Agents have long done some version of pre-marketing—reaching out to their networks, posting on social, circulating a “Coming Soon” to their database. But what hasn’t existed, until now, is a way to make those listings publicly visible: open to every buyer and searchable by anyone.
Zillow Preview changes that. Rather than keeping pre-market listings behind closed doors as some large brokerages are opting to do, it enables early listings in that pre-market phase to be visible to everyone—and that’s good for agents, buyers and sellers alike.
“The industry has been having a messy conversation about pre-market listings for a while, but a lot of the solutions being floated around felt like gatekeeping to me. That’s never how I run my business,” says Sandy McAlpine, a broker at REMAX Results—one of the first brokerages to sign on for Zillow Preview. “I don’t win by controlling access to listings—I win by outperforming and creating better exposure for my sellers.”
Zillow Preview allows agents at participating brokerages to publicly list their pre-market homes on Zillow and Trulia before they go active in the MLS, with listings clearly labeled as “Preview” so buyers can discover them in search, save and share them, contact the listing agent and even preschedule tours for when the home goes live. With Zillow Preview, buyers are never required to work with a specific brokerage to view or inquire about a home.
“The first seven to 10 days determine everything,” McAlpine says. “With Zillow Preview, those days now start with data, visibility and momentum—not a cold launch into an uncertain market.”
And according to McAlpine and Andrew Pulini—a team leader at Keller Williams Empower in Philadelphia and current Zillow Preview partner—this isn’t just a nice-to-have feature; it’s a meaningful addition to any agent’s listing strategy.
Designed to expand visibility instead of restrict it, with the launch of Zillow Preview, the portal is doubling down on its longstanding belief that real estate works best when information is open and accessible, giving agents a new way to compete in today’s changing environment.
Defining an industry standard: the evolution of pre-marketing
In a growing number of markets, pre-market listings are kept in private listing networks or limited to closed audiences—creating a fragmented experience where buyers don’t see the full market, sellers miss potential demand and agents are pressured to compete through access rather than service.
“You’re limited to your own database and your personal reach, and wherever the MLS is allowed to export the data,” McAlpine says. “You’re kind of capped out pretty fast. What Zillow Preview does is take what used to be a fragmented process and scale it to a massive audience instantly.”
With 235 million average monthly users on Zillow—nearly 2.5x the nearest competitor—and 70% of buyers and sellers using Zillow during their journey, Zillow Preview is putting your listing in front of hundreds of millions of active buyers—the largest pool of real estate shoppers online.
Justin J. Alcott, president of DASH Carolina—one of the boutique, independent brokerages to join Zillow Preview at launch—put it in terms that are hard to argue with.
“Selling a home off-market is like auctioning a Picasso in a closet,” he says. “At the most important financial moment of their lives, sellers don’t need less exposure…they need more. Zillow is where more buyers search for homes than anywhere else on earth…and Zillow Preview puts our sellers’ listings in the center of that room before the doors even open, with every serious buyer already holding a paddle. Going once. Going twice. Gone.”
That perspective matters—because Zillow Preview is not a tool reserved for national franchise networks or teams. The program’s early partner roster spans large brokerages and franchisors like Keller Williams, REMAX, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, United Real Estate and Engel & Völkers alongside independent firms like DASH Carolina, Bastion Realty, Palm Paradise Realty, Levi Rodgers Real Estate Group and dozens of others. Within the first weeks of the announcement, Zillow received over 1,000 requests from brokerages and agents eager to participate.
Pulini immediately recognized the scale advantage. “The idea of pre-marketing is not new…but this takes it to a completely different scale. You’re combining early exposure with one of the largest pools of active buyers in the world,” he says. “You’re not just pre-marketing anymore. You’re actually marketing before it even goes live.”
Real-time data empowers market intelligence
But what separates Zillow Preview from simple expanded reach is the data—real-time insights that transform pricing conversations from opinion-based to fact-based.
“The scale part is great…but the data is what really changes the game,” McAlpine says. “You can see real-time insights like views, saves, shares and early tour requests. And it gives you actual feedback from the market before you even go live.”
This intelligence is transformative as agents now have an incredible amount of buyer behavior data to inform their strategy. If a listing is getting strong engagement, that signals real demand. If engagement is soft, that signals an adjustment might be needed.
Zillow Preview gives agents access to real-time demand signals while retaining the flexibility to refine pricing and strategy before going fully active.
“It looks like data without accruing days on market. I’m able to see views, saves; I get tour requests all before days on market begin,” Pulini says. “I’m getting a read on demand and getting data to bring back to my clients so I can interpret that. It turns the first week of the listing going live into something we can prepare for instead of reacting to.”
A compelling value proposition
McAlpine and Pulini both emphasize that the shift created by Zillow Preview is fundamental: agents at firms of every size now compete on how well they market and serve clients, not on who has access to listings.
For listing agents, the value proposition is compelling—and the economics back it up. Agents get early exposure to millions of buyers, priority placement in search and email alerts, and real-time demand signals to inform pricing and strategy decisions before going live. When a buyer chooses to contact the listing agent directly though a Preview listing, that connection is free—no referral fee, no cost to the agent.
And the upside extends further: if a buyer first engages through a Preview listing and later closes with a Zillow Preferred agent, the listing agent may receive a portion of Zillow’s revenue from that transaction. Those earnings come directly from Zillow, not the seller, and do not affect commissions or consumer costs. The result is a model where more visibility generates more buyer engagement, and that engagement creates real value for listing agents.
McAlpine also sees it as a recruitment and retention tool for her team. “I can walk into a listing appointment and show a seller exactly how I’m going to create demand before we even go live, and not every agent can offer that right now,” she says. “In a competitive listing environment, that really matters. And this also comes up in recruiting—agents want to be aligned with teams and brokerages that have tools that actually move the needle, and this is probably going to be one of them.”
Raising the bar in strategy and communication
Pulini believes we’re at an inflection point.
“Pre-marketing is going to become a standard phase in the listing cycle—not something you occasionally do, but something you intentionally plan for,” he predicts. “From an agent perspective, the bar is just going to get higher for strategy and communication. It’s not just about putting a home on the market anymore. It’s about being able to clearly explain when to use premarketing versus fully going live, how to create demand before the listing officially launches and how to interpret that data to guide pricing and strategy.”
McAlpine is equally optimistic. “This is one of the most operationally impactful tools I think we’ve had as listing agents. I’ve seen what happens when pricing is off at the launch of a listing,” she says. “Those first couple of weeks are really critical, and you don’t get them back. If I had this kind of demand data before going live, I could have had a completely different conversation based on facts and not emotion.”
A fundamental shift: leveraging a structured, data-driven strategy
For agents like McAlpine and Pulini, who have built their careers on client service, the tool is a natural evolution. It amplifies what they already do—understand their market, service their sellers and create competitive advantage.
For agents who use it strategically, it can be transformational. For brokerages aligned with their agents’ and clients’ success, it’s a retention and recruitment powerhouse. And for the industry as a whole? It signals a future where the best agents—the ones who combine strategic thinking with the ability to act on real-time market signals to best serve their sellers—will win more often.
“If you’re serious about winning listings right now, you need an edge,” says McAlpine. “The premarket phase is one of the most important parts of a listing lifecycle, and most agents are under-utilizing it or not utilizing it correctly. This turns that phase into a structured, data-driven strategy instead of a guessing game. Agents who understand how to use this strategy are going to win more often.”
To get access to Zillow Preview, agents and brokerages can visit https://www.zillow.com/agents/preview.
