— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.

The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.

Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.

Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”

The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.

— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.

In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”

Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.

— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.

“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.

“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.

— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.

Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.

“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.

— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.

Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.

— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”

— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.

— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.

“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.

— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:

• Evan Jacobs has joined as head of engineering, previously serving as a software development manager at Amazon Web Services. Jacobs is also a startup founder.
• Quinn Hawkins was named head of communities, joining from First Street, where he was chief product officer. His background includes leadership at Redfin and Microsoft.
• Masud Khan was named staff software engineer. Past employers include Apple, Databricks, Meta and Amazon.

Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.

— EchoMark, ​the ​Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic ​watermarking ​to identify ​the ​source of information leaks, ​has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.

“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.

— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.

Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.

“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”

— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.

— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.

— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.

— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.

Zillow and Redfin settled an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission and five states Monday, just as a trial was set to begin, agreeing to undo part of a $100 million partnership that the government said effectively paid Redfin to stop competing in apartment rental advertising.

The companies, both based in Seattle, have been rivals in online real estate and related services for the better part of two decades, expanding into rentals to build their businesses beyond the market for single-family homes. The FTC alleged the deal combined two of the three largest online apartment listing services against one main competitor, CoStar’s Apartments.com.

The proposed settlement requires Redfin, now owned by Rocket Cos., to relaunch its apartment advertising operation within six months — hiring a general manager, a sales force and a trained customer support team, while committing to spend millions of dollars to grow the business.

Redfin faces fines if it misses deadlines, and must report regularly to the FTC on its progress.

Zillow’s apartment listings will still appear on Redfin.com, Rent.com and ApartmentGuide, and Redfin will keep syndicating them, so Zillow is holding onto the audience it gained in the 2025 deal. The companies say the syndication will run through at least 2030.

What ends is the exclusive nature of the partnership: As part of the FTC settlement, Redfin is no longer barred from selling its own advertising alongside those listings, or from doing business on its own with the property managers shifted to Zillow under their original deal.

Zillow also must help Redfin rebuild. Under the order, which runs 10 years, Zillow is required to give Redfin employee information so it can recruit Zillow workers, waive any noncompete or anti-poaching agreements blocking those hires, and let apartment advertisers locked into Zillow contracts renegotiate without penalty for nine months after Redfin relaunches.

The companies will also pay the states $2 million in costs and fees, according to Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, who co-led the five-state coalition.

Zillow said the partnership “will continue unchanged,” and framed the standalone advertising products both companies plan to launch in 2027 as added flexibility for property managers.

“This resolution is a win for renters and multifamily housing providers,” said Michael Sherman, general manager and senior vice president of Zillow Rentals, in a statement. He said the partnership has brought “more leads and leases to property managers and more options to renters,” and that the standalone products will let Zillow “do even more to support the marketplace.”

The FTC offered its own take: “Today’s settlement unwinds an agreement under which Zillow paid Redfin $100 million to stop competing and hand off all its customers to Zillow,” said Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “This kind of payment to a competitor to exit a market and stop competing violates the antitrust laws.”

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson called it “a complete victory for the American people” in a thread on X early Monday. He added, “This anticompetitive agreement is now history under our proposed settlement.”

Guarnera said the settlement “delivers better, quicker, more certain results” than the agency would have been able to achieve if it had gone to trial and prevailed.

“Today’s settlement will restore competition by paving the way for Redfin to re-enter the market as a stronger competitor,” Brown said in a statement. “Most importantly, consumers will have more choices and won’t be subjected to illegally manipulated prices.”

The FTC and state cases were consolidated last year. Zillow and Redfin moved to dismiss in January, and U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga denied that motion in May, according to Real Estate News. However, the FTC’s case had met resistance in July, when Trenga denied its request to declare the deal presumptively unlawful, finding genuine disputes of material fact.

Redfin called the outcome “a significant win for Redfin and consumers across the country.”

“This agreement allows us to maintain our rental partnership with Zillow through at least 2030, while building and investing in a standalone rentals business of our own,” a spokesperson said, adding that renters “will continue to have access to the rental inventory they rely on today.”

The proposed settlement, announced Monday morning, requires court approval.

Updated with details from Washington AG Nick Brown.

This week, two New York City renters filed a class action complaint alleging that a brokerage business called Compass—which has been boycotting posting listings on free digital platforms like Zillow—has now delisted so many rental units that it has created a fake supply shock that is artificially raising rents.

According to plaintiffs, Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, Compass has bought so many brokerage firms over the past decade-plus that it maintains a monopoly, controlling “over 80 percent of the rental unit listings available for renters in Manhattan based on 2025 data.”

With that monopoly, Compass can “literally dictate pricing for as much as 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental units,” renters argued. And now, Compass is allegedly trying to manipulate prices on other platforms, as well.

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— Mehul Shah joined Oracle as group vice president for OCI data and storage services, ending a 14-year run at Amazon and Amazon Web Services.

In his last role at AWS, Shah led engineering and product for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Oracle and Db2, and ran the launch and expansion of Oracle Database@AWS, the partnership that put Oracle’s database inside Amazon’s cloud.

“Through that collaboration, I saw firsthand that OCI shares the same DNA that inspired me to join Amazon back in 2012,” Shah said on LinkedIn, citing “deep curiosity, a passion to innovate, the courage to make bold decisions, and relentless drive to excel.”

Shah, who is based in Seattle, spent more than eight years at AWS, earlier leading real-time data streaming services including Amazon Data Firehose and Kinesis Data Streams, and serving as director and general manager of Amazon EMR. He started at Oracle this month.

— Seattle Children’s named Dr. Natalie Pageler senior vice president and chief information officer, putting her in charge of digital strategy and IT operations for the pediatric hospital system.

Pageler comes from Stanford Children’s Health and the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was division chief of clinical informatics and earlier spent a decade as chief medical information officer. She is a pediatrician and clinical informaticist with more than 20 years of experience.

Seattle Children’s CEO Dr. Christopher Longhurst followed a similar path. He was chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health, the same role Pageler held, before spending a decade at UC San Diego Health, most recently as chief clinical and innovation officer.

— Zillow Group named Cassandra “Sandi” Knight its first-ever chief legal and policy officer, a role the Seattle company created this month as part of a broader leadership shuffle. Reporting to CEO Jeremy Wacksman, she oversees Zillow’s legal, compliance and government relations functions.

Knight joins from Google, where she spent four years as a vice president leading global civil litigation and discovery. She was previously vice president and chief litigation counsel at PayPal, and spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley in senior litigation and compliance roles.

She began her career as a trial lawyer at the San Diego Public Defender’s Office, the firm Keker & Van Nest and the San Francisco City Attorney’s office. She holds a law degree from Stanford and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She arrives at a busy moment: Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the companies’ $100 million rental listings deal. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year.

Two longtime Zillow leaders are heading out:

• Sara Bonert, vice president of industry engagement for Zillow Group and ShowingTime+, is leaving after nearly 20 years. One of Zillow’s earliest employees, she joined in the fall of 2006 as director of broker services, helped build Zillow’s first platform for taking in listing data, and signed the partner agreements that took the site from zero to a million listings in four months.
• Jeff Tompkins, head of corporate real estate and operations, wrapped up almost five years with the company. Tompkins, who is based in Denver, ran Zillow’s workplace strategy across North America and beyond. He said he will share his next role soon.

— Amir Pelleg, a veteran of companies including Amazon and Convoy, is the new chief product officer at Uber Freight. He is based in Seattle, working out of the shared Uber and Uber Freight office on Second Avenue.

At Amazon, Pelleg was principal product manager for Kindle Fire, launched the Dash Button and initiated Alexa’s smart home controls, then incubated and launched Amazon Shipping in India, the U.K. and the U.S. as a director and general manager in Amazon Transportation.

He was a vice president on Convoy’s executive team until the Seattle freight startup shut down in 2023, then spent two and a half years at dental tech company Dandy.

“I’ve seen what works and what fails in digital freight,” Pelleg said in a Q&A posted by Uber Freight.

— Seattle’s Frazier Healthcare Partners added Wes Wheeler to its Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence, advising on diligence and on life science logistics and infrastructure.

Wheeler was most recently CEO of LabConnect, a central laboratory services company serving clinical trials, and before that president of UPS Healthcare, where he built a vertical of 10,000 employees across 35 countries. During Operation Warp Speed he was the primary industry interface to the U.S. government, overseeing distribution of more than 1.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to over 100 countries.

— Dr. Heather Cheng was announced as the inaugural recipient of the Marty Lazarus Weiden Family Endowed Chair at Fred Hutch Cancer Center, which will fund her work detecting, preventing and treating hereditary cancers.

Cheng is clinical director of cancer genetics programs at Fred Hutch and directs its prostate cancer genetics clinic. In 2016 she was part of a team that found more than 10% of men with advanced prostate cancer carry inherited mutations in DNA-repair genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The chair is named for Marty Lazarus Weiden, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and died in 2001. The family learned only later that some of its members carry a BRCA mutation.

— Microsoft corporate vice president Darryl Willis was named to the board of ONE Nuclear Energy, a natural gas and advanced nuclear developer going public this quarter through a merger with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp.

Willis has led Microsoft’s energy and resources group since 2019. He was previously a Google Cloud vice president and a BP executive who ran the company’s Deepwater Horizon claims process and testified before Congress. He will officially join the board when the merger closes, and he is expected to chair its compensation committee.

— Jake Milstein was named head of healthcare solutions marketing at Zscaler, a return to healthcare cybersecurity. He joins from application security company Contrast Security and was earlier chief marketing and revenue officer at Critical Insight, the Bremerton, Wash.-based security firm acquired by Lumifi Cyber.

Before moving into technology, Milstein spent a decade at Seattle’s KIRO TV, including four years as news director.

— Michele Mehl left Amazon Web Services after nearly two and a half years to become senior public relations manager at ALSO, arriving the same week the electric vehicle company announced a $150 million Series D round led by Prysm Capital.

ALSO builds the TM-B consumer electric bike and the TM-Q commercial delivery quad, and counts Amazon and DoorDash among its commercial partners.

— Richard Van Bibber was named senior vice president of research and development at Verasonics, the Kirkland, Wash.-based maker of ultrasound research platforms used in fields including biomedical ultrasound, materials science and earth sciences.

Van Bibber has spent much of a 25-year medtech career in the Puget Sound region, including seven years as director of research at Kirkland’s Cardiac Dimensions and five years leading clinical affairs at Bellevue-based Aortica.

— Dave Cotter joined the board of Nickson, the apartment-furnishing startup led by Cameron Johnson, alongside MarcyPen Capital Partners and Larry Braithwaite. Cotter is CEO of Greenwood and has previously worked at Amazon, Nordstrom, zulily, RealNetworks and Leafly.

— PCC Community Markets president and CEO Krish Srinivasan will retire effective Jan. 29, 2027. Srinivasan was chief financial officer at Remitly and vice president of finance at Lyft before joining the Seattle grocery co-op as CFO, and earlier held leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

— Seattle Foundation named Elizabeth Wong as chief philanthropy officer, reporting to President and CEO Alesha Washington. Wong spent more than a decade at Foundation Source and earlier worked directly with the Gates family at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And in case you missed it:

— Jay Bartot, a co-founder of the airfare-prediction startup Farecast and former chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs, was named CTO of Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for entrepreneurs. Read more here.

— Expedia Group is parting ways with at least eight vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and promoted five other leaders, as it reorganizes its product and technology groups around AI. Read more in this GeekWire story.

Zillow Group’s revenue rose 18% to $772 million in the second quarter, beating its own forecast, but a $36 million restructuring charge from severance and other costs stemming from this week’s layoffs pushed it to a $4 million net loss.

The Seattle-based online real estate company, which on Tuesday laid off more than 500 people, or 7% of its workforce, expects the restructuring to cost $59 million to $64 million in total, with the rest recorded in the third quarter, according to the company’s 10-Q regulatory filing.

Zillow also announced a series of executive changes, including expanding CFO Jeremy Hofmann‘s role to include chief operating officer. Jun Choo, who became COO in 2024, is stepping down to focus on his health, serving as an advisor through the end of the year.

The company created a chief legal and policy officer role and hired Cassandra “Sandi” Knight, a Google vice president of litigation and discovery, who was previously PayPal chief litigation counsel. Knight starts next week.

Zillow and Redfin are set to go to trial Aug. 24 as defendants in an antitrust case brought by the FTC and five state attorneys general over the $100 million rental listings deal between the two companies. Zillow has spent $26 million on the case so far this year, including $10 million in the second quarter.

In addition, Zillow promoted Kathleen Berroth to senior vice president of strategy and operations, and Eric Wilson to senior vice president and GM of mortgages.

For the second quarter, Zillow said the residential real estate industry grew 6%, while industry-wide lending for home purchases was roughly flat compared with a year ago. The number of people visiting real estate sites and apps declined overall as mortgage rates rose, the company said, citing Comscore. Zillow’s own traffic fell 2%, to an average of 239 million monthly users.

Most of the revenue growth came from Zillow’s newer businesses. Mortgage revenue rose 75% to $84 million as Zillow directed buyers on its site to its own lending arm, and rentals revenue rose 31% to $209 million. Residential revenue, from advertising sold to real estate agents, grew 7% to $465 million.

Zillow Group’s layoffs will eliminate 91 jobs in Washington state, landing heavily on senior staff, according to a notice the company filed with the state Employment Security Department.

The filing under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act is the first detailed accounting of who was affected by the more than 500 layoffs the company announced Tuesday. The cuts hit about 7% of its global workforce, which stood at 7,058 as of March 31.

Zillow Group is officially headquartered in Seattle, but the relatively small share of the layoffs in its home state (18%) reflects how distributed it has become. The company adopted a remote-first model it calls “Cloud HQ” in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and it has continued to bet on remote work as other tech companies pulled employees back to the office.

The list of affected job titles in Washington state is dominated by senior positions. It includes five directors and three senior directors, 14 principal-level roles, and a long list of senior managers and senior individual contributors. Relatively few junior positions appear on the list.

Product and engineering absorbed the most. Senior Product Manager is the single largest line at seven positions, followed by Senior Software Development Engineer, Software Development Engineer and Senior UX Researcher at four each. Together, product and engineering roles account for more than a third of the Washington cuts.

The list also includes AI and machine learning positions: a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Engineering, a Senior Applied Scientist, a Senior Manager of Research Science, and an Annotation Lead, associated with labeling data to train AI models.

Zillow told GeekWire on Tuesday that AI did not drive the layoffs. “Today’s changes are about better positioning Zillow for the path ahead, which includes having the right people in the right roles and being able to move faster,” a company spokesperson said.

The WARN notice adds a detail Zillow did not mention publicly: “Some of these terminations are the result of, or are expected to result in, the relocation or contracting out of operations and/or employee positions.”

Affected employees were notified Aug. 4 and will be terminated effective Oct. 5, more than 60 days later as required under state and federal law. They will continue to receive pay and benefits until then, according to the filing. Employees who are offered and accept another role at the company before that date will not be terminated.

The cuts affect workers at Zillow Group’s headquarters at 1301 Second Ave. in downtown Seattle and employees working from home elsewhere in Washington. The company said in the filing that its headquarters will remain open. None of the affected employees are represented by a union.

Zillow Group reports second-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon.

Seattle-based online real estate company Zillow Group laid off more than 500 employees Tuesday, about 7% of its global workforce, its second and largest round of cuts this year.

The layoffs are about “ensuring we have a disciplined cost structure and getting more efficient, with the right people in the right positions,” Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in a company blog post announcing the cuts. He said the decision reflects “both the strides we’re making in our strategy and the reality of what is required of us to grow at scale.”

He added, “Continuing to grow at scale requires us to work differently than we do today.”

Wacksman told real estate executives at the T3 Leadership Summit in April that Zillow employees were being retrained to use AI in their jobs, with gains that “are small, but they’re compounding,” as reported by Real Estate News.

FOLLOW-UP: Zillow layoffs hit 91 jobs in Washington state, with senior roles bearing the brunt

Zillow told GeekWire the cuts were not driven by AI. “Today’s changes are about better positioning Zillow for the path ahead, which includes having the right people in the right roles and being able to move faster,” a company spokesperson said.

The company didn’t disclose which teams were affected, how many of the cuts will hit its Seattle headquarters, or what severance employees will receive.

Zillow Group will report second-quarter earnings Wednesday afternoon. The company’s business has been growing, defying a sluggish housing market. Its first-quarter revenue rose 18% year-over-year to $708 million, while the residential real estate industry grew 2%, according to NAR. Net income climbed to $46 million from $8 million a year earlier.

Wacksman indicated Tuesday that the company is still bucking the trend: “We continue to outperform the category, despite a housing market that has been essentially flat,” he wrote.

However, the company has been spending nearly as fast as it has been growing, on rental listings, loan officers for Zillow Home Loans, advertising and legal bills. Execs told investors in May that the spending would ease up in the second half of the year. Cutting payroll is one way to make that happen, and Zillow’s earnings guidance tomorrow could reflect that.

As for those legal bills: Zillow is headed to trial later this month in an FTC antitrust case over the $100 million deal the company struck in early 2025 to become the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings on Redfin’s websites.

Zillow cut about 200 jobs in January, but characterized those as performance-related and part of its annual review cycle. It had 7,058 employees as of March 31, down just 10 positions from the end of 2025, meaning it had largely backfilled January’s cuts before Tuesday.

It’s part of a wave of cuts and consolidation in real estate portals and property tech. CoStar has cut its Homes.com inside-sales team by nearly 40% in recent months. Better founder Vishal Garg stepped down as CEO Monday as the mortgage company pushed to cut costs.

Rocket Companies acquired Seattle-based Redfin for $1.75 billion in an all-stock deal that closed in July 2025, then cut about 2% of its combined workforce weeks later. Longtime Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman departed in January after 20 years leading the company.

Along with its flagship Zillow portal, Zillow Group’s brands include Trulia, StreetEasy, HotPads and Out East, plus agent software products Follow Up Boss, ShowingTime and dotloop.

Updated after publication with additional details from Zillow.