Zillow Group and Redfin have settled the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case over their rental listings partnership, filing a stipulated final order on Aug. 24 — the same morning a bench trial was scheduled to open in Alexandria, Va. The deal leaves the two companies’ syndication arrangement standing but forces Redfin back into the apartment advertising market it left behind after taking $100 million from Zillow.
The settlement ends an 11-month fight over what the FTC called an illegal agreement to dismantle Redfin as a competitor. It also spares both companies a trial whose outcome would have set the first modern precedent on competition among the websites where most American renters begin their search.
What the Zillow Redfin FTC settlement requires
The core of the order is a deadline. Redfin must restart its internet listing service rental advertising business within six months, according to the FTC’s announcement of the order. That means building the technology to sell and display listing ads, hiring a general manager, a sales force and a customer support team, and spending on promotion to win business back.
Redfin has committed to invest millions of dollars in rebuilding the operation and faces monetary penalties if it misses the prescribed timeframes. The agency said Redfin will relaunch with significantly more listings than it carried before the 2025 agreement, and has given a multiyear operating commitment.
The order also strips out the contract terms the government targeted. Provisions that barred Redfin from selling advertising independently, limited which customers’ listings it could display, and required the sharing of confidential business information are eliminated.
Two remedies address the practical problem of restarting a business that was deliberately wound down. Zillow must hand over contact information for employees who can be recruited back, waive noncompete and anti-poaching agreements covering them, and stay out of Redfin’s way while it hires. And for nine months, Zillow customers on multi-month advertising contracts may renegotiate without penalty — Zillow has to tell them so, and cannot block them from moving to Redfin.
The order runs 10 years. Zillow must notify the FTC before entering any new syndication agreement for multifamily properties, and both companies owe the agency regular compliance updates. The Commission approved the stipulated order on a 2-0 vote.
How the case got here
The FTC sued on Sept. 30, 2025, alleging that a February 2025 agreement between the two companies violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act and Section 7 of the Clayton Act. Under that deal, Zillow paid Redfin $100 million; Redfin exited the business of selling rental advertising to apartment operators, became a syndicator of Zillow’s listings, and cut hundreds of jobs.
The Commonwealth of Virginia and the states of Arizona, Connecticut, New York and Washington filed a parallel complaint the next day, and the cases were consolidated in December. As RealtyWire reported ahead of the trial date, the court had denied a motion to dismiss in May and denied the FTC’s motion for partial summary judgment in July, sending the dispute to a bench trial before Judge Anthony J. Trenga.
“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.”
Guarnera argued the negotiated outcome beat the alternative. The settlement “delivers better, quicker, more certain results for both renters and property management companies than we would have been able to achieve after prevailing at trial,” he said, “including firm and enforceable commitments by Redfin to relaunch its rentals advertising business.”
Zillow keeps the partnership
Zillow’s own account, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to a current report, frames the outcome as a validation of the arrangement rather than a retreat from it. The syndication partnership continues across Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, Rent.com, ApartmentGuide and Redfin.
“This resolution is a win for renters and multifamily housing providers,” said Michael Sherman, general manager and senior vice president of Zillow Rentals, in the statement filed with the SEC. The company said the partnership expands access for renters while reducing friction for housing providers.
Zillow credited the arrangement with nearly quadrupling the number of multifamily properties on Redfin’s sites and growing its own multifamily listing count by roughly 40%. Properties that had previously advertised on a single platform generated more leads, the company said, and customer acquisition costs fell. Those are Zillow’s characterizations of its own results, not independently verified figures.
The company also disclosed that in 2027, Zillow and Redfin will each offer standalone multifamily advertising products alongside the existing partnership — the commercial expression of the competition the FTC order is designed to restore.
What it means
Verified: the restrictive terms are gone, Redfin is under an enforceable clock to re-enter, and the syndication relationship survives.
RealtyWire analysis: the settlement’s design is unusual in that it does not simply prohibit conduct — it obligates a company to compete, with penalties for moving too slowly. That is a harder thing to supervise than a ban, and the six-month, nine-month and 10-year clocks in the order are what will determine whether apartment operators actually get a second bidder for their advertising dollars. The near-term test is straightforward: whether Redfin has a sales team, a product and paying customers by late February.
The litigation has already been expensive. Zillow disclosed $26 million in FTC litigation costs in the second quarter alone, a period in which it also cut more than 500 jobs and reported rentals revenue up 31% on the strength of the multifamily business now at the center of the order.
What to watch: Redfin’s hiring and product announcements over the next two quarters, whether apartment operators use the nine-month contract escape hatch, and the FTC’s first compliance reports.
