Rocket vs Zillow: The battle for ‘super app’ supremacy

One of the biggest housing stories so far this year is Rocket’s pending acquisition of Redfin. That acquisition also kicked off a new battle between Rocket and Zillow over who will get to the consumer first — and serve them best — through a housing ‘super app.’

In a presentation for investors, Rocket outlined how its acquisition of Redfin will help the company create a more seamless and affordable way for consumers to transact real estate, showing how it will take consumers from the home search phase all the way through title and closing. 

If you’re wondering why this rings some bells, it’s because it’s more or less identical to Zillow’s “Housing Super App Strategy.”

As industry analyst Mike Delprete put it in a recent blog post, both firms are now  “in search of the holy grail of real estate: a one-stop shop that combines home search, buy & sell, financing, and title insurance.”

The dawn of the super app

Zillow began honing its Housing Super App strategy in early 2022 after announcing its departure from iBuying during its Q3 earnings call in November 2021. It began as a murky and vague concept, but Zillow’s goal to create an end-to-end home-buying platform that works with consumers from home search through close has become clearer over the years as the real estate industry giant has put more puzzle pieces into place.  

While many others have aimed for the same goal, so far, Zillow is the closest to creating this full digital integration. But Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin could change the game.

“Despite sharing the same vision, I think both companies are approaching this vision from opposite ends of the spectrum, leveraging where their existing moats are,” Ryan Tomasello, a managing director at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said. “Rocket obviously has the moat in mortgage and Zillow has the moat in search and agent referrals, so it is not surprising to see Rocket make a move to expand its presence on the other end of the spectrum in home search and with that agent network.”

John Campbell, an analyst at Stephens, shares a similar view. 

“Rocket’s capabilities in mortgage are more advanced than basically anybody, so Zillow has to continue to up its game in mortgage — offer more financing options, loan types, speed up the time to close, and possibly offer consumers rebates in certain areas. But Zillow has that recognizable consumer brand.”

Zillow’s advantage in user traffic

When it comes to engaging with consumers at the start of their homebuying journey, which is measured by listing portals in user traffic, there is no doubt that Zillow is king.

In 2023, Zillow had an average monthly unique visitor count of 214 million, compared to the traffic of Rocket’s home search platform, RocketHome, of 1.5million unique monthly visitors and the 49 million average monthly users recorded at Redfin. The same trend can be seen in 2024, with Zillow’s average monthly traffic coming in at 221 million visitors, while a combined Rocket and Redfin adds up to 58 million unique monthly visitors. 

“We believe that much of Zillow’s success was driven by its ability to better monetize its existing top of the funnel/website traffic, which is something Redfin is in part bringing to Rocket,” Campbell said. 

Rocket’s strength in mortgage

But when it comes to mortgage, Rocket has the clear advantage. As of Q1 2025, Zillow has just 330 loan officers, while Rocket and Redfin have told investors that they have a combined 15,000 loan officers and agents to serve contracts.

While Zillow may be behind when it comes to the scale of its mortgage company, it has been rapidly growing. Year-over-year, Zillow’s mortgage revenue growth jumped 51% in 2024 to $145 million. 

“The driver of Zillow’s recent improvements has really been mortgage,” Campbell said. “The revenue on a mortgage is actually far higher than what they generate when a Flex agent closes a sale. In some of the early integrated markets, the data shows that Zillow is really figuring this out — they’ve unlocked this cupboard for themselves. We believe that Zillow could be well on its way to becoming a top-20 originator.”

But Zillow isn’t the only one with work to do on the mortgage side of its business. Although it excels with refinance transactions, Rocket has struggled to generate the same volume of purchase loan transactions. Analysts, however, feel this acquisition will help with this.  

“This has been a strategic initiative for them for years now and this is going to expedite the process,” Campbell said. “On that front, this is a really smart deal because Redfin has a great mouse trap as far as higher traffic through its portal.”

Analysts aren’t the only ones eyeing the potential this acquisition creates for Rocket. In an investor presentation about the acquisition, Rocket noted that the acquisition could result in $200 billion-plus in addressable purchase originations per year or roughly one-in-six purchase mortgage originations — 16% of the purchase origination market.

In addition to its purchase origination volume struggles, Jay Voorhees, the co-founder of JVM Lending, notes that Rocket does not offer all of the mortgage loan products on the market, which may mean that unless this changes it will be unable to meet the purchase origination needs of all Redfin agents and consumers. 

“These products include many types of down payment assistance products, bridge loans, no ratio loans, no DSCR loans, no CRA (low-income area) loans, and no 3% down on PMI loans,” Voorhees wrote.

Who has the upper hand?

While analysts have no doubt that the companies are busy working on their respective “weaknesses,” there are ways in which they are evenly matched. 

“On the one hand, Zillow has roughly like a mid-single digit share of home sales and Rocket combined with Redfin, has a similar share of purchase originations, so they are essentially starting from very similar points, despite those points being in mortgage versus actual agent referrals,” Tomasello said. 

As the firms work to shore up their relative deficits, given how evenly matched they are on volume, some believe Rocket’s scale and balance sheet may give it the edge over Zillow. 

As of mid-March 2025, Zillow had a market capitalization of $16.73 billion, a little more than half of Rocket’s market capitalization of $28.33 billion. Additionally, Rocket and Redfin’s combined 2024 marketing budgets dwarfed Zillow’s, coming in at $913 million compared to $175 million. 

“I think the obvious benefit that Rocket has over Zillow is its scale and balance sheet — it is twice the size of Zillow in terms of market cap and earnings power,” Tomasello said. 

Additionally, Rocket’s track record of successfully executing its goals gives Larry Ulsh, a national account executive at American Heritage Lending, a lot of confidence that this endeavor will be no different. 

“It has the budget and scale to do this, so I’d put my money on them to build out something great,” Ulsh said. “Zillow seems to just be gluing disparate pieces together, but they do have a really recognizable and well-known brand and that is something that is very valuable and hard for other players to overcome. If Zillow and Rocket had teamed up, it would have been killer.”

Greater market impact

Tomasello also feels that the combination of Rocket and Redfin creates a “very formidable competitor” for Zillow, but he doesn’t believe it is a winner-take-all scenario.

“This is a very large market and more importantly a very fragmented market,” Tomasello said. “There is clearly room for multiple players to win here, so I don’t think this Rocket-Redfin development completely derails the opportunity for Zillow or anyone by any means.”

It is in sharing a similar belief that the market is big enough to accommodate multiple players, that Luca Dahlhausen, the CEO of Realfinity, believes more companies will be looking for ways to integrate mortgage services into their companies. 

“I think we are going to see more companies and more agents decide to start offering mortgage services,” Dahlhausen said. “If we see Rocket and Zillow having success with this, I think we will see even more players start thinking that they need to offer some sort of embedded mortgage or finance option because otherwise they may lose those buyers to another firm who is already doing those things.”

While Ulsh agrees with Dahlhausen’s hypothesis, he says that he has yet to see anyone really take the plunge into exploring this alongside Rocket and Zillow. 

“My biggest question in all of this is: where are the other large lenders? Why isn’t anyone else trying to do something like this?” Ulsh said. “I feel like they are all sitting around and waiting to see what happens with Rocket before they do something, but by then it will be too late.”

Although he is doubtful many other players are contemplating an acquisition as large as Rocket’s, he isn’t ruling out the possibility of seeing more mortgage and real estate joint ventures pop up. 

“I think this will probably encourage some mortgage bankers to go back to doing more joint ventures, especially now with the CFPB being pruned back,” he said.