Zillow has unveiled Zillow Pro, a unified suite of tools that brings together Follow Up Boss, My Agent, and enhanced Agent Profiles. It is the company’s clearest signal yet that it intends to become the digital command center for agent and client relationships.
At the heart of the announcement is a simple but powerful idea: agents who don’t have their clients inside Follow Up Boss won’t have access to the full benefits of Zillow Pro. To take advantage of real-time activity alerts, persistent branding, and AI-powered follow-ups, every client must be part of the agent’s connected database.
That requirement changes the game.
Turning CRMs into client visibility engines
Follow Up Boss has long been the dominant CRM among top producers. By merging it with My Agent’s persistent branding feature, Zillow is creating a closed loop of client monitoring. When an agent invites a contact from Follow Up Boss into a My Agent relationship, that client begins seeing the agent’s name and photo across Zillow’s ecosystem, from listings to saved searches to email updates.
This is worth repeating. If you have a client in Follow Up Boss, your agent branding will appear on Zillow as your client browses. More importantly, the app will tell you what your client is looking at along with their estimated propensity to transact.
In return, the agent gains visibility into what that contact is viewing, saving, or sharing on Zillow. AI-powered alerts can then recommend the right moment to re-engage.
The result is an always-on client tracking system that sits at the intersection of CRM and consumer portal.
Zillow is only the second company in real estate to enable this level of client visibility. The first was Homeowner.ai, also known as Onehomeowner from Cotality, and LiveInHere by Fidelity National Financial. These platforms pioneered continuous client engagement by giving real estate, mortgage, and title professionals real-time insight into homeowner activity and intent. Zillow Pro now brings a similar capability to the agent community at scale.
For agents that want to double up on their strategy, Homeowner.ai allows agents to connect their Follow Up Boss accounts to import clients using the popular API Nation integration solution. This allows agents to track client activity on Zillow and Homeowner.ai. Imagine knowing that a client you have not spoken to in years starts shopping on Zillow, going to open houses, and improving their home for sale.
The new rules of engagement
Zillow’s move formalizes what many brokerages have struggled to achieve: continuous visibility into client behavior. It also introduces new obligations for agents and teams:
- Centralized contacts: Only contacts stored in Follow Up Boss can be invited into a My Agent relationship. Scattered databases or manual spreadsheets will not qualify.
- Active permission: Clients must opt in to connect. Agents will need to explain the benefit clearly and request consent early in the relationship. This solves the issue of the same customer in multiple agent databases.
- Consistent follow-through: Once connected, clients will see the agent’s brand across Zillow. Neglecting follow-up now carries a higher reputational cost.
- Data stewardship: Storing and managing contacts responsibly becomes a business-critical skill. As a note, Homeowner.ai will help you match and append customer records for accuracy.
For brokers, this reinforces the importance of CRM strategy. For agents who are partnering with Zillow, integration of Follow Up Boss into your tech stack will be valuable for recruiting and retention.
The missing link: dotloop’s quiet omission
It is noteworthy that Zillow Pro does not include Dotloop, one of the leading transaction management platforms in real estate and a company Zillow has owned since 2015. Dotloop is reportedly used in nearly half of all U.S. real estate transactions, according to company executives.
The omission raises questions about Zillow’s strategic direction. It could signal a deliberate separation between transaction management and client engagement, or it might hint at a broader repositioning of Dotloop within Zillow’s ecosystem. Given the emphasis on AI-driven engagement and contact visibility, Zillow may be prioritizing lead generation and retention tools over back-office workflow systems for now.
If Dotloop were later integrated, Zillow Pro could become a complete lifecycle platform from search to closing. Until then, agents will need to rely on other solutions to manage transactions once a deal is in motion.
Strategic implications for brokers and MLSs
Zillow Pro highlights a growing tension in real estate technology: who owns the relationship data that drives transactions? By making the agent’s CRM the entry point, Zillow is both empowering and enclosing. The agent retains personal control of outreach, while Zillow gains deeper behavioral insight across millions of buyers and sellers.
Brokerages will need to decide how much of that visibility they are willing to delegate. MLSs may see a renewed urgency to build or partner on their own client engagement platforms like their MLS consumer website, or Cribio.com offered by the Broker Public Portal to maintain industry sovereignty.
A sign of where the market is heading
If Zillow Pro succeeds, the industry will move toward a future where every client is connected to an agent through a persistent digital relationship that never goes dark between transactions. It is a logical evolution of customer for life solutions, but it also raises new questions about privacy, data sharing, and competitive dependence.
For now, the message is clear. To compete in this new environment, agents must bring every contact into Follow Up Boss. Without that foundation, Zillow Pro’s AI-powered insights will not activate, and those who delay risk losing visibility into their own clients.
