Zillow will pay $212.5 million to settle a shareholder class action lawsuit over its handling of Zillow Offers, the home-flipping business it shut down in 2021.

The lawsuit alleged that Zillow executives painted an overly positive picture of Zillow Offers in the months before the shutdown, without disclosing how poorly the company was able to predict home prices. That kept the stock artificially high until Zillow revealed the problems and announced the shutdown in November 2021, according to the complaint.

The Seattle-based company disclosed the settlement Wednesday in an SEC filing. About $48 million of the payment is expected to come from insurance. The deal requires court approval and includes no admission of wrongdoing.

In a statement, a Zillow spokesperson said, “We are pleased that the parties have reached a resolution on the matter.”

The settlement comes about three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Zillow’s challenge to the case’s class status. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups backed Zillow’s petition.

Steve Berman, managing partner of Seattle law firm Hagens Berman, the court-appointed class counsel, told Real Estate News he believes it’s the largest single securities settlement in the history of the Western District of Washington, the federal court district that includes Seattle.

Separate shareholder lawsuits filed on the company’s behalf against its leaders, known as derivative suits, remain pending, according to the filing.

Zillow bet its future on buying and selling homes in 2019, when co-founder Rich Barton returned as CEO and projected the business would reach $20 billion in annual revenue within three to five years. The company used its pricing algorithms to buy houses, fix them up and resell them.

The effort unraveled in the fall of 2021. An analyst report found that two-thirds of 650 homes it sampled from Zillow’s inventory were listed for less than the company paid.

Days later, Zillow shut down the business, cut about 2,000 jobs and took a $304 million inventory writedown, with Barton citing the unpredictability of its home-price forecasts. Zillow’s stock fell 32% over two days, according to Reuters.

The original lawsuit, filed that month in federal court in Seattle, cited upbeat statements executives made in the months before the shutdown.

They included a September 2021 remark by Jeremy Wacksman, then Zillow’s chief operating officer and now its CEO, that “the strength and the appeal for Zillow Offers just continues to grow.” Investor Jeremy Jaeger later became the lead plaintiff.

The class covers investors who bought Zillow Class A or Class C shares between Aug. 5 and Nov. 2, 2021. If the judge grants preliminary approval, Zillow will pay the money into a settlement fund within 20 business days.

— Niantic Spatial hired Dave Citron as chief product officer. He joined from Microsoft AI, where he was corporate vice president of product on the Superintelligence team and helped build and launch Microsoft’s first frontier foundation models.

San Francisco-based Niantic Spatial, spun out of Pokémon Go maker Niantic, builds spatial AI models and services, including a visual positioning system trained in part on images crowdsourced from Pokémon Go players. The company has an engineering team in Bellevue, Wash.

The Seattle-area executive was previously senior director of product for the Gemini app at Google DeepMind and worked on Google Meet and Google Duo. He began his career at Microsoft in 2005, helping take OneDrive from its first release to more than 200 million monthly users.

“AI is remarkably good at reading and writing, but it still doesn’t understand the physical world well enough to act in it safely,” Citron said in the announcement.

— The Fund for Science and Technology, the Seattle-based foundation responsible for giving away a large portion of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s fortune, named Jane Dietze its first chief investment officer. She starts Jan. 4, 2027, after finishing the year at Brown University, where she has held that role since 2018.

Brown says its endowment grew from $3.2 billion to $8 billion over the 10 years through fiscal 2025. Her deputy, Joshua Kennedy, will succeed her. Dietze previously held investment roles at Bowdoin College, Fortress Investment Group and Columbia Capital.

The foundation launched publicly in August 2025 with a mandate to deploy at least $500 million over four years in bioscience, the environment and AI for good. It also funds the Allen Institute and Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI.

The fund started with a $3.1 billion endowment from Allen’s estate and is expected to oversee a large portion of the proceeds from the sale of Allen’s sports teams. Its first CEO, Lynda Stuart, stepped down in May.

— Nicholas Stevens joined payments giant Stripe as head of product for agentic commerce, working from Seattle, after a decade at Zillow. He was most recently Zillow’s vice president of product for AI and data, leading product strategy for the company’s AI products and data platform.

His LinkedIn profile notes that he drove the partnership that made Zillow one of seven global launch partners for OpenAI’s ChatGPT apps platform. He previously worked in product at Prismatic.

“I believe AI buying & selling on your behalf can be magical,” he wrote.

— Scowtt, a Kirkland, Wash.-based startup that uses AI to predict which sales prospects will become customers, named Ben Trenda chief revenue officer. Trenda is an ad tech veteran who worked at Overture/Yahoo, AOL and Rubicon Project, and co-founded iSocket. Scowtt says it is approaching $10 million in annual recurring revenue.

— The American Astronomical Society named University of Washington astronomy professor Emily Levesque the next editor in chief of its journals, including The Astrophysical Journal. She takes charge in August 2027, succeeding Ethan Vishniac.

— ThriftBooks, the online used-book seller founded in Seattle in 2003, named Carla Anderson Skogland chief financial officer. She had been interim CFO since April. Anderson Skogland, who is based in the Seattle area, was previously CFO of Sono Bello. She spent 11 years at Amazon, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and for more than 15 years at Starbucks.

— Michael Mann is stepping down as executive director of Clean & Prosperous, a climate policy group that backed Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, once a successor is chosen. He took over on an interim basis from the late founder David Giuliani and led the group for five years. Mann, founder of consulting firm Cyan Strategies, previously led the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment.

— Lani Ramos joined Yoodli, a Seattle startup that uses AI roleplays for communications training, to build its renewals function. Ramos spent 13 years at Tableau and Salesforce, most recently as director of renewal for North America.

— Former Starbucks CFO Rachel Ruggeri joined the board of San Diego-based Jack in the Box. Ruggeri, a Seattle-area finance leader, spent more than two decades at Starbucks and was its CFO from 2021 to March 2025. She also serves on the board of Stryker.

— Victor Fetter is stepping down at the end of the year as chief technology and business systems officer at Everett, Wash.-based Fortive after nearly seven years. Rich Noonan, Fortive’s chief information security and technology operations officer, will become CIO. Fetter, who is based in Mississippi, plans to expand his board work and angel investing.

— And in case you missed it:

• Microsoft moved its communications team under President Brad Smith. Brent Colburn is interim communications leader, and longtime comms chief Frank Shaw will serve as an advisor through the end of the year.
• Truelist founder Carey Armstrong, a former Zillow vice president, is joining Mainstay as chief strategy officer after Mainstay acquired her startup.

Zillow launched 20 years ago, and we’ve been covering the Seattle-based company since before it had a name. This week, we’re looking ahead to what’s next in real estate and technology.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, recorded live at Atmosphere Seattle overlooking Lake Union, Zillow Senior Vice President of Engineering Toby Roberts joins us to talk about what AI is doing to the business of buying and selling homes.

The show was recorded in partnership with Real Estate At Work, the networking group hosted by Leka Devatha, a broker with Real Residential and founder of the redevelopment firm Rehabit Homes, in front of a room of brokers, investors and technologists.

Listen here, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and keep reading for highlights.

AI agents and real estate agents: Roberts called AI “a complete watershed moment” that “has changed the full ecosystem” of buying and selling homes.

His position is that AI agents will work as a copilot for real estate agents rather than replace them. He cited what’s already happening inside Zillow’s CRM for agents, where the company has built conversation summaries and follow-up prompts, such as where the loan stands, whether the customer has submitted their documents, and what the next step should be.

But there’s still the human side of the business, with Roberts noting that 50% of people cry at some point during a home purchase. It’s the biggest transaction many people will ever take part in, with huge financial and personal stakes, and that’s the part of the job that still needs a person.

If the AI agents can do more of the grunt work for real estate agents, he said, “they can spend more time focused on that human connection that has to exist in this really scary transaction.”

Real or AI? John raised a New York Times story published days before the show, on listing sites filling up with fake fireplaces, enhanced views and virtual landscaping. Roberts said listings “should accurately represent the state of the home,” noting that fake fires in fireplaces predate AI, going back years to Photoshop.

In July, Zillow said on its site it “supports clear disclosure when A.I. is used to materially alter a listing image” and that “where possible, believes consumers should be able to view the original content alongside the altered version.”

Zillow does offer generative AI on the buyer’s side, where a shopper can restyle a listing photo to see the room a different way. Roberts said the point is that the buyer chooses it, rather than the original photo being altered before anyone sees it.

Zillow and ChatGPT: The company was a launch partner in OpenAI’s app store, which John tried the day before the show. He clicked to request a tour inside ChatGPT for a home on Whidbey Island, and a human agent called him two minutes later with no idea that the lead came from a chatbot.

Asked about the integration, Roberts said it’s still early, but the people who show up that way are serious about buying. Zillow built its own map inside ChatGPT, pins and all, and those leads reach agents the same way they would from Zillow’s own app.

One big consideration was security and permissions. Zillow connects to ChatGPT through MCP, the Model Context Protocol, the standard that lets a chatbot plug into an outside service.

It was still new when Zillow started, and the sign-in and permissions pieces were “still very much in its infancy,” so Zillow had to build some of it itself. Because the company originates mortgages, it also has to follow fair housing and fair lending rules, which he called “an absolute must.”

AI inside Zillow: Roberts runs Zillow’s core technology initiatives, with a team of more than 650 engineers. He shared some of the numbers on AI-assisted coding inside Zillow: 97% of engineers are using the tools, and code is reaching production about 40% faster than in the past.

But even as engineers write more code, other engineers still have to review it. Roberts said that code review process is the next thing Zillow needs to speed up, “otherwise, we inundate our developers with just reading more and more code reviews, day after day.”

Roberts said Zillow hasn’t made the wholesale shift to small, self-contained teams that some have predicted. Instead it has placed AI champions across every part of the company, and set up internal groups where employees compare what worked and what didn’t.

It has also built a way for teams to share AI skills across the company. Roberts’ example was a financial calculation that comes up over and over. A team can build one skill and share it, so Zillow isn’t running “different, conflicting, and competing” versions of the same math.

Then it’s the GeekWire Trivia Challenge: We present four extraordinary Zillow listings for unusual buildings that were converted into homes. Three are real. One is an AI deepfake. Check out the handout here with the four listings, and see if you can tell the difference. 

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

— Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend promoted Nate Bek to principal. Bek joined the firm as an associate in January 2024 and was most recently senior associate and head of research.

Kirby Winfield, Ascend’s founding general partner, credited Bek with helping the firm’s companies launch with national press coverage, researching and communicating its investment theses, and sourcing deals including Neuramill and Endurance Energy.

“Nate has been a force multiplier for Ascend. It’s rare for a micro VC fund to have a resource like him,” Winfield said. “He not only executes and publishes novel market research and thought leadership that strengthens our brand and expands our reach; he’s also hyperconnected in the Seattle ecosystem and has sourced some of our most compelling investments.”

Winfield added, “We’re excited to see him continue to grow as Ascend becomes a nationally recognized pre-seed firm.”

Bek was previously a startups and venture capital reporter at GeekWire. He co-wrote a widely read GeekWire guest column in August making the case that many of Seattle’s most promising startups are building physical products such as rockets, power plants and off-road vehicles.

— Brandon Paddock left Microsoft to start his own AI software company. Paddock, who is based in Seattle, was a principal software architect in Microsoft’s Office organization and the technical lead for “Agent Mode” in Word, which shipped last fall and became the default Copilot experience in Word early this year. His last day was Sept. 11.

“I am incredibly excited about what I’m building, but not quite ready to talk about it here,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Paddock first worked at Microsoft from 2005 to 2013, including on search features in Windows 7 and Windows 8. He rejoined in 2016 after serving as CTO of Seattle startup Zealyst. He also built the Twitter client Tweetium as a side project.

— Seattle-based STEM education nonprofit Technology Access Foundation named Donya Loyd Kemp director of TransformED, which works with teachers at partner public schools to put TAF’s project-based STEM learning model into practice.

Kemp comes to TAF from Atlanta, where she was principal of Purpose Built Schools Atlanta and director of project-based learning at Charles R. Drew Charter School. She was most recently a senior consultant at Potential Unleashed Consulting.

In a TAF Q&A, Kemp said she was excited to contribute to work “that recognizes the brilliance of students, particularly students who have historically been underestimated.”

“So excited to have Donya on board. Leveling up for our children and teachers,” TAF co-founder and executive director Trish Millines Dziko wrote on LinkedIn.

— Zillow Group named Rikki Tremblay vice president and principal accounting officer as Jennifer Rock retires as chief accounting officer, according to a regulatory filing. Rock will stay on in an advisory role through March 1, 2027.

Tremblay has worked at the Seattle-based real estate company since 2014, most recently as vice president of reporting, technical accounting and controls. She previously held audit roles at Deloitte.

— Joy Chik joined the board of NewCore, a Tel Aviv- and San Francisco-based startup building an identity platform for people and AI agents. NewCore emerged from stealth in June with $66 million in funding.

Chik, who is based in the Seattle area, spent 28 years at Microsoft, most recently as president of identity and network access. She announced her departure in April.

— Werner Koepf is now chief technology officer at VanillaSoft, a sales engagement software company. Koepf, a longtime Seattle-area tech leader, was previously chief product and technology officer at AI localization company LILT and senior vice president of engineering at Karat.

He has also held engineering leadership roles at Conversica, Ticketmaster, Expedia and Amazon, where he led the gifting business, including Wish List and registries.

— Mike Katz joined the board of MNTN, a publicly traded connected TV advertising company. Katz left Bellevue-based T-Mobile this year after 28 years, most recently as chief business and product officer. He remains an adviser to T-Mobile’s CEO.

— Christopher Budd joined Salesforce as director of security industry engagement, a new role connecting the company’s security team and research with the broader security industry. He joins Iain Mulholland and other former Microsoft colleagues. Budd, who has contributed many pieces to GeekWire over the years, previously led X-Ops communications at security company Sophos.

— Jay Carney joined venture capital firm SV Angel as general partner and head of public policy and communications. He will connect the firm’s portfolio companies and founders with policymakers in Washington and state capitals. A major focus will be Project Blueprint, SV Angel’s new effort to partner with tech founders and lawmakers to shape AI policy.

Carney, who is based in Washington, D.C., was previously global head of policy and communications at Airbnb, and Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs from 2015 to 2022. He was White House press secretary to President Obama from 2011 to 2014.

— Seattle-based A Place for Mom named Jason Conley chief technology officer. The company helps families find senior care. Conley will lead its technology strategy, engineering and data organization, including the use of AI across customer experiences and internal operations.

Conley will work remotely from Lexington, Ky. He was previously CTO at VIP Medical Group and Envera Health, and held senior technology roles at BrightSpring Health Services.

— Luis Montero rejoined the Seattle-based Gates Foundation to help shape its AI communications strategy across global health and development. Montero left the foundation about a decade ago for a career in tech.

His roles since then include global head of policy communications at Discord and public affairs positions at Edelman, Google and Microsoft, where he worked on executive communications for President Brad Smith. He is based in New York.

— Vancouver, B.C.-based defense tech startup Juno Industries expanded its board, advisory and leadership teams. The company develops AI-native command and control software and sensor systems for the Canadian Armed Forces and allies.

New leaders include head of engineering Dylan Neid, who spent nearly a decade at AbCellera; head of strategy Tania Belisle-Leclerc, former director of policy to Canada’s ministers of foreign affairs and national defense; and head of growth Bryan Riddell, former CEO of Team Rubicon Canada.

Claude Rochette and Alnesh Mohan will join the board once Juno goes public through a reverse merger with Trail Blazer Capital Corp., a shell company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.

— And in case you missed it:

• Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw will leave the company at the end of the year after overseeing its communications for nearly three decades, first at an outside agency and for the last 17 years as a Microsoft executive.
• Amazon named Kevin Mandia, founder of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, to its board of directors.