• by Tanya Gazdik , March 19, 2026

Zillow announced it will no longer ban home sellers and their real estate professionals for marketing a listing on the Compass family of websites or Redfin.com before marketing on Zillow. 

Because of this reversal, Compass is dropping its lawsuit against Zillow.

“Our goal has always been to give homeowners more choice to decide when, where, and how to market their homes,” Robert Reffkin, chairman and CEO of Compass, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “We are pleased to see that both other brokerages and portals are now recognizing the strong consumer demand for more options in how they sell their homes.”

Zillow said in a statement that while it welcomed Compass' decision to voluntarily withdraw its lawsuit, the claim lacked merit, and the court's preliminary injunction ruling reinforced that view.

”The underlying issue remains: Private listing networks are not in the best interests of consumers, and they never have been,” reads the statement, according to Real Estate News. “Restricting listings to hidden networks limits transparency, disadvantages buyers and sellers and undermines fair access to real estate information which is so critical in this housing affordability crisis.”

The legal clash, dating back almost a year, according to Marketing Daily, centered on how home listings can be marketed online.

“A growing number of real estate agents, the search site said, were gatekeeping available homes rather than sharing them widely with brokerages and search portals,” according to Business Insider. “Agents were trading homes in clubby ‘private listing networks,’ advertising them solely on their own brokerage's website, or tucking them away in internal databases that could only be unlocked by contacting certain agents.”

Compass sued Zillow in federal court over the new rules, painting the "Zillow Ban" as an existential threat to its business.

“For the past few years, Compass — now the largest real estate brokerage in the world — has encouraged agents to use ‘coming soon’ listings as part of its three-phase marketing strategy,’ according to CNN Business. “Pre-market listings show homes advertised privately or on limited platforms before appearing more widely on home listing sites like Zillow or Redfin.”

Critics say such listings can obscure how long a home has truly been on sale and limit who sees it, while brokerages argue it gives sellers more control over how their homes are marketed.