Zillow's CEO on growth during a housing crisis

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Zillow CEO, Jeremy Waxman. Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software.

The company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned that into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become a vertically integrated platform for buying, selling, and renting real estate. Now, if you've been listening to Decoder lately, you have maybe already guessed why I was so eager to talk with Jeremy. A popular mobile app like Zillow is really the front end to a big series of databases, and the politics of who gets to access databases and how much that access should cost is newly up for grabs if you think the next era of software will be defined by AI. After all, you don't need an app like Zillow if your AI agent can just go look at the real estate database, which is called the MLS, directly. Or maybe you do need an app like Zillow.

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