Zillow and Redfin settle FTC antitrust case over rental-listing deal

Zillow and Redfin have reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and five states, ending a legal fight over a 2025 partnership the FTC claimed hurt competition in the rental-listing market. The settlement was announced Monday, just as the case was scheduled to head to trial that morning. The case stemmed from a deal announced last year in which Redfin agreed to display Zillow’s rental listings on its own sites rather than compete directly with Zillow for rental advertisers — an arrangement that could have kept Redfin out of the rental-advertising business for as long as nine years. Redfin owns Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com, two major rental-listing platforms.

According to the FTC and attorneys general from Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Washington, Zillow agreed to pay Redfin $100 million to keep it from competing with Zillow. The companies defended the partnership as a way to give renters access to a larger pool of listings, but the FTC argued Zillow was paying one of its largest competitors to stop competing, which could have let Zillow charge higher prices and offer less favorable terms to property managers, and could have reduced the quality of rental listings available to consumers.

Under the proposed settlement, Redfin must reenter the rental-advertising business, and the order removes restrictions that previously limited its ability to compete independently for property-management customers. The relationship between the two companies doesn’t end entirely: Redfin can keep displaying Zillow’s rental listings, but it will again be able to compete for its own customers, sell advertising, display listings from its own clients, and pursue new rental customers without being required to share sensitive business information with Zillow. The case comes just months after the Department of Justice’s settlement with Ticketmaster over similar allegations that a dominant company suppressed competition — though 26 of the 30 state attorneys general who initially sued Live Nation alongside the DOJ chose to keep pursuing that case and won in April.

Why it matters

The settlement shows regulators are willing to unwind pay-to-not-compete arrangements between major platforms even after a deal has been running for a year, a signal to other companies weighing similar partnerships that structure alone won’t shield them from an antitrust challenge.