices, accounting for 1,137 or 95 percent of all notices.

• Zillow’s internal strategy documents repeatedly mention Compass and “other bad actors,” but there was no evidence that Compass agents were specifically targeted.

Zillow appears to be primarily enforcing its policy in the mid-Atlantic: Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

• Over the past month, there have been bans in a handful of other states, including Texas and Florida, as the policy starts a slow, national rollout.

I conducted a survey in the days before publishing this article, asking my LinkedIn followers how many listings they thought Zillow had banned nationally as of November 14th.

• Based on the results, many people will be surprised at how few listings have been banned: 80 percent of the 870 respondents thought Zillow had banned more than 50 listings, with 49 percent guessing that Zillow had banned over 1,000 listings.

The bottom line: Zillow probably wants the number of banned listings to be as small as possible.

• A critical part of Zillow’s listing standards is the threat of a ban on Zillow, designed to put immense pressure on agents and homesellers to change behavior – ideally without an actual ban.
   

• It’s a tricky needle to thread: because a banned listing effectively punishes a homeseller, Zillow needs to carefully calibrate its enforcement to maximize its business goals while minimizing collateral damage against consumers.