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.
Some Americans worry that the Federal Trade Commission's rush to limit personalized pricing in the name of consumer protection could end up killing discounts they depend on or, counterintuitively, raising prices.
The FTC has no power to ban personalized pricing, in which a business uses a customer’s personal data to determine the highest price that person might be willing to pay for a product or service. But the agency believes it could set limits on the practice, including potential penalties for businesses that fail to disclose when customers may be paying more because data suggests they won't balk at the price.
In a request for public comment on a proposed policy statement, the FTC acknowledged that personalized pricing is common in some industries. But FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said new industries are increasingly tracking customers to set individualized prices, blindsiding consumers who expect a listed price in markets like retail “to be the same price that everyone else sees,” Ferguson said.
A sale price at a Seattle grocery store. A proposed city ordinance would bar grocers from setting different prices for individual shoppers based on their personal data. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Seattle is in the final stages of becoming the first city in the country to ban so-called “surveillance pricing” in grocery stores. Experts disagree about whether it will actually save consumers money.
The proposed Fair Pricing and Transparency Ordinance would ban grocers from setting variable prices for individual consumers based on their personal data, both in-store and online.
This was one of Mayor Katie Wilson’s biggest campaign promises, and it comes after Maryland, Connecticut, and New Jersey passed the first state-level surveillance pricing regulations this spring. The City Council will hold a public meeting this Friday, Aug. 21, to hear amendments to the proposed ordinance.
The bill has received fierce criticism from tech and grocery industry representatives who say the ordinance would prohibit personalized discounts that benefit customers.
A City Council Central Staff Memo, which was first circulated last Thursday and will be presented at Friday’s meeting, raises some of those same concerns. Despite opposition from one councilmember and requests for major amendments from another, the bill seems well on its way to getting the requisite votes.
Impact on consumers
At the heart of the controversy is a disagreement about whether personalized pricing harms or benefits consumers.
The use of algorithmic pricing by Instacart last December met with so much backlash that the platform stopped using it. A 2025 Consumer Reports investigation had found that Instacart varied the total cost of the same cart at a Seattle-area Safeway by roughly $10, with only 8% of shoppers getting the lowest price. Those were randomized experiments to test price sensitivity rather than prices set from individual profiles, and Instacart stopped offering the technology behind them in December after the investigation was published.
In brick-and-mortar stores, electronic shelf labels have not yet been shown to offer individualized list prices. Instead, grocers such as Krogers and Albertsons personalize the effective price through the distribution of individualized digital coupons to loyalty club members.
The federal government is moving to regulate those. The FTC on Wednesday proposed an enforcement policy that would treat undisclosed personalized pricing, including discounts, as a violation of federal law, and opened it for public comment.
Amanda Dalton, who represents the Northwest Grocery Retail Association, said personalized discounts make groceries cheaper overall. Her organization was involved in drafting the bill but ultimately testified against it out of concern that it would prohibit those deals.
“We support what the council is trying to do as it relates to using personal information to drive higher prices,” Dalton told GeekWire. “Where we diverge is the need and ability to continue what we call pro-consumer common practices that are happening in grocery stores every day, like discount programs, coupons, fuel rewards, student discounts, and volume based deals.”
Contrary to messaging from some industry advocates, the current bill does allow some discounts. Loyalty programs, volume-based discounts, third-party manufacturer coupons, and discounts based on a broad identity, such as students or seniors, are all explicitly permitted.
Industry groups predict, however, that the liability exposure will make it too risky for stores to continue to offer those deals.
“There will be hoops that companies need to jump through to deliver those discounts, and a lot of legal exposure to liability,” Drew Ambrogi, a policy manager at Chamber of Progress, said.
As a solution, industry groups including Chamber of Progress, TechNet, and NWGRA have suggested that the bill be amended so that algorithmic pricing is prohibited for raising prices but is permitted for lowering them.
Advocates on the other side worry that would gut the bill entirely.
“That creates an incentive for retailers to inflate the list price and offer personalized discounts to each person based on their individual willingness to pay,” said Grace Gedye, a policy analyst for Consumer Reports.
UFCW 3000, which represents workers at major grocery chains, has also endorsed the bill, opposing individualized pricing regardless of whether it raises or lowers prices.
“It’s easy to figure out when your neighbors are getting a different price,” said union member J’Nee DeLancey, who works at Ballard Town and Country. “We grocery workers will have to handle the fallout of angry, confused customers.”
Loyalty programs
One Kroger and Albertsons-funded group called Protect Seattle Savings has claimed, online and in mass text blasts to Seattleites, that the proposed ordinance “puts your loyalty rewards program on the chopping block” — a claim that is not backed up by the bill itself.
In fact, the bill does exactly the opposite: it includes a carve-out for loyalty programs that allows retailers to use a customer’s purchase history to determine pricing so long as that customer has opted into a loyalty program and the criteria for the discount are disclosed.
That exception has drawn criticism from the NWGRA, which warns it may unintentionally penalize consumers who can’t afford to join the loyalty program. On DoorDash, for example, users have to pay $10 a month to be a “DashPass” loyalty rewards member. If DoorDash is only allowed to offer discounts to those members, then the bill may unintentionally make orders more affordable only for customers who can afford the membership fee.
NWGRA is calling on the city to expand the carve-out so that a retailer can offer purchase history-based discounts to non-loyalty members as well. The Central Staff Memo circulated last week highlighted the push from industry to preserve the use of purchase history for all customers, but wrote that it is “difficult to ascertain whether the limitations on personalized discounts would result in a net cost increase for consumers,” since consumer data could be used to raise prices as well as lower them.
Input from industry
Supporters of the regulation say they’ve already made significant compromises with industry. Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who sponsored the bill, initially planned to ban electronic shelf labels, as New Jersey did, but dropped the provision after grocery workers said the new labels made their jobs easier. Now, the Seattle bill simply prohibits a store from using electronic shelf labels to display a price that has been determined using algorithmic pricing.
Another compromise was the narrowing of the regulation to exempt small grocers and convenience stores. The bill will apply only to grocers with 20 or more retail locations globally, as well as mixed-use retailers that sell groceries, like Costco; and delivery services, like Instacart and DoorDash.
Councilmember Rinck said the bill is the product of engagement with retailers, and that she hopes to keep them on board.
“We were at the table with grocers, and the proposal changed in response to their business concerns,” Rinck said. “We will be watching what folks in industry have to say about the legislation and amendments this Friday.”
Private right of action
The last major sticking point is the proposed enforcement mechanism, which industry representatives criticize for being overly aggressive.
The bill splits enforcement between the City Attorney’s Office and consumers. Both avenues allow civil penalties of up to $3,000 for a first violation and $10,000 for subsequent offenses, plus damages. The private right of action can only be pursued against stores with 25 or more locations instate, and civil penalties for a single collective action are capped at $1 million.
“The private right of action will have a chilling effect on the offering of discounts altogether,” Ambrogi said. “What is not explicitly banned by the bill may be presumptively banned because a business’s compliance department doesn’t think it’s worth exposing them to ambiguity.”
Dalton also opposes the private right of action for being too broad. Customers can seek damages for being offered an individual price, even if they did not buy the product in question.
“Our argument has been for clarity and simplicity,” Dalton said. “Now you’ve got a $1 million class action threat on every single product in your grocery cart.”
Consumer advocacy groups say the expansive private right of action is what gives the bill teeth, pointing to the similar clause in New Jersey’s surveillance pricing ban.
“If it was only public enforcement, there are practical limits on how frequent enforcement could be,” Gedye said. “Compliance might not be as rigorous as it would be if any consumer who thinks they’ve really been harmed by this practice can start looking into it and potentially initiate a case.”
City Attorney enforcement
The Central Staff Memo warned that the City Attorney’s Office may not be up for enforcing this law, either. Stores will be required to retain records on prices and discounts for three years. The bill charges the CAO with the task of auditing stores and ensuring compliance with the record keeping requirements.
Unlike the law that passed last year regulating algorithmic rent-fixing in Seattle, this bill does not enlist a city agency to help the CAO with enforcement. The regulation also applies to a far larger potential pool of complainants, and it does not arrange for additional funding in its fiscal note.
“The CAO may have to develop new systems and procedures to handle intakes directly and may not have capacity to conduct thorough investigations that would involve analyzing large volumes of data,” the memo said.
In response, a CAO spokesperson told GeekWire their office does not share the memo’s concerns and is in “full support” of the proposed ordinance.
“The City expects that grocery retailers will voluntarily comply with the legislation once it’s adopted, which includes a 1-year phase-in while the City will inform and educate retailers about the bill’s provisions,” a CAO spokesperson told GeekWire. “We anticipate the expected level of work can be managed using existing resources and funds recovered through litigation.”
The council will vote on the bill in September after they return from recess. But first, Friday’s committee meeting will reveal which councilmembers are in support of the legislation and what kinds of amendments will be considered.
Councilmember Rinck said she “feels good” about getting the bill passed, and looks forward to making Seattle the first city to regulate algorithmic pricing on groceries.
“Government gets a bad rap for being reactive,” Rinck said. “This is an opportunity for us to be proactive in trying to regulate this kind of practice before it really takes hold in our city.”
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