Seattle-based Zillow is in hot water over the photos that populate its rapidly growing selection of rental listings. And another Seattle listings company could soon face similar trouble.
Virginia-based listing website CoStar sued Zillow on Wednesday, alleging Zillow illegally uses CoStar’s photos in a “widespread and systematic” pattern of copyright infringement.
CoStar owns Apartments.com, a top competitor in the race to grab attention from renters searching for their next home.
The dispute is the latest volley in an ongoing fight between the two competitors, both vying for dominance in the for-sale and rental listing market. It also comes as Zillow spars with the brokerage Compass over private home listings.
In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, CoStar claims Zillow has illegally used nearly 47,000 CoStar images in online property listings and that the images have been key to helping Zillow rake in more money from its rental-listing business.
“Zillow is profiting from decades of CoStar Group work and the billions of dollars we have invested,” CoStar CEO Andy Florance said in a written statement.
Zillow also shares rental listings with Seattle-based Redfin and Realtor.com, which is owned by a subsidiary of News Corp. CoStar threatened actions against those companies, too.
“If these other sites do not immediately remove our images, we will have no choice but to sue them as well,” Florance said.
Zillow did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday. Redfin declined to comment.
CoStar claims it has created the “world’s largest library of real estate photographs” by paying thousands of photographers to document residential and commercial properties. The company copyrights and watermarks those photos and allows property owners to use them when advertising on a CoStar website. They cannot sublicense the photos to competing websites, according to CoStar.
The lawsuit alleges Zillow blatantly took thousands of those photos without CoStar’s permission and used them to populate rental listings on Zillow and several other Zillow-owned rental websites.
The photos benefit Zillow by drawing more renters and apartment owners to its website, CoStar claims.
Zillow uses the photos to build pages for properties that are not listed for rent, then invites property owners to “claim this property” and continue to use the same photos once apartments are advertised for rent, according to the complaint. Zillow also sells advertising packages to property owners who “claim” their property on Zillow and sells renters a tool to apply for multiple properties.
Beyond those pages, Zillow also uses the photos of features inside apartments, such as granite countertops, to inform its estimates of property values and to make recommendations to people searching for rentals, the complaint said.
All told, those uses generate income for Zillow on the back of CoStar’s work, the lawsuit claims.
To illustrate the benefit, CoStar points out that Zillow now features rental listings from 60,000 properties, and revenues to the rentals portion of Zillow’s business climbed 33% in the first quarter compared with the same period last year.
Zillow has faced similar allegations before. A federal judge in 2022 ordered the company to pay nearly $2 million in another copyright infringement case.
Zillow and Redfin are widely known as repositories for listings of for-sale homes. They draw information for those listings from multiple listing services, where real estate agents upload details about properties. But no similar database exists for rentals.
In February, the two companies announced a $100 million deal for Zillow to become the exclusive provider of multifamily rental listings on Redfin. Soon after, Redfin laid off 450 employees.
