Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman hits back at antitrust lawsuit claiming market abuse

Wacksman left Microsoft’s Xbox division to join Zillow in 2009 as home prices were falling amid the subprime mortgage crisis. He became CEO last August amid an entirely different crisis—one spurred by rising prices, higher mortgage rates, and very tight supply. Zillow stock is up more than 50% since then, propelled by innovations like its AI-powered Zillow showcase. That has cemented the real estate site’s dominance in attracting 227 million unique visitors a month.

“The thing we do is we try and continue to make that process better and easier for those that are buying, because then as more buyers come, it’ll be better for everyone,” he says in the latest Leadership Next podcast. “The category is very hard. It’s still very broken.”

But there is a war being waged in the world of real estate right now. Brokerage giant Compass recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Zillow, arguing that its new listing rules that went into effect on June 30 are an abuse of its market position. (Zillow now requires all publicly marketed listings be available to list on Zillow within a day or be banned from its site—thus stopping Compass from keeping some listings off the site for a while.)

Wacksman points out that the U.S. is “the only market in the world where we as buyers and sellers and our agents can see all the listings for free … There are a handful of companies that really want to undo that cooperation and really put the internet back in the box and keep their listings for themselves and make you pay them to see access for those listings. And we don’t think that’s good for buyers and sellers.” 

Compass, of course, has a different take. You can watch our conversation here or you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple.

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Nina Ajemian and Jim Edwards.