Trends 2026: How integrated services could reshape the industry
Zillow and Rocket have taken big steps toward creating an end-to-end homebuying experience that keeps users in their ecosystems. How will it impact brokerages?
Editor's note: Since 2006, the Swanepoel Trends Report has provided in-depth research and analysis to help leaders understand the forces shaping residential real estate. This exclusive series of excerpts highlights each trend featured in the 2026 report, which was released in November 2025.
The Integrated Real Estate Experience Leaps Forward: Large brokerage companies have leveraged mortgage lending to amplify their businesses for decades — for example, RE/MAX's Motto Mortgage and Howard Hanna Mortgage Services — but only recently has the concept of a fully integrated real estate transaction seemed achievable. Rocket's acquisition of Redfin and Zillow Group's investment in Zillow Home Loans suggest an end-to-end real estate experience is now closer than ever.
The following excerpt, taken from T3 Sixty's 2026 Trends Report, explores the strategies these major real estate companies are using to capture more market share via integration.
Inside the strategy
By deploying a direct-to-consumer, integrated real estate transaction strategy, Rocket and Zillow aim to participate in a larger portion of the real estate transaction funnel. With Redfin, Rocket is moving up the funnel. Zillow, with its focus on increasing the percentage of consumers using both Premier Agents and ZHL, is moving down the funnel.
Some of the strategies portals deploy to increase the link between brokerage and mortgage include helping consumers search for homes within their buy windows with a prefiltered home search, streamlining the transaction process and offering incentives for bundling services.
Filtered home search
In this approach, a portal prompts a consumer to choose a mortgage first before searching for homes, with a prompt such as, "Discover the homes you can afford."
Redfin's affordability tool and Zillow's "BuyAbility" are examples.
In Redfin's tool, consumers enter in their annual household income, monthly debts, how much cash they anticipate putting down and their estimated home equity. The tool calculates the purchase price, monthly payment based on prevailing mortgage rates that automatically adjust based on a debt-to-income ratio that consumers can set.
After setting their budgets with the tool, consumers can then view all the homes in the market of their choice on redfin.com that fit their buying window.
Zillow's BuyAbility tool, launched in May 2024, offers similar functionality. After entering their financial information, consumers see a target home price based on current interest rates and their specific financial data. When they look on zillow.com for homes, their results are listed as "Within BuyAbility" or not. More than 2 million people have enrolled in BuyAbility since it launched, Zillow announced on its second quarter 2025 earnings call.
In addition to giving homebuyers insight into their budgets and shopping for homes they can afford, these companies make it push-button easy for them to get prequalified for a mortgage.
Getting prequalified increases the likelihood that a buyer will use that lender to fund the mortgage.
Bundling incentives
Companies have introduced perks for brokerage customers to use their affiliated mortgage offerings such as a closing credit.
Rocket in July introduced Rocket Preferred Pricing, which allows consumers who buy with a Redfin agent and finance through Rocket Mortgage to choose between a 1 percent lower interest rate for the first year or up to $6,000 in lender credits from Rocket Mortgage. The pricing is also available to buyers who purchase a Redfin-listed home and finance through Rocket Mortgage.
Streamlined experience
Zillow and other brokerages tout the ease and speed that consumers benefit from when they use one of the company's affiliated services. The back-end platforms present the real estate transaction status and steps required to complete tasks more seamlessly, which can potentially result in faster closing times.
Zillow has also enhanced the ease of an integrated transaction for Premier Agents by deeply embedding the experience within the Follow Up Boss CRM platform, which many Premier Agents utilize. With this integration, agents can seamlessly transfer and introduce consumers to ZHL loan officers through the Zillow app, see the status of financing through the app and download the preapproval letter when ready.
Because the integrations are aimed to streamline the transaction and make consumers' experience much smoother and quicker, deals that include both a Premier Agent and a ZHL can have higher conversion rates. And because conversion rates and customer satisfaction are two of the key factors Zillow uses to evaluate Premier Agent performance (especially in Flex markets) and how to distribute high-quality leads, Premier Agents have a business incentive to refer business to ZHL.
Read the full chapter: Digital and printed copies of the 2026 Swanepoel Trends Report are available for purchase at T3 Trends.
Real Estate News is an editorially independent division of T3 Sixty.