Despite record-breaking high home prices in the U.S. and a ridiculous amount of data about the housing market (all those Zestimates!), Zillow’s foray into flipping houses caused the company to lose $881 million in one year.
Burning this staggering sum of money is quite impressive, considering that American home prices increased an average of 17.5 percent from late 2020 to late 2021, an increase that’s more than twice as large as the typical year-over-year increases seen during the 2010s. But as Americans were engaging in frenzied bidding wars, Zillow’s algorithmically-driven buying process was dropping huge cash on homes left and right.
