What helps Zillow stand out? In addition to tech investments and growth, employees praise the benefits they are given as part of employment. They also cherish the opportunity to do their jobs remotely.  

“The benefits provided are excellent and better than any company I have ever worked for,” employees told Great Place to Work. “We are given paid maternity leave and contributions towards our medical deductibles so we do not have to feel a burden when needing medical care.”

Zillow also offers a flexible remote work arrangement to employees, a quality shared with 98% of the companies on Fortune’s 2025 list. 

“This company is fully remote, and we are able to have a healthy work-life balance and have the ability to move where we need to without being tied to an office,” employees say. Investing in an online headquarters versus emphasizing one physical location has helped the company recruit and retain talent. 

“We like to think we hire adults. We like to treat people like adults,” Dan Spaulding, chief people officer at Zillow, tells Fortune, adding that he only goes into the office about 5 days out of every month. 

Seattle-based Zillow’s care for its 6,730 employees has led to overwhelming trust in leadership, which pays dividends for the success of its business. 

Successful business strategy

Zillow has achieved an audience that far surpasses competitors in the space. 

Zillow reports an average monthly audience of 217 million users, more than double that of competitors Homes.com and Redfin. Investing in proprietary tech and tools, most notably the price estimator Zestimate, help it differentiate in the competitive market of real estate. 

Zestimate was one of the company’s first machine learning tools, Nicholas Stevens, Vice President of Product, Artificial Intelligence, at Zillow, said in an interview with Fortune reporter Jason del Rey. The tool has evolved to look beyond hard data, such as number of rooms and square footage, and factor in more complex elements like listing images and a 3D walkthrough. 

That’s helped customers “to get a deep sense of the quality of the home and the value of the home…that’s really improved the accuracy of the Zestimate, Stevens said. 

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The company has invested $4 billion over the past decade in a customer relationship management system, a virtual staging company, and a media software and content management platform. The strategy is paying off, giving Zillow a competitive advantage in the sector. 

“We place Zillow as a kind of category winner who’s been taking share and is essentially a ubiquitous, dominant brand within a category, which is residential real estate,” Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst at Citizens Bank, Nicholas Jones, said in an interview with Fortune. “Competitively speaking, really, no one’s near Zillow in terms of traffic volume, the leads they can generate.” 

Zillow’s tech investments are doing more than driving growth in audience: working for a forward-thinking company with a thriving strategy also boosts staff morale and trust in leadership.