Google Doesn't Need Zillow Anymore. How AI Is About to Change Real Estate Forever

Is Google about to change real estate forever?

For years, Zillow, Realtor.com, Homes.com, and brokerage websites have dominated the home search experience. But what happens when Google stops being a search engine and starts becoming an AI-powered real estate advisor?

In this episode, we explore one of the biggest "what if" scenarios in real estate: What if Google bought Zillow? More importantly, does Google even need Zillow anymore?

We dive into Google's AI platform NotebookLM, how artificial intelligence is transforming online search, and why many experts believe the future of the internet is moving from "search results" to direct answers. If buyers can simply ask AI where to live, what house to buy, which neighborhood fits their lifestyle, and which agent to hire, what happens to Zillow, Realtor.com, brokerages, and traditional lead generation?

In this episode we discuss:

• What Google NotebookLM is and why it matters
• How AI is changing the future of search
• Why Google may be entering the real estate business
• Whether Google could realistically acquire Zillow
• How a Google-Zillow combination would impact agents and brokerages
• What happens to Realtor.com, Homes.com, and other portals
• The future of lead generation and online marketing
• Whether federal regulators would block a Google-Zillow merger on antitrust grounds
• Why the biggest threat may not be AI replacing agents—but AI replacing portals

Whether you're a real estate agent, broker, lender, investor, or simply curious about the future of technology and housing, this conversation will help you understand where the industry may be headed next.

What do you think? Will Google eventually become the dominant platform in real estate? Let us know in the comments.

Don't forget to like us and share us!
Gary

* Gary serves on the South Carolina Real Estate Commission as a Commissioner. The opinions expressed herein are his opinions and are not necessarily the opinions of the SC Real Estate Commission. This podcast is not to be considered legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your area.    

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Imagine you're relocating from Myrtle Beach to Columbia. But instead of opening up Zillow or Realtor.com or homes.com or going to some Facebook group or school websites to do research, playing with mortgage calculators and watching a bunch of YouTube videos, you simply open Google and you type this. I'm moving to Columbia, South Carolina from Myrtle Beach. I have a budget of $450,000. I work downtown Columbia. My wife is a nurse at the hospital. We have two kids and we want highly rated schools. What neighborhoods should I consider to buy? Instead of getting your typical Google search results, which are a bunch of links, usually to real estate agents who've paid or done what they could to get higher ranked based on SEO. Google responds this way: based on your criteria, you should consider Lexington, Chapin, and Northeast Columbia. Here are 15 houses that fit your requirements. Your average commute time would be 18 minutes. Your school ratings are attached. Here are the local property tax estimates. And here are three recommended real estate agents with verified transaction histories. Here are the pros and cons of each neighborhood, each house, and each real estate agent. So then you ask, which home has the best resale value? And it gives you an answer. And then you ask, well, which of these houses is likely to have a foundation issue based on its age and its construction type? And Google answers. So then you ask, well, can you summarize every disclosure document for these homes you can find on the multiple listing services and everywhere? And it gives you the answer. And you ask, well, can you create a moving checklist? You get the answer. You ask, do you have comparable insurance costs? And it gives you the answer. And it goes on and on and on. As the saying goes, guys, this isn't your daddy's Google anymore. At what point are you no longer using Google as a search engine? Google is effectively now acting as a real estate portal based on artificial intelligence. And if that's already happening today, should Google continue to try to build this and dominate the market and perhaps overtake Zillow, or should it just go ahead and buy Zillow? Because buying Zillow would certainly be the fastest way to dominate the entire home buying process and experience. But at what cost would that be to the consumer? And what cost would that be to the real estate agent? And would the federal government even allow such a massive merger? I'm going to be discussing this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of Dish and Dirt.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

This is Dish and Dirt with Gary Pickering, South Carolina's only podcast dedicated to the real estate agent craft. And now the host of Dish and Dirt, Gary Pickering.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

And Greens, and welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Dish and Dirt. I'm your often opinionated but rarely wrong host, Gary Pickering, coming to you from the beautiful downtown Columbia, South Carolina offices of Blair Cato Pickering Castellan, this, the last week of June 2026. So that brings us to the midway point of 2026. I hope you all have had a great first half of the year and ready to rock and roll for the rest of this year. 26 is already shaping up to be a great year, so let's finish it out on a strong note. Today, what we're going to do is talk about a question that sounds like it should come out of Silicon Valley boardrooms, but may actually tell us about the future of real estate and where it's headed. Because what would happen if Google bought Zillow? Would the government even allow that? Would real estate agents possibly survive something so massive? Would real estate brokerages just become irrelevant at that point? What would happen to homes.com, realtor.com, and every other portal? And would they be forced into this battle with Google? There's no way they could win. But perhaps the most important question in all of this was does Google even need to buy Zillow anymore? Because if you've been paying any attention to what Google's doing in its recent moves, particularly with artificial intelligence and this new product it has called Notebook LM, I think you probably already realized something that most people in the real estate industry haven't fully grasped yet. Google isn't trying to help people search for information anymore. They're now trying to help people make decisions. And if Google becomes the world's most trusted decision-making platform, then real estate becomes one of the most valuable industries they could ever enter into. Today, what we're going to explore is what Notebook LM is, why it matters to the real estate industry, whether Google is already fully invested in the real estate business world, what a Google Zillow merger would look like, how it would affect agents, portals, brokerages, consumers, and whether antitrust regulators and legislators would even allow it to happen, or is it even necessary now? Could Google just knock Zillow completely out of the business? People like Mike Delprati and Brian Stevens, they've already been talking about this, about the possibility of Google competing with Zillow. Bam news, the Wall Street Journals have even analyzed it. And I'll have to admit, it seemed rather far-fetched just months ago, but really I don't think it is anymore. So let's dive into this question. Let me ask you this question. As a consumer, in our earlier scenario, at what point in that search process did the consumer feel the need to leave the Google platform and go to Zillow? The answer is they they probably didn't. They got the 15 houses in the neighborhoods they needed with their three agent recommendations. They've narrowed their search to help them make a decision. At what point did the consumer need to leave Google to go to realtor.com? Again, they probably did not need to. And at what point did the consumer need to go to a brokerage website? Frankly, I don't see there's any need to ever go to a brokerage website anymore. You're only looking at that brokerage's limited listings where you can go to Zillow or Holmes.com and see every listings, or you can use AI and limit those listings to what exactly you're looking for. And I think that's why a lot of these brokerages are getting into the portal war. They realize that their brokerage page is becoming an equate and obsolete. But most important, at what point did the consumer ever need to leave Google in the scenario? And that's where our conversation starts. Now let me give you some very startling statistics that come from Now BAM, which is a real estate editorial page that I follow on Instagram. According to Now BAM, 53% of buyers say they would purchase a house with no human help. That means a majority of people who responded are willing to buy a house without having a single human being involved, no real estate agent involved whatsoever. I think that number is very inflated. I think when it actually comes down to it and people trying it, they would realize it does not work. They need help from a real human. But the fact is that 53% of people say they were willing to try to buy a house with no human help whatsoever. 89% said that they would share personal financial data with AI for mortgage advice. That is utterly insane. Putting your personal information in AI, hoping that it doesn't use that information and provide that information to other parties. That's crazy. And 68% say they somewhat or totally trust mortgage information, AI-based tools. Again, I think people are going way overboard in the amount of trust that they have in these programs. Now, according to realtor.com, 82% of active buyers and active sellers say they're already using AI for housing insight. And I'm sure that number scares a lot of people, but I would say that number is probably 100% when it comes to using the internet. And I'm old enough to remember when the internet came out, Al Gore invented the internet, said he did, didn't really do so, but claimed he did. But when he said that, everybody freaked out and said, well, if we got the internet, we won't need real estate agents because everybody can just look up the information online. Well, the internet turned out to be the greatest thing to ever happen to real estate agents. It did not end real estate agents. So the 82% number doesn't necessarily scare me because I expect 100% of people are already looking on the internet. And with AI what it is today, I would expect that number to be at least 75% or more. That's not meaning that they're bypassing real estate agents and not using real estate agents. It just means they're getting better educated amongst themselves before they even hire a real estate agent. That could be good. There are some concerns about that, let's be honest, but that could be good just like when the internet was invented. When asked what made them smarter about the housing market, real estate agents had a ranking of 62%, but AI had a ranking of 61%. So right now, the public says that real estate agents and AI are about equal in making people feel smarter about the housing market. I'm telling you this not to frighten you out of the business, but to try to alert you as to what's to come. Whether we like it or not, these changes are coming. We need to prepare for these changes, which brings us to Notebook LM. Most real estate professionals probably have never heard the name Notebook LM. I had not heard it until I started researching for this show. Very few actually understand what it actually does. Notebook LM is a Google AI research assistant. But calling it a research assistant doesn't fully capture what's happening and what it fully does. I want you to think of it this way: Chat GPT is trained on the internet. Notebook LM, on the other hand, is trained on whatever information you give it. You upload documents, you upload reports, you upload websites, you upload videos, and Notebook LM becomes an expert on those specific sources. It's almost like hiring a research assistant at a college, like University of South Carolina, and they can read thousands of pages for you. But this is different because they can read them in minutes, seconds. You could upload MLS reports, HOA documents, property disclosures, inspection reports, neighborhood guides, school information, market statistics, builder information, mortgage documents. And then imagine asking this what are my biggest risks with this property? How does the HOA allow things and not allow certain things to happen on the property? Summarize this inspection report. Give me the comparables to the five neighborhoods surrounding this property. Explain these closing documents in simple terms. Notebook LM can do that and a whole lot more. And it gets better every single day it's used. Now think about this from Google's perspective. What happens when you combine Notebook LM with a Google search, with Maps, with YouTube, with Gmail, with Gemini, with Android, and with every other Google product known to mankind? Suddenly we're not talking about a search engine. We're now talking about an AI-powered life advisor. Whether Google and Zillow merge or simply try to destroy each other, something massive is going to be happening with Google and how it's going to be used in real estate. And we have to address that first because this may be the single biggest technology story in real estate since Zillow launched in 2006. Most agents think the threat is AI replacing agents. I don't think AI is replacing agent. I think the biggest disruption is that AI is replacing searches. And almost nobody in real estate is talking about those implications. Let's talk about the old internet. The past 25 years, Google has operated on a very simple model. You ask it a question, it gives you links. Doesn't give you answers, it gives you links. And that's a very important thing to understand. You visit the website, you determine the answer. The website monetizes your attention. The more clicks, the more money they make from advertisers. For example, a buyer might type best neighborhoods in Columbia, South Carolina. Google's going to provide a link to Zillow, probably, Realtor.com, some local blogs, some brokerage websites, maybe some YouTube videos. The consumer then clicks through multiple sites and pieces together an answer for themselves. The website gets traffic, the traffic becomes leads, leads become revenue, and that's how Zillow became Zillow and became worth billions. This is how brokerage websites generated business as well. This is how real estate blogs worked. This is how SEO became an industry. It's an industry that's now going away. So let's talk about the new internet. AI changes the model completely. Instead of asking a question and getting a link, AI, the future is ask a question, get an answer. The consumer never leaves that platform. For example, a buyer asks a question very similar to the question I posed at the beginning today. What is the best neighborhood in Columbia for a family with two children, a $500,000 budget, and a downtown commute? Instead of getting 10 links from Google, AI is going to provide a complete answer. The consumer is probably not going to then have to be directed to Zillow. They may never visit a brokerage website. They may never even go to realtor.com. The answer is going to come directly from Google. And that is the fundamental shift because it's all controlled by Google, the search engine. This probably matters a lot more than most agents even realize. Because today, most real estate marketing is based on capturing attention. Real estate agents spend a tremendous amount of effort, time, and money creating blogs, videos, SEO content, neighborhood pages, market reports, and so forth. And historically, the goal was just to get found on Google or on YouTube. But what happens when Google reads your content and now gives an answer itself instead of directing them to your link? The consumer still gets the information, but you don't get the link visit. You don't get the client. That's a massive change, and it's already happening today. It's just happening right now on chat or Claude or Gemini, but now it could happen on a search engine. And it already is. When you search on Google, you get an AI response as well as a link response. Soon it could be just the AI response and no longer the link. What is Google's end game? Most people think that Google is a search company. Google is not seeing itself that way anymore. Google wants to become the answer company. And even more specifically, Google wants to become a decision-making company. Think about the major decisions in life: where to live, where to buy a home, what schools to choose, colleges to go to, what car to buy, what doctor to see, what attorney to hire. Which attorney to hire? These are all decisions that AI wants to help in making those decisions by becoming your advisor. The company that becomes the trusted advisor becomes very powerful, incredibly powerful. And real estate sits right in the middle of one of the largest financial decisions most people ever make in their lifetime. So let's compare today's buyer journey versus tomorrow. Today's buyer journey searches Google, they visit Zillow, they go to realtor.com, they go on YouTube, they do a bunch of school research, they maybe check some crime maps, they look at local tax records, they research your neighborhoods, they contact agents, and they piece everything together. But tomorrow's buyer is gonna say, find me the best home for my family. And AI is gonna analyze everything by listings, schools, commute times, taxes, your crime stats, your walkability, your appreciation trends, your flood maps, your insurance choices, your HOA restrictions, and they're gonna present a total recommendation in just seconds. Not search results, but actual recommendations based on reason. And that's completely a different experience now for most of our consumers. So what happens to Zillow? Well, this is where this whole thing gets very fascinating. Historically, Zillow benefited from Google. Google sent traffic to Zillow, but if Google starts answering questions directly, Zillow becomes dependent on Google in a way that it never has been before. Think about it. If Google tells the consumer, based on your criteria, here are the five best houses, why would the consumer click through to Zillow? AI's already answered the question. This is why I think Google may become Zillow's biggest competitor, and it doesn't necessarily want to or need to buy Zillow and take on all the headaches that they're gonna get from the federal government when they try to do so. But let's suppose for a second they could do so. What happens to the real estate agents? Well, those are winners and there's some losers. And the losers are gonna be agents whose business model depends on information. Years ago, the agents controlled the information, but the MLS democracized that information and Zillow democratized it even more. Now AI is gonna organize that information so the information alone becomes less valuable. It's about the data and how that data is being used. The winners are gonna be the agents who can provide interpretation of that data, who can provide judgment, who can provide negotiations, who can provide trust. The future agent isn't an information source. The future agent is a strategic advisor. I've been saying this for many years, guys. This is nothing new. What separates real estate agents and why we need real estate agents is the ability to advise, counsel, and advocate for their clients. Without those, what do you have to offer? So what's going to happen to our lead generations, our portals? Well, this could be the biggest disruption because today a buyer searches homes for sale in Lexington, South Carolina. Tomorrow they may be asking who is the best agent in Lexington for luxury homes under a million dollars? Now think about that. The lead isn't generated by Zillow, the lead isn't generated by Realtor.com, the lead is being generated by AI. Whoever controls that AI recommendations controls the leaf flow. That's an extraordinary amount of power that Google could have here. So the question for you is you ever searched AI to see what it has to say about you? I've asked it about Blair Cato, and what chat has to say about Blair Cato is if you're asking specifically which firms many South Carolina realtors would put at or near the top for residential, closing volume, agent relationships, education, statewide presence, and brand recognition, Blair Cato is frequently mentioned in that conversation. The firm has built a particularly strong reputation with real estate agents through education, industry involvement, and high transaction volume. Okay, I like that. But if you searched yourself or asked that question, who is the best real estate agent in Columbia? Who's the best real estate agent in Myrtle Beach? Who's the best real estate agent in Charleston? Is your name going to show up on that list? If it doesn't, you may have a problem. Well, how about brokerage marketing? Well, brokerages have traditionally invested in SEO, websites, blogging, and neighborhood pages, and those tactics don't disappear, but they become less important than authority does. Google AI increasingly evaluates expertise, reputation, reviews, authority, and trustworthiness. And that means the future winners will likely be firms that are recognized as experts rather than firms that simply rank well on SEO. Let's talk about the real threat to real estate. Most agents are worried that AI will replace agents. I think they're worried about the wrong thing. The bigger disruption is that AI may replace the websites that currently connect consumers to agents. The battle isn't going to be AI versus agents. The battle is AI versus portals. And if Google becomes a primary housing advisor, every company that depends on search traffic, whether it's Zillow, Realtor.com, brokerage websites, lead generation companies, or even the MLS consumer portals themselves, they all have a huge problem. I think the question everyone should be asking is if the consumer can ask one AI assistant where to live, what house to buy, how much to offer, what lender to use, or which agent to hire, who owns that relationship? And for the last 20 years, that relationship has been fought over by agents, brokerages, MLSs, and portals, and they're fighting over it today. But for the next 20 years, it might be fought over by AI companies. And right now, Google's probably in the strongest position of anyone to win that battle. The reality is Google already is in the real estate business. And here's why I think many real estate professionals are making a mistake. They look at Google, they look at Zillow as separate businesses. And I don't think that's true anymore. Google already owns the attention. I want you to think about the home buying process again. Where do buyers start? As we said earlier, they go to Google. Where do they research neighborhoods? They go to Google. Where do they watch neighborhood videos? They go to YouTube. Aha. Well, guess who owns YouTube? Google. Where do they check those commute times? Well, they do that on Google Maps. And where do they search for lenders? They do that on Google and they search for home inspectors and closing attorneys and everybody else on Google. Google touches nearly every step of the real estate transaction already. The only thing Google doesn't fully own is the transaction itself. And that's where the Zillow idea becomes interesting. Because why Zillow matters to Google is that Zillow has something Google wants. They don't want the listings. They don't want the photos or the estimates. They can get that stuff themselves. Google can build that tomorrow and have the biggest platform in the world. What Zillow really has is consumer intent. Zillow knows when somebody stops casually browsing and starts seriously looking to buy. They know when houses are generating real inquiries. They know when price points create action. They know which consumers are preparing to move. They know which agents successfully convert leads. They know what buyers spend time on. They know what information is incredibly valuable to the buyer and the seller. And Zillow has something else also important to Google: relationships, thousands of agents, advertising relationships, lead generation systems, consumer trust. For millions of Americans, Zillow isn't simply a website. It's a place where you go to buy a house. That kind of brand recognition, very hard to build, even for a Google. What would happen if Google did buy Zillow? Let's just imagine that for a minute. Google announces we're acquiring Zillow. The real estate industry would immediately implode. The social media would melt down, agents would panic, brokerages would panic, portals executives would panic, investors would panic, consumers would probably celebrate because the consumer experience would probably be incredible. They could search, they could do all their maps, their AI, their listings, their mortgage tools, their neighborhood analysis, their showing requests, their agent matching, everything, forecasts, everything under one roof. Consumers would probably love it. The experience would probably be seamless, friction would disappear, but the question would everybody else love it. And this is where things become very personal. The fear amongst agents would be obvious. Google becomes a trusted advisor. The consumer trusts Google, not the agent, not the brokerage. Google. Imagine that. Google, find me the best listing agent. Or Google, recommend a buyer's agent. Who controls that recommendation? Google. Who controls your visibility? Google. Who controls lead flow? Google. That'd be incredibly powerful. But there's another side of the story. Consumers still need human advisors. AI cannot negotiate. AI cannot handle emotional sellers. AI cannot calm nervous buyers. AI cannot rescue difficult transactions. And right now we're losing about 25%. One out of every four transactions does not close. AI cannot walk through a property and notice something's off. But the agents who can provide true expertise will become more valuable. The agent who simply unlocks doors will be less valuable. And in all of this, the brokerages face a bigger challenge, and that's visibility. Today, consumers often know the brokerage. Tomorrow they may only know the platform. Think about Uber. Most passengers don't know the company's driver. They know Uber. The platform owns the relationship. The service provider fulfills the service. Brokerages could face a similar future. Consumers may increasingly identify with the platform rather than the brokerage. That's a major strategic shift. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing these brokerages trying to do. Get on with the portals. But the portals is where the bloodbath is really going to happen. Homes.com, realtors.com, Redfin, these independent search sites, MLS consumer portals, brokerage websites, all would be forced to compete against a company that controls the search engine itself. And that's not a fair fight. That's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Google controls discovery. Google controls the traffic. Google controls the attention. The attention is the most valuable currency in modern business. A Google Zillow combination could fundamentally reshape the entire portal landscape. But now the biggest question is would regulators approve it? Ten years ago, maybe today, I see this being extraordinarily difficult to get past regulators. I can think of several senators who would already go crazy over this. The federal government has spent years investigating Google. They've gone after Zillow. The question's simple. And the answer to that is obviously yes, all of that would be a problem. That's your classic antitrust questions that any federal government is going to ask. And unlike 20 years ago, regulators are a lot more aggressive today. I believe a Google Zillow deal would face probably the most intense antitrust review in real estate industry history. So that brings us back to the very first question. What if Google bought Zillow? Maybe that was the wrong question to even do today. Maybe the better question was what if Zillow become, what if Google become Zillow without buying Zillow? Because when you look at notebook LM, Gemini, Search, Map, YouTube, AI agent, consumer data, and everything Google's building, it starts to feel like the company is assembling all the pieces necessary to own the home buying journey. Zillow might simply be the shortcut, or Zillow might become unnecessary. Either way, every real estate professional should be paying attention to what's going on at Google because the next battle in real estate may not be between agents and portals or brokerages in portal or even Zillowandhomes.com. The next battle may be between the real estate industry and the most powerful information company the world has ever seen, Google. And if that battle comes, the winners will be the professionals who understand what happens before everyone else does. As BAM now said in its post, how do you use this information in this conversation you're going to have to have with your potential clients? You have to lead with an agreement on what AI does well. You cannot go in there and say AI sucks. It doesn't. It can pull data, it can draft offers, it can schedule showings, it can answer questions mainly right at 2 a.m. in the morning. But the things it cannot do is it cannot read the room and negotiations. It can say what a buyer should offer and what a seller should accept, but that doesn't mean that that's what human beings will do. Human beings have to be able to negotiate these transactions. Read the room and make the negotiations work. Build the relationship-based trust that holds the deal together. As I said earlier, 25% of deals are falling through. You have a one in four chance that the contract you signed as a buyer will not close. A lot of these deals get to the closing table because we have professional real estate agents who can keep them together, who can negotiate the problems away, who can recognize the issues and how to resolve them, who can talk that seller off the ledge, who can talk that buyer off the ledge. That is most important in getting these real estate transactions put together. AI can't do that. They know what's driving and motivating sellers in this market. They know the market. AI can look at a market and give you statistics, but it takes a human being to truly analyze it and understand what's driving the human beings in this market. Well, I hope you got a lot out of this. Things continue to change in the AI industry. It's going to greatly affect what happens in real estate. Google is going to be a major player in this. We have to see what happens with this because if Google controls where the traffic is sent, then that could change everything. Well, I hope everybody has a great rest of your week and hope you'll come back again for another episode of Dish and Dirt. Please like us, subscribe us, and share us. And please on YouTube click that subscribe button so we can get those subscribers up. Y'all have a great weekend, and we'll see you again next week for another episode of Dish and Dirt.