> Can you not imagine how useful it is to know user data e.g. what neighborhoods receive the most clicks, what type of homes generate the most favorites, how long people view one listing vs. another, … that is unrelated to public MLS data?

Click data is much less valuable that the recent sale price data available in MLS. Using 90s style dwell time and click counts would likely yeild a lot of very noisy data. False positives from people's browser reopening with 15 tabs looking at different houses. False positives from social and paid advertising boosting a particular home or neighborhood's numbers. False positives from enterprising real estate entrepreneurs doing everything they can to get the clicks up in areas they own property to drive up prices. Meanwhile, the recent sale prices tell you much more, with certainty and are very expensive to manipulate.

Surely Zillow was also using that data.

> Surely Zillow was also using that data.

One would hope.

Maybe, but I was under the impression that Redfin/Trulia/Realtor.com would have the same information.

Also, unless Zillow started imposing confidentiality agreements on their bids, then competing buyers would just have to bid $1 more without their dataset, right?

Zillow is the largest aggregator. They own Trulia. I can squint and see the thought process here by Zillow, though execution, as evident, did not go as planned.

I somehow missed they had bought Trulia way back when.

Evidently not as useful as Zillow expected!