Zillow alternatives for loan officers

Sources accessed: September 15, 2026 · Last updated: September 20, 2026

1. The short answer

Zillow sells loan officers a prepaid cost-per-lead product called Connect, operated by Zillow Group Marketplace, Inc., a licensed mortgage broker. It publishes no price, and it states no number of lenders per contact. If either of those matters to your budget, the alternatives further down publish more than Zillow does, and the questions in section 4 are how you close the gap before you prepay anything.

This page is the long version of one row in our fifteen-provider comparison. It is not a second hub, and it repeats nothing from the articles linked at the end.

2. Two relationships, one brand

This is the part that gets blurred everywhere else, so it goes first rather than in a footnote. The same brand reaches a loan officer in two completely different ways, and they are not alternatives to each other.

• You buy contacts through Connect. Zillow Group, Inc.'s Form 10-K for FY2025 states that "Zillow Group operates Connect through its wholly owned subsidiary, Zillow Group Marketplace, Inc., a licensed mortgage broker" and that "For our Connect cost per lead marketing product, participating qualified mortgage professionals typically make a prepayment to gain access to consumers interested in connecting with mortgage professionals." Zillow's own advertiser page calls Connect its "flagship mortgage advertising platform". The consumer side says the same thing from the other direction: "Participating lenders pay Zillow Group Marketplace, Inc. ("ZGMI") a fee to receive consumer contact information", and names ZGMI as "a licensed mortgage broker, NMLS #1303160".
• Zillow also originates loans itself. The same Form 10-K says Zillow Home Loans "is currently available in 49 states and the District of Columbia", and that buyers can "finance directly with Zillow Home Loans or to connect with our mortgage partners through our mortgage marketplace". Both facts come from the same filing. A partner lender buying Connect contacts is buying from a company that also lends.

Two smaller labels are worth fixing while we are here, because both get misattributed to the lending side. Custom Quotes is a separate Zillow product, described on its own advertiser page as a platform for "larger, consumer-direct call centers to display their mortgage rates", so it is not the same purchase as Connect. Premier Agent is an agent product, not a loan officer product: the Form 10-K books it under Residential revenue from "agent and software offerings". If someone quotes you a Premier Agent price as a mortgage lead price, those are different things.

One third-party characterization, named as such. The Truth About Mortgage, written by Colin Robertson and dated September 12, 2025, describes the mortgage marketplace as having "become harder to find (but it still exists!)" as Zillow pushes Zillow Home Loans. That is a publication's reading of the situation and not Zillow's own wording, which is why it is attributed here rather than stated as a fact about the company.

3. What Connect costs, in Zillow's own words

Zillow does not publish a price for Connect, and no publication we read prints one either. Here is the whole of what its own advertiser page says about money, quoted, as read on September 15, 2026:

• "The price varies based on factors such as loan amount, credit score and loan type."
• "A minimum initial deposit is required."

The deposit amount is not published. We looked for it on Zillow's own pages and in its Form 10-K, and it is not there. It is also not in the one trade article we treat as citable on mortgage lead pricing: HousingWire's "9 top places to buy mortgage leads in 2026", by Julia Mahan, published October 27, 2025 and last modified March 25, 2026, lists nine providers and Zillow is not among them, so it prints no Zillow price either. Any figure you find elsewhere for a Zillow deposit or a Zillow cost per contact traces to somebody's blog rather than to a source you can open, which is why there is no number in this section. Ask Zillow for it in writing and you will have the only version of it that is worth having.

On delivery, the same page says "You receive contacts based on your location and market availability", and describes the lead model as "Consumers answer a series of questions to find a local lender, and lenders receive contacts based on location data". CRM delivery is not described on the pages we read. Lead types through the marketplace are purchase and refinance, per the Form 10-K.

For what a lead costs to make rather than to buy, one named benchmark is worth holding next to any quote you get. LocaliQ and WordStream's "Search Advertising Benchmarks", updated June 1, 2026, using Google and Microsoft Ads data, put the all-industry average cost per lead at $66.69, Finance and Insurance at $74.44 and Real Estate at $102.51. Those are search-ad costs, not purchased-lead prices, and nobody should read them as Zillow's. They are here as a sanity check on the order of magnitude. Our answer on what mortgage leads cost goes through the five things that actually move the number.

4. Questions to ask before you prepay

These come out of the gaps above: points Zillow's own pages leave open. They are questions, not accusations, and every one of them is worth putting to every provider in the table below, including us. Ask in writing, and keep the answer with a date on it.

4.1 How many lenders receive the same contact?

• Zillow states no number. Its advertiser page describes the lead model and the location-based routing, and says nothing about exclusivity or about how many lenders receive one contact. That is not a criticism, it is the state of the published record, and it makes this the first question to ask.
• One company on the table below does state a number, and it is not Zillow. LendingTree's Form 10-K says a consumer request is transmitted to up to five participating Network Partners. That figure is documented for LendingTree and for nobody else here, and it should never be carried across to another provider, on this page or anywhere.
• So ask directly: in my ZIP codes, how many lenders receive this contact, on average rather than at most? And what happens to the consumer's record afterwards?

4.2 What does the deposit buy, and what is the price per contact?

• How large is the minimum initial deposit, in my market?
• Given that the price "varies based on factors such as loan amount, credit score and loan type", what is the current price for my filters, and how often does it change?
• What happens to an unspent balance if I pause or stop, and what is the refund or credit policy for a contact outside the filters I bought?
• Can I cap daily spend and restart without a penalty?

4.3 Where does my contact volume come from?

• The Form 10-K says a buyer can "finance directly with Zillow Home Loans or to connect with our mortgage partners through our mortgage marketplace". Ask how that choice is presented to the consumer in my market, and what it means for the volume a partner lender should expect.
• What does "market availability" mean for my counties, and how do I find out whether my market is open before I put money in?

4.4 How does the contact reach my desk?

• Is delivery real time into my CRM, and through which integration exactly? CRM delivery is not described on the pages we read, so this is worth confirming rather than assuming.
• Can you supply a consent certificate per contact, and can I see one before I commit? Our answer on where mortgage leads come from explains why the origin of a record predicts how the first call goes.
• Can I buy by state or by ZIP, and can I change that later? We wrote a separate answer on buying by state or ZIP, because the unit a provider sells geography in decides how tightly you can control spend.

5. Five other places, and us

Not a ranking, and the row order carries no meaning. Zillow is first because it is the subject of the page. The full set of fifteen, with the same sourcing rules, is on the comparison hub.

Two related reads, both of which stay out of this page's way: the lead types compared, for what separates aged, shared, exclusive and live transfer, and where to buy purchase leads, for the four things to check before paying for any of them.

6. Method

When. Every page behind this comparison was read on September 15, 2026. Anything a provider changed after that date is not reflected here yet.

What we read. For Zillow: its advertiser page for mortgage lenders, its consumer marketplace page, and Zillow Group, Inc.'s Form 10-K for FY2025. For the other providers: their own lender-facing pages, LendingTree, Inc.'s Form 10-K for FY2025, and one trade publication, HousingWire, named wherever it is the source. HousingWire discloses at the top of its article that it may earn a commission when a reader buys through its links, and it gives no source for its own price figures, which is why they are attributed to it rather than presented as anyone's price. A few sites blocked automated access and were read through a reader proxy, so quotations are as extracted from the page text.

What is not here, and why. No deposit figure and no cost per contact for Zillow, because neither is published anywhere we could open. No exclusivity number for Zillow, because it states none. No performance, conversion or contact-rate figure for any provider here, ours included. Where a page said nothing on a point, this page says "not stated" rather than filling the gap with an inference, which is why some cells are emptier than a listicle's would be.

Corrections. If you work for a provider named here and a fact about you is wrong, out of date, or missing context, write to info@visionxlab.com with the page it comes from, and we will correct the cell and move the date stamp at the top of this page.

Disclosure. This page is published by VisionXLab. VisionXLab sells mortgage leads, so we are one of the companies being compared, and we appear in the table above alongside everyone else. Every fact about another provider comes either from that provider's own public pages, from a filing with the SEC, or from a named third party, accessed on September 15, 2026, and the source is stated next to the fact. If you are a provider on this page and something here is wrong or out of date, write to info@visionxlab.com and we will correct it.

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