Zillow Group Approaching Key Technical Levels: Is It Time to Buy?

Key Points

• Zillow Group investors have had a tumultuous experience since the pandemic, but the stock's recovery is beginning to gain momentum.
• New partnerships and features have increased revenue as the company finally shakes off the iBuying fiasco of 2021.
• The stock is approaching a key technical level, and signals indicate upward momentum is gaining strength.

Are you a recovering Zillow investor? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Millions of Americans got hooked on the intuitive real estate app during the COVID-19 pandemic. With interest rates near zero, housing prices soaring, and baseball season postponed, checking your home value became the new national pastime. 

And if you owned shares of Zillow Group Inc. NASDAQ: ZG during the pandemic, you might have been able to use your profits to buy a new condo. 

However, changing macro tides and some serious missteps sent the stock plummeting in late 2021, and it’s been a long road back to respectability for Zillow. The stock is still down nearly 50% from its 2021 high, but there’s reason to believe its recent momentum is sustainable.

Is it time to finally buy Zillow? 

Not Just Rates: Why Zillow Was Crushed Worse Than Homebuilding Stocks

Zillow Group shares looked like a meme stock during the pandemic. The stock price fluctuated significantly, ranging from $18 to $212 to $26 in less than two years. Although high rates contributed to a cooling housing market, the homebuilder and REIT sectors still outperformed Zillow in the post-COVID years.

What caused such a sharp and sudden decline? Macro can only be blamed for so much; Zillow's own mistakes deserve the crux of the scrutiny.

Zillow launched an iBuying program in 2018 called Zillow Offers, which used a proprietary algorithm to identify undervalued homes that the firm could fix up and sell for profit.

However, the algorithm ran into a significant problem: it didn’t work!

The program repeatedly overpaid for its assets, failing to account for local housing trends, repair and maintenance costs, and competition from motivated buyers. Additionally, when Zillow attempted to scale this program, it faced serious supply and labor shortages that delayed renovations and kept houses off the market longer than anticipated.

By Q3 2021, the ice had broken. Zillow dropped a disastrous earnings report, ‘highlighted’ by a stunning $422 million loss from the Zillow Offers segment. On average, Zillow was losing $80,000 per home sold, and the company began shutting down the program in November 2021 with 2,000 layoffs.

ZG shares were never likely to hold their 2021 highs as the stimulus-fueled rally petered out, but the total failure of Zillow Offers gave investors reason to doubt the company’s long-term prospects. However, fundamental and technical improvements are starting to become noticeable.

Technical Signals Highlighting a Strengthening Uptrend

It was a rollercoaster start for ZG shares in 2025, but bullish technical signals are flashing on the daily chart. A Golden Cross formed earlier this month when the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) crossed the 200-day SMA, creating one of the most popular bullish signals used by technical traders. The last time a Golden Cross appeared on the ZG chart, the stock appreciated approximately 80% in just six months.

Like most U.S. equities, Zillow suffered a sharp drawdown in Q1 this year, exacerbated by President Trump’s reciprocal tariff announcement in April. However, the stock has been up nearly 20% in the last three months, and bullish momentum has led to shares approaching their 2025 high of $85.29 in February. 

Volume has increased to the highest average daily level since September 2024, and the Relative Strength Index (RSI) is cooperating by staying under the Overbought threshold of 70. The technical trend has had upward momentum for more than a year, and fundamentals are also starting to catch up.

Earnings and Upgrades Providing Fundamental Tailwinds

Shaking off the Zillow Offers disaster has been a challenge. Still, the company is working to expand its reach through a key partnership and innovative features to connect better buyers and sellers, such as the Enhanced Markets feature and AI-powered tools like SkyTour and BuyAbility.

Some of these new investments are already performing well, as evidenced by the Q2 2025 earnings report released post-market on August 6.

Zillow announced a partnership with Redfin in February, intending to expand its rental offerings by pairing Redfin (and its subsidiaries) with Zillow’s rental platforms Trulia and HotPads. The company’s Q2 numbers showed that the benefits of this new partnership are already being realized.

Zillow reported $655 million in Q2 revenue, a 15% year-over-year (YOY) advance that beat the expected $647 million. It was the highest revenue figure for Zillow since Q2 2021, with rentals being a significant contributor to sales. Rental revenue grew 36% YOY to $159 million, much of it attributable to the Redfin alliance (56% growth in multifamily revenue).

The company reported 40 cents of earnings per share, which missed analysts’ 44-cent EPS estimate. However, investors essentially wrote this miss off due to increased marketing expenses and investments in strategic partnerships like Redfin.

The cost of revenue was $166 million during Q2, but these figures are more likely to be one-time increases than consistent drags on profit.

The average analyst rating on the stock remains Hold, but 10 different research firms boosted their targets following the Q2 report, and the new consensus price estimate of $85.62 indicates an upside of 7% from current prices.