AUGUST 2025 – For months now the news site BusinessInsider.com has been covering the emerging dispute over online real estate listings: At the center of it is a lawsuit by fast-growing Compass Realtor against Zillow in which Compass wants to keep control of information on its real estate listings. On the other side is Zillow, which, like Realtor.com, has for years pushed for more disclosure about property histories, among other key data.. That full-disclosure approach has built widespread trust among all users of their sites, and as a result site traffic has exploded.
Last week BI senior real estate reporter James Rodriguez wrote a trenchant piece pointing out that Europe’s real estate sites are notoriously unreliable and incomplete – largely because local listing agents don’t want to advertise their best listings. The huge quality gap between US real estate sites and European ones is something more and more Americans are learning about as they search for homes overseas. And, given the current legal dispute, there’s a good chance, Rodriguez writes, that American listing sites may become just as incomplete and unreliable as Europe’s. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but it still wins a Rosebud.
https://www.businessinsider.com/author/james-rodriguez