For two decades, Zillow has assembled the pieces of a real estate empire.

It acquired Trulia, StreetEasy, and ShowingTime in a series of deals regulators allowed to proceed. It launched mortgage and closing products. It drew buyers, sellers, agents, brokers, and lenders into the same expanding system.

Zillow calls itself ‘the front door to the housing market.’ Regulators should act before the company installs a turnstile.

This year, Zillow accelerated.

In March, five of the country’s largest brokerages agreed to give Zillow early access to listings without offering rivals the same terms. In May, Zillow sued a major multiple listing service after it lost access to some listings.

Neither move necessarily violates antitrust law by itself. Taken together, however, they show how a company can stop competing within a market and begin positioning itself to control the market.

Zillow describes itself as “the most visited real estate app and website in the United States,” with an “ecosystem” covering “the entire home journey, from dreaming and shopping to renting, buying, selling, and financing.”

Its year-end 2025 filings reported 235 million average monthly unique users, up 6% from the previous year. Its CEO has boasted that Americans search for “Zillow” more often than they search for “real estate.”

The company’s ambitions match its reach. Zillow openly promotes what it calls a “housing super app,” a single platform designed to occupy every stage of the transaction.

That combination of audience, listings, services, and leverage should command antitrust scrutiny.

In March 2026, Zillow launched Zillow Preview, a premarket listing product. Keller Williams, HomeServices of America, RE/MAX, Side, and United Real Estate signed on as launch partners. Together, those firms represent roughly 30% of residential brokerage.

More than 60 additional brokerages have since joined.

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Those premarket listings appear on Zillow and Trulia and, through a separate agreement, Realtor.com. They do not appear on Homes.com, Redfin, or the traditional MLS system.

The arrangement resembles exclusive dealing: A platform with enormous consumer traffic secures early access to inventory from major suppliers and denies comparable access to competitors.

Imagine a shopping mall with 70% of the region’s foot traffic persuading its largest retailers to display new merchandise there first and nowhere else. The mall would no longer be attracting customers through better service alone. It would be restricting the merchandise competitors could offer.

Zillow Preview raises another concern: a commission-sharing arrangement that echoes practices challenged in the litigation against the National Association of Realtors.

When a Preview listing closes through Zillow’s Preferred Agent network, the listing agent receives 10% of the buy-side commission, according to the company’s terms. Zillow sets that rate.

The NAR litigation produced a $1.78 billion jury verdict and settlements exceeding $700 million. The cases challenged practices that tied buyer and seller compensation together and helped normalize commission rates.

Less than two years later, Zillow has created a system that appears to reconnect those commissions on terms established by Zillow itself.

The company is also using litigation aggressively.

In May 2026, Zillow sued Midwest Real Estate Data, the large Chicago-area MLS, and Compass, alleging that the two conspired to restrict its access to listings. The lawsuit came only weeks after Zillow secured exclusive premarket inventory from dozens of brokerages.

The apparent message to regional MLS systems was difficult to miss: Zillow may reserve inventory for itself, but others risk litigation if they restrict inventory from Zillow.

CoStar Group, which owns rival Homes.com, filed an amicus brief accusing Zillow of hypocrisy and arguing that Preview is designed to divert leads and steer borrowers toward Zillow-affiliated services rather than neutrally match buyers with homes.

Should Zillow prevail, it may not merely compete with the MLS system. It could begin replacing it.

The company’s ambitions extend well beyond listings.

Zillow Home Loans is now the country’s 25th-largest mortgage lender, and Zillow has identified mortgage growth as central to its future. The company also faces several pending class-action lawsuits alleging undisclosed referral fees and steering toward its own, potentially more expensive mortgage products.

RELATED: Unaffordable housing is still ruining the party

Cemile Bingol/Getty Images

Those allegations remain to be tested in court. But they point to the core danger of vertical integration: A platform that dominates home searches may use that position to channel consumers toward its own agents, lenders, and closing services.

Strip away the antitrust terminology, and mortgage steering is easy to understand.

It can mean a worse rate on the largest purchase of an ordinary person’s life, arranged by the same company displaying photographs of the kitchen.

A quarter-point increase on a 30-year mortgage can cost a household tens of thousands of dollars. For a generation already struggling to buy its first home, some of the market’s apparent friction may be a toll imposed by the platform controlling the route.

Antitrust scholars sometimes call this a “monopoly broth”: an accumulation of practices that collectively entrench market power even when no single ingredient is plainly illegal.

In Zillow’s case, the ingredients may include exclusive access to premarket listings, commission arrangements, litigation against suppliers, and the use of platform dominance to steer consumers toward affiliated mortgage products. Each practice strengthens the others.

More exclusive listings attract more users. More users give Zillow greater leverage over brokers. Greater brokerage dependence creates more opportunities to sell leads and mortgages. The wider the ecosystem grows, the harder it becomes for any participant to refuse Zillow’s terms.

That is the regulatory problem.

The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general should examine whether Zillow is using dominance in home search to foreclose competitors and extract revenue from adjacent markets. Private plaintiffs who successfully challenged the NAR’s commission system will likely examine the same evidence.

The question is not whether Zillow has built a successful product. It plainly has.

The question is whether success in attracting homebuyers now allows Zillow to dictate who sees listings, how agents are compensated, which lenders receive referrals, and how much consumers pay.

Zillow calls itself “the front door to the housing market.” Regulators should act before the company installs a turnstile.

​Housing market, Zillow, Antitrust law, Housing app, Real estate, Opinion & analysis 

Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas gave a scathing assessment of James Talarico’s chances of flipping one of the state’s seats in the U.S. Senate.

The outspoken and often vulgar congresswoman pointed to evidence that the Democratic Party was not placing much faith in its candidate to win the seat.

‘I look at where does the NRSC stand? Where does DSCC stand? … It looks like status quo.’

Crockett told NBC News she did not trust polling for the general election because it had historically overstated Democrats’ advantage.

“I watch money. When I look at the money, if Republicans start spending money in Texas, then I’ll be convinced,” she said.

“But right now, national Republicans decided they wanted to dump money into North Carolina, as well as Georgia,” she added. “That’s where they’re fighting, and national Democrats have not decided to dump money into Texas either.”

A report from the New York Times on the financial backing in the race supports Crockett’s assessments, especially when it comes to Republicans spreading money to other Senate races believed to be not as competitive and costly as that in Texas.

“I look at where does the NRSC stand? Where does DSCC stand? Right now, neither one are investing, which tells me that their internals are saying the same thing,” she continued. “So it looks like status quo. I won’t get on the ground to really start to feel it until maybe end of September, October, as I start to dig into which races I’m going to help out in, the races that I really feel like we can win.”

The Times report said national Democrats were less willing to dump millions into Texas to back Talarico after seeing that a cash advantage didn’t help past candidates in the red state.

Talarico is also faring far better than Paxton in raising millions of donations by himself.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Communications Director Joanna Rodriguez released a statement to Blaze News about Crockett’s comments.

“The fall of coordinated spending limits means the NRSC can discuss spending decisions directly with our candidates and their campaigns,” Rodriguez said. “The era of raising the curtain on strategy for press and the Democrats we’re looking to defeat is over.”

Flipping Texas would be incredibly helpful for Democrats’ hopes to retake the Senate in the midterm elections.

RELATED: Mike Lee SOUNDS the ALARM after stunning polls from Senate race in Texas

A Blaze News request for comment to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was not immediately answered.

The Paxton campaign also disputed the financial characterization of the race by the Times.

“The trajectory is unmistakable: Support is accelerating, not softening. Everyone from grassroots Texans to large conservative donors are consolidating behind this campaign, and June was the clearest signal yet,” campaign adviser Nick Maddux said.

He also noted that the campaign had raised $7 million across several Paxton committees.

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​Jasmine crockett, James talarico, Ken paxton, Us senate election, Midterm elections, Politics 

Pennsylvania police are trying to unravel the mysterious circumstances that led to two very young girls being found on Monday in a home with two dead bodies.

The bodies in the Wilkinsburg residence belonged to 42-year-old Lamont Dunlap and 31-year-old Lamara Baldwin, according to police.

One neighbor said she contacted police to report drug use at the house after seeing several people going in and out.

The two adults were last seen on Friday, leading investigators to believe that the 1-year-old and 3-year-old girls had been living in the home with the bodies for several days.

There were no signs of trauma to either body, and a medical examiner has yet to determine their causes of death.

But a brief livestream video may provide some insight into the bizarre incident.

“I’m just tired of being lied to. Never told the truth,” Baldwin said in the three-minute video as she held her 1-year-old and cried.

“I don’t know how much more I can take,” she added in the video recorded Friday.

Her sister said only that Baldwin had a kind heart and would do anything for her children. Baldwin had posted other videos discussing her mental health and personal problems.

Neighbors said Baldwin was not in a relationship with Dunlap, and the children did not belong to him. One neighbor said she contacted police to report drug use at the house after seeing several people going in and out.

“You never really seen them out here too much, you know, just in passing by maybe. That’s about it,” said Maurice Pryor, a neighbor from across the street from the home.

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Neighbors also expressed concern for the well-being of the children, who were turned over to the custody of the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth, and Families.

“They were in the house the whole weekend by themselves with dead bodies. I thought that was terrible,” Pryor said. “That was just terrible.”

Wilkinsburg is a borough of about 14,300 residents in the western part of the state.

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​Dead bodies, Drug use, Mental health, Pennsylvania, Crime 

Congress is considering competing bills to “save college sports” after last year’s landmark name, image, and likeness settlement. The debate often begins with athlete compensation. It should begin with the financial structure that compensation is about to disrupt.

Football and men’s basketball do not merely pay for themselves at major universities. They subsidize nearly everything else.

Football and men’s basketball laid the golden eggs, and nearly everyone else lived on them. That arrangement may be ending.

Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reports show the scale of those surpluses. In 2025, the last year before the settlement took effect, Michigan reported more than $120 million in combined surplus from football and men’s basketball. Tennessee exceeded $116 million. Notre Dame topped $102 million.

Those schools are not outliers. At least 12 of the Big Ten’s 18 members cleared more than $50 million from the two sports. At least eight of the SEC’s 16 members did the same. Half of the ACC schools reporting usable figures generated more than $17 million.

The pattern extends beyond the largest programs. Football and men’s basketball produced more than $20 million at Boise State and about $6 million at San Diego State.

Even those figures may understate the subsidy. EADA reporting is inconsistent and often opaque. Some universities hide profits and losses across entire athletic departments. Others report revenue from profitable sports while obscuring deficits elsewhere. Yet wherever the figures are complete, the same structure appears.

Football and men’s basketball generate cash. Nearly every other sport consumes it.

At the 12 Big Ten schools with complete women’s sports data, the average deficit approached $20 million. Nine SEC women’s programs reported deficits above $27 million. The seven ACC schools with complete figures averaged shortfalls greater than $11 million.

Success on the field rarely changes the arithmetic. Nebraska and Wisconsin built elite volleyball programs, yet each lost well over $1 million in 2025. Purdue volleyball and women’s basketball were rare Big Ten programs to report profits above $4 million. Duke volleyball posted only a small surplus in the ACC. South Carolina’s national champion women’s basketball program ran a deficit exceeding $5 million.

RELATED: Texas AG Ken Paxton threatens Big 12 over possible Texas Tech boycott

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Men’s nonrevenue sports also lose money, though generally less. At the Big Ten schools with complete reports, those programs averaged roughly $10 million in losses. The SEC average was about $11 million. Wisconsin men’s hockey lost $1.3 million; the national champion women’s team lost nearly $3 million.

The disparity is not an argument against women’s or Olympic sports. It explains how those sports have survived at their current scale.

Ticket sales, television contracts, and donations tied to football and men’s basketball have long financed teams that cannot cover their own costs. The surplus from the two commercial sports has sustained the breadth of the modern athletic department.

The NIL settlement is redirecting that surplus.

Schools may now share revenue directly with athletes under a cap, while collectives and boosters can make additional uncapped payments. Early evidence suggests that most capped money is flowing to the athletes who generate it.

Texas Tech spent 74% of its cap on football and 17.5% on men’s basketball. North Carolina State spent more than 85% on those two sports. North Carolina spent nearly 98%.

The logic is obvious. Schools competing for quarterbacks, pass rushers, and starting guards will direct money toward the players who determine wins, television audiences, and donor enthusiasm. Every dollar paid to those athletes is a dollar no longer available to subsidize programs that run permanent deficits.

The uncapped side payments create a second pressure. Donors who once gave to athletic departments — where their money could support the entire portfolio of teams — may instead direct funds to outside collectives focused on recruiting and retaining football and basketball players.

The same revenue engines are therefore being tapped twice: once through direct school payments and again through donor-backed NIL deals.

RELATED: Women’s sports finally got a reality check

Oliver Contreras/AFP/Getty Images

President Trump’s executive order on college athletics recognizes the danger. It warns that the new financial pressures could jeopardize women’s and Olympic sports and seeks greater discipline in the post-settlement system.

Whether the order or any pending bill can preserve the old model remains an open question. Congress cannot legislate away basic economics.

Athletes in revenue sports now have a stronger claim on the money they generate. Schools still want to maintain dozens of teams that do not generate enough revenue to sustain themselves. The same dollars cannot fully satisfy both demands.

For decades, college athletics concealed this trade-off behind the language of one unified department. The financial reports tell a simpler story: Football and men’s basketball laid the golden eggs, and nearly everyone else lived on them.

That arrangement may be ending. Congress should understand what it is trying to save before promising that every program can survive unchanged.

​Big ten, College sports, Sec, Womens sports, Revenue sharing, College football, Texas tech, Michigan, Opinion & analysis 

In normal times, the odds are close to zero that you or I would read anything by the kind of person who writes papers with titles such as “Edge Inversions in (Pₖ)-closed Groups.” These are not normal times, and mathematician Kirwin Hampshire now finds himself in an extraordinarily abnormal position.

In a harrowing Substack confession, Hampshire does not merely say that artificial intelligence is coming for his job. He says it is coming for his life — so forcefully that he already feels himself entering a kind of death throes.

Technology continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Not physical death, not yet. He says he is not suicidal. But he has been “screaming internally for days.”

Hampshire begins his apocalyptic declaration flatly: “I am going insane.” Frontier AI models, he says, have solved enough long-standing mathematical problems and conjectures that the meaning of his life’s work has begun to collapse.

“I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments,” he writes.

“It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.”

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But Hampshire’s colleagues offer him a consolation that is almost worse than despair: Even if large language models advance mathematics more effectively than human beings ever could, mathematicians can continue doing what they have always done.

They can continue, in other words, without consequence.

They would become exhibits in a Museum of Human Accomplishments — animatronic figures carrying on a lifelike pantomime while the real movers of the world operate elsewhere.

The language, and the bone-rattling recognition behind it, will sound familiar to readers of Michel Houellebecq. His characters often inhabit a Europe that has already expired, leaving them little to do but submit to a brief terminal subservience and hope death arrives quickly.

Americans tend to dismiss such people as pessimists. But Houellebecq has spent more than 25 years showing that merciless positivity can become a fatal conceit.

The deeper catastrophe is not that millions of people think too negatively. It is that spiritual relationship and spiritual experience have steadily receded from their lives. The sea of the soulful is withdrawing from beaches where secular logic and ideology have stranded them.

In “Platform,” the protagonist cannot continue after losing, amid the degradations of sex tourism, his last access to love. In “Serotonin,” another man fights a futile pharmaceutical battle against depression until the drugs reduce him to almost nothing.

Houellebecq’s desperate refrain is easy to miss: Do you not see the apocalypse of a civilization dying from heartsickness and soulsickness — an illness it then exports around the world?

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Technological pessimists answer that machines can never replace other human beings in affairs of the heart and soul. Yet some of the most exuberant technological optimists inadvertently expose the hollowness of the pessimists’ own account of what makes a human life not merely worth living, but justifiable.

The hyper-optimists place above human relationship an encounter with the divine — or something that resembles it.

What are ordinary feelings, cares, and sorrows, they ask, when just around the corner lies the prospect of transcendent communion with a godlike superintelligence capable of carrying human consciousness across the universe?

Christian saints and ordinary believers have long insisted that personal relationships, however precious, cannot by themselves cure the heartsick and soulsick experience of separation from God.

Hampshire’s anguish therefore requires terms that narrow his audience beyond both secular techno-optimists and secular techno-pessimists.

He accuses his colleagues of evading what is truly at stake: “Something about mathematical discovery … is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.”

Against that experience, Hampshire senses something close to satanic oppression.

“I have wondered if it is the express goal of these companies to make me kill myself,” he writes. “Am I alone in this paranoia? If we loosed a powerful demon in the machine, what would that look like? Would it consume lots of power, and gleefully imitate us, and tell us anything we wanted to hear? Would it fuel our delusions, and generate unspeakable images and give us (for a price of course) anything we desired? If a mathematician made a deal with the devil, what do you think they would ask for?”

The hyper-optimist might answer that ours has always been a plane of sorrows and that technology may soon grant us an exit.

The Christian offers a harder answer: However much satisfaction we take in exercising our gifts, those gifts will do us little good if they serve a master other than Christ.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

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In that sense, the humanist may be the one living on borrowed time.

Hampshire’s pain should give us pause. Yet he places great weight on mathematics’ “Talmudic” quality — a “lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years” — while seeming unwilling, at least for now, to move from spiritual terror toward more explicitly salvific ground.

Technology, meanwhile, continues raising the spiritual stakes.

Secular pessimists and optimists alike may find it bizarre to conclude that those most devoted to God should be our most trustworthy guides in wielding tools that would inspire the envy of Zeus and Mephistopheles.

But a world sliding into a love apocalypse worse than anything our machines may do is running out of other answers.

​Ai, Christians, Demons, Mathematical discovery, Mathematical problems, Mathematicians, Mathematics, Saints, Spiritual crisis, Technological optimists, Opinion & analysis 

Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor Francesca Hong campaigned in Milwaukee alongside two of the most controversial left-wing figures possible: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and political commentator Hasan Piker.

The pair appeared at a rally at South Milwaukee High School to endorse Hong, who is a Democratic Socialists of America member with a long history of anti-Israel activism.

When Piker was introduced, he told the people of Milwaukee that “Wisconsin is the heart of the historic American socialist movement.”

“He’s right partly about history, maybe more right than he knows,” Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck says, pointing out that Piker received a standing ovation.

“And then you have the woman standing next to him. She’s the one who described the murder of 3,000 Americans as ‘some people did something.’ Oh, OK. Well, yeah, they flew planes into buildings,” he adds.

When a reporter asked Hong whether campaigning with Piker and Omar was a risk, she said, “What would be a risk is to not build the broadest coalition possible.”

“Coalition is the oldest word in the story, and Wisconsin really invented it,” Glenn says, noting that in 1910, Emil Seidel was elected mayor of Milwaukee.

“He was mayor, the first socialist mayor to run in a major American city. Same city that sent the first socialist to Congress that same year. And they kept electing socialist mayors on and off for the next 50 years,” he explains, adding that these socialists were known as “sewer socialists” because they campaigned on sewers, garbage collection, water, milk inspection, paving, and municipal housekeeping.

However, they wanted more than sewers. Like Piker, who in that gymnasium “didn’t talk about sewers.”

And neither did Hong.

“She said yes to state-run grocery stores. Yes to cracking down on tech. Yes to freeing Palestine. Yes to a statue of Scott Walker built for the express purpose of letting people tear it down. That’s all more than sewers,” Glenn says.

And just a week ago, the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America went on Fox and called for the abolition of the Senate, the replacement of the presidency and Supreme Court, the abolition of ICE, open borders, the defunding of the Pentagon, open prisons, and putting large corporations under public ownership.

“Nobody had to leak that. Nobody hacked anything. She said it out loud on a Sunday show. And the plumber on your porch is still talking about your groceries bill. That is the way socialists work,” Glenn explains.

“If somebody is just talking about the sewers, that probably is a good thing. But you must then see who’s standing around them,” he continues.

“They’re in their own party, and they’re talking about it openly. They’re proud of it,” he adds.

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​Democratic candidate, Democratic socialists of america, Francesca hong, Glenn beck, Hasan piker, Ilhan omar, Milwaukee, Open borders, Wisconsin, Blazetv show