From “Value Any Home”
to “Rentals. Homes. Agents. Loans.”

The June 2006 capture is Zillow’s beta, four months after launch. The capture renders mostly unstyled, so the page falls down the screen in plain blue links. The orange heading says Value Any Home. A box below it announces Bird's Eye View Images! NEW!: New 3D-like images let buyers examine homes at an angle. Three drawings near the bottom speak to buyers, sellers and owners, and the last one offers to Track the value of your most important asset.

The code holds a headline the still doesn’t show: Free, Instant Valuations and Data for 65,000,000+ Homes, and under it, in parentheses, (...and you don't have to enter any personal info and no one will contact you). The launch announcement in February had promised the same thing: free valuations on more than 40 million homes, no personal information needed.^[1]

Above the content sits an empty column with a single HTML comment in it: please don't crash. Zillow’s own history says the launch drew more than a million visitors in three days, ultimately overloading the servers and crashing the website.^[2] The comment is still in the code on New Year’s Day 2007.

The capture from January 1, 2007 is the first in our set with its design intact. A green headline says Discover, value, and sell 67,000,000+ homes, and under it ( ...free and on your own terms ). The tabs read Home, Map & Search, Post For Sale, Real Estate Wiki and My Zillow, and the What’s New box sells the wiki as A guide for you, by you. Above that line: It's free! Post a home for sale and Set a Make Me Move™ price on your home.

Make Me Move had launched on December 7, 2006, three and a half weeks earlier. Any owner could post the price that would get them to move, without showing any personal details, and buyers wrote to them through an e-mail anonymizer. Co-founder Lloyd Frink put it as a question: What number would it take for you to call the movers and hand over your keys?^[3]

The Extras list still has Enter our Holiday Lights Contest. A comment at the end of the code holds a server stamp, Sun Dec 31 17:43:11 PST 2006. It matches our capture to the second: the page was served at 5:43 in the evening on New Year’s Eve, Pacific time.

No 2008 capture we found kept its stylesheet, so the story jumps to February 2009. The logo has dropped its Beta tag, and the page is built around tabs for Homes, Mortgage, Advice, Directory and Local Info, plus More and My Zillow. Under the search box runs a row of counters, All Homes: 85,415,106, For Sale: 3,104,821, For Sale By Owner: 42,003, Make Me Move: 141,443 and Recently Sold: 2,619,248. In two years the Make Me Move count went from 8,221 to more than 141,000.

The page is also local. All three featured homes are in Germantown and Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the code tags the visit s.prop2="MD". The visitor that day was the archive’s crawler.

The What’s New box is gossip: Where's My Ziti? See TV homes of the Sopranos and Beverly Hillbillies, plus real residences such as Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion in our Famous Homes lineup. The More menu in the code lists a feature called Dueling Digs.

By October 2010 the first counter reads All Homes: 99,744,758, and a new one has joined the row: For Rent: 165,531. Zillow had added rental listings in December 2009.^[2] The still shows four counters. The code has six, and the two missing ones are the owners’ own: For Sale By Owner (11,118) and Make Me Move (150,146).

This capture is set in Minnesota. The listings are in Centerville and Hugo, the rates box is titled Minnesota 30yr Fixed Rates, and its Location menu is set to Minnesota. What’s New on Zillow features a celebrity again, Spelling's Amazing Mansion: The Spelling Manor is on the market for $150 million, making it the most expensive home for sale in the U.S.

The code also holds a Flash chart under Centerville Home Values, with a plug-in today’s browsers no longer run: This content requires Flash, Get Macromedia Flash Player. We hid its blank slot in the still.

In June 2011 the counters are gone. The page turns pale blue and splits in two, Find Homes on the left and Find Mortgage Rates on the right, with a phone advertising the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace iPhone App under the words Instant answers on the go! The logo has dropped its .com. All three featured homes are in San Francisco. The footer names a partnership: Yahoo!-Zillow Real Estate Network.

Phones are all over the code. Its menu lists Zillow apps for iPhone, Android, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. In April 2010 Steve Jobs had shown Zillow on the iPad at an Apple event.^[2]

The June 2012 page is almost empty. There is a bigger logo with Your Edge in Real Estate, one wide search bar that starts Find Homes:, three small house photos for San Francisco Homes For Sale and four phone logos over Take Zillow With You. Above them there are only the menu and the account links.

In June 2013 the homepage becomes a photograph. A wide photo of a house with a pool fills the top of the page, and a dark box in the middle says Find your home. over tabs for For Sale, For Rent, Foreclosures and Zestimate. The search box shows a Last Search, Denver, CO, and the menus in the code are all about Denver. The top bar adds a new item, Digs™, and its code lists the rooms: Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Gardens, Kitchens and Living Rooms.

Under the photo the page makes its case, Why shop for a home on Zillow? The answers are 1 million more listings, Browse hidden inventory and Zestimate® values on all homes. The hidden inventory is the 2006 idea again: homes not yet on the market, among them homes with a Make Me Move® Price, found only on Zillow, for free.

The June 2014 page keeps the layout with a brick house and a tree in pink bloom. The Foreclosures tab is now Pre-Market, the reasons get a subtitle, Here are 3 big reasons..., and the hidden inventory now includes Zillow’s Coming Soon listings. The menu code names Loomis, California.

The June 2015 hero puts the prices on the houses themselves. It is an aerial photo of a suburb with curving streets, and almost every roof carries a tag: $245K, $230K, $280K, $300K. Over it, in a blue panel, is a headline that lasts through our 2018 capture, Find your way home. The tabs read All Homes, For Sale and For Rent, and a bar at the bottom says Zillow Rentals, Be the first to find up-to-the-minute listings.

In the top left corner, where the logo should be, our still has only a blue square. The logo doesn’t render in our 2015 to 2018 stills. This time the menus in the code are all about Beverly Hills.

Local content in the captures

In February 2015 Zillow had closed its purchase of Trulia, $2.5 billion in stock, and formed Zillow Group with Trulia, StreetEasy and HotPads.^[4] In our captures the footer code first lists them in June 2017: Zillow Group® Brands: Trulia StreetEasy HotPads Naked Apartments RealEstate.com.

From 2016 to 2018 the homepage keeps Find your way home, with tabs for Buy, Rent, Sell and Zestimate, and stacks rows of listings under it. The rows show San Francisco homes. Our June 2016 capture lists 205 upcoming open houses in San Francisco, the most recently built, the least expensive and 36 waterfront homes, and its first open house is a $3,980,000 condo. A banner says Edit your home facts, because Updated home details factor into your Zestimate®.

The rows change with the years. June 2017 adds Great elementary schools, 814 homes in San Francisco near highly rated schools. September 2018 has Great middle schools and Video walkthroughs. Both pages put a lender banner, Be ready to buy, under the search.

The Sell menu in the code still lists Make me move in all three years. Zillow was testing a different offer. Instant Offers started in May 2017, and in April 2018 Zillow said it would buy and sell homes itself in Phoenix and Las Vegas.^[5]

In late 2016 Zillow also listed a house that doesn’t exist: Santa’s home at the North Pole, on a page built like a real listing. None of our homepage stills shows it, but the page itself was archived. The December 1, 2016 capture gives it Year built: 1822, and by February 2024 its Zestimate had gone up by more than $500,000.

The June 2019 homepage is the first in our set with the new look. The headline is set in a serif, Reimagine home, over a white house at dusk, and the tabs are gone, replaced by one search bar. The logo is new too, a flat blue Z next to a blue wordmark. Zillow introduced the identity in April 2019 and explained it in one line: The new Zillow logo was inspired by a signature, which is the culmination of every successful home transaction.^[8]

Below the photo the page says We have the most listings and constant updates. So you’ll never miss out. Three drawn cards follow. The middle one, Sell a home, begins Whether you sell with new Zillow Offers™ or take another approach. The Sell menu in the code has both offers side by side, Sell with Zillow Offers and Make me move: the price Zillow would pay, and the price an owner could name.

By June 2020 Make Me Move is gone from the menu. The Sell menu in the code now reads Sell with Zillow Offers, Find a seller's agent and Post For Sale by Owner. The headline, over a house with lit windows, is Home has never been more important, and the cards below it answer Have questions about buying, selling, or renting during COVID-19? One of them suggests Selling? Create a 3D Home tour.

The code carries a warning for one state that the still doesn’t show: In-person real estate transactions are currently restricted in Vermont. Further down the page, a link says Watch a message from Zillow.

Look at the logo. The Z is striped in rainbow colors, and a rainbow arcs over the drawn houses in the footer. The Z is rainbow-colored in our June 2021 capture too.

June 2021: Change starts here, over a family carrying boxes from a moving truck. A banner above the logo says Rates are near historic lows. The Sell a home card promises a cash offer through Zillow Offers®, and the menu in the code adds a bundle, Buy and sell with Zillow 360.

Five months later Zillow pulled back. On November 2, 2021 the company announced it would wind down Zillow Offers, its service for buying and selling homes itself. CEO Rich Barton said the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated. The results that day included an inventory write-down of about $304 million, and Zillow expected the wind-down to cut its workforce by about 25%.^[9]

A homepage capture made a few hours after the announcement, at 00:21 UTC on November 3 (still November 2 in the U.S.), has Sell with Zillow Offers in its menu.^[10] In our June 2022 capture the link is gone.

From June 2022 the headline is Find it. Tour it. Own it., first over two people sitting on a porch, then in June 2023 over the front steps of a blue house. The 2022 cards read Buy a home, Sell a home and Rent a home; in 2023 the first one becomes Finance a home. The 2023 page adds a sign-in box, Get home recommendations, Sign in for a more personalized experience.

The small print in the code keeps growing. Both pages say You have a right to fair housing. and link to New York’s fair housing protections. The footer lists New York’s Standard Operating Procedures, a Texas brokerage notice and a privacy link that reads Do Not Sell My Personal Information in 2022 and Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information in 2023. ShowingTime has joined the row of brands by our 2022 capture, and in 2023 it reads ShowingTime+.

There is no 2024 page in this story. Every 2024 capture we checked shows a bot check instead of the homepage, under the title Access to this page has been denied.

The June 2025 headline is a list: Agents. Tours. Loans. Homes. The words are bold and white over a photo of three people at a garden gate, and the logo has changed again. The Z keeps its blue, and the wordmark next to it is now black. Under the photo come a card of recommended homes and Find homes you can afford with BuyAbility℠.

In February 2026 the hero photo, the recommendations card and the Buy, Sell and Rent cards repeat, and the four words are shuffled: Rentals. Homes. Agents. Loans. Tours are out, rentals are in, and homes move up from last to second. A note lower down explains the recommendations. They are based on your location and search activity, such as the homes you've viewed and saved and the filters you've used.

Twenty years apart, both ends of this story start with a search form. In June 2006 it sat under Value Any Home, and the code promised no one will contact you. In February 2026 it asks for an address, neighborhood, city, or ZIP code under four words, and the page remembers the homes you viewed and saved. Make Me Move, the price an owner could name, left the menu between our 2019 and 2020 captures. Zillow Offers, the price Zillow would pay, left between 2021 and 2022.