Two decisions, deliberately blurred
Ask most agents whether they should "do anything with Zillow" and you get a philosophical answer about whether the portals are good or evil. That is the wrong frame, because it collapses two questions that have nothing to do with each other.
Question one: should you buy leads from a portal? That is a real, arguable business decision with a price tag, and we have argued the case against it more than once.
Question two: should the free profile that already exists with your name on it be accurate and complete? That one costs nothing, obligates you to nothing, and has an obvious answer.
Both portals benefit from you treating these as one question, because "I don't do Zillow" conveniently leaves a half-built profile sitting there under your name. You have not opted out of anything. You have opted out of editing.
This post is entirely about question two.
The real reason to care, and it isn't leads
Search your own name the way a seller would: full name, then your city.
For a great many agents, a portal profile ranks at or near the top — frequently above their own website. That is not a compliment to the portal; it is arithmetic. Zillow and Realtor.com are enormous, established domains, and your site is one small domain. On a query that is your own name, they usually win.
Which means the profile is doing a job whether you manage it or not. It is the page where a referred seller checks whether you are real, active, and plausible before they call. A profile with a five-year-old headshot, no recent sales, and two reviews is not neutral — it is evidence against you, delivered at the exact moment someone was deciding.
The lead form is the portal's business. The impression is yours, and you get it either way.
These profiles are entity records, which is the part that compounds
Here is the angle that makes this worth an afternoon rather than a shrug.
Strip the design away and a portal profile is a structured record of verifiable facts: legal name, brokerage, license, service areas, specialties, languages spoken, price bands, and a transaction history sourced from the MLS rather than from you. Very little else on the open web ties your name to that many checkable facts at once.
That is precisely the raw material both search engines and AI assistants use to establish that a name belongs to a real, currently-practicing agent in a specific market — the entity resolution problem that step one of the playbook exists to solve. A portal profile is one of the highest-density corroboration sources an agent has, sitting there free.
It follows that the single most valuable thing you can do is boring: make every fact on it identical to the same fact on your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, and your Yelp listing. Same name form, same brokerage spelling, same service area, same phone. Four slightly different versions of you read as four weak strangers rather than one established professional, and a portal profile is a big, well-indexed place to be inconsistent.
What Zillow's Agent Finder actually uses
Zillow is reasonably open about the mechanics, and the specifics are more useful than the generic "complete your profile" advice built on top of them.
Per Zillow's own Agent Finder documentation, the directory draws on three inputs: agent-created profile data, listing information from MLSs and brokers, and consumer ratings and reviews. Agents are ordered by an algorithm weighing activity in that region — including reviews, sales in the last 12 months, and listings — and Zillow says the highest-rated and most-reviewed agents in a searched location surface toward the top.
Two consequences that actually change what you'd do:
- Recency beats career totals. "Sales in the last 12 months" is the window. Twenty years of production does not carry a quiet year, and your profile will quietly reflect that. Make sure the MLS IDs feeding the profile are connected and correct, because unattributed closings are invisible closings.
- Filters are eligibility, not decoration. Consumers can narrow by language, price, property type, brokerage, team versus individual agent, whether you represent buyers or sellers, and specialty. Every one of those maps to a profile field. Leave the field blank and you are not ranked low in that filtered search — you are absent from it. An agent who speaks Spanish and never entered it is invisible to every consumer who filtered for it.
On the profile itself, Zillow recommends a professional individual headshot rather than a team photo, and — usefully specific — advises putting the critical information in the first few lines of your bio, because that is all a consumer sees before clicking "More." So open with who you help and where, not with a childhood anecdote about loving houses.
What Realtor.com changed in September 2025 — the part nobody forwarded to agents
Realtor.com is not a reskinned Zillow, and treating them as interchangeable is where copied advice goes wrong. In early September 2025 Realtor.com launched a new agent search that replaced the stand-alone "Find a REALTOR®" search and now includes agents who are not NAR members. Its industry-relations FAQ is the clearest public account of how it works, and four things in it deserve attention.
1. Ranking is "relevancy and robustness." In Realtor.com's words: "Profiles are ranked on relevancy and robustness so that both free and paid profiles show up in the search results for this experience." Robustness is completeness. That is about as direct an instruction to finish your profile as a portal will ever give you.
2. Video is gone. Flatly: "Videos are no longer included in the new agent search experience." Plenty of agent-marketing content still tells you to record a Realtor.com profile video. On Zillow that advice is current; here it describes a feature that was retired. If you recorded one for the old Find a REALTOR® profile, it is not working for you any more.
3. Listings in search results are a paid feature. Realtor.com states that profiles showing current or recent listings on the search results page belong to agents subscribing to products with those elevated features — and that consumers who click through can still see your listings once they are on your profile page. So if a competitor's search-result card shows listings and yours doesn't, that is a purchase, not an optimization you missed.
4. The lead form on your free profile is not yours. This is the one worth reading twice: "Lead forms appear on the Realtor.com agent search experience unless you are a paying Realtor.com customer." Realtor.com adds that inquiries are delivered directly to the NAR member, free of charge, when the consumer clicks the "Connect" button on that member's profile.
Read plainly: on a free profile there is a form whose submissions are not routed to you, alongside a Connect button whose submissions are. Nothing is hidden — it is published in their own FAQ — but almost no agent knows it, and it reframes what "my Realtor.com profile generates nothing" usually means.
The 4× impressions claim, read honestly
Realtor.com markets profile completion with a real number, and you will see it repeated everywhere without its qualifiers. Its agent-profile page says a completed profile "can get you up to 75% more leads and up to 4x more impressions," footnoted to Realtor.com's own profile impression and lead data measured June 2024 to June 2025.
Three qualifiers that the number is usually quoted without:
- "Up to" describes a ceiling, not a typical outcome. The median agent's result is not in that sentence.
- It is the vendor's own measurement of its own product, published as marketing. That does not make it false; it makes it uncorroborated.
- It is correlational. Agents who complete their profiles are plausibly also the agents closing more deals, collecting more reviews, and answering the phone. Completion is not doing all of that work by itself.
Which does not mean ignore it. When an action is free, takes an hour, and the vendor's own data points the right direction, the honest read is: directionally worth doing, not a lever that produces four times the business. If a coach quotes you the 4× without the footnote, that tells you something about the coach.
The actual work, in order
An afternoon, once, then a quarterly look. Do it in this order.
- Claim both profiles if you haven't. Realtor.com's FAQ points to
realtor.com/profile; Zillow's is in the agent account area. Yours very likely already exists — claiming is editing, not creating. - Fix the facts first, before anything cosmetic. Name form, brokerage, license, phone, website. Identical everywhere. This is the step that pays off beyond the portal, and it takes fifteen minutes.
- Connect your MLS IDs and audit the sales history. Missing closings, sales attributed to the wrong profile, duplicates. On Zillow the last twelve months carry weight, so a gap here is expensive.
- Fill every filterable field. Languages, specialties, price range, buyer/seller representation, property types, service areas. Not aspirationally — claim what you actually do, because a blank field is an absence from a filtered search and an inflated one is a claim you can't support.
- Rewrite the first two lines of the bio. That is what gets read. Who you help, where, and what you're unusually good at. The rest can be as long as you like.
- Individual headshot, current, the same one everywhere. Recognition across platforms is the point.
- Ask closing clients for a review on one platform at a time, and ask for specifics — the neighborhood, whether they bought or sold, what was hard. Zillow limits reviews to consumers who actually worked with or communicated with the agent, and rates you on local knowledge, process expertise, responsiveness, and negotiation. A review naming the neighborhood is worth several that say "great to work with."
- Zillow only: add the profile video. Thirty to sixty seconds. Skip this step on Realtor.com — see above.
- Test the contact path. Submit an inquiry to yourself from each profile and find out where it lands and how fast. On Realtor.com, note which button you clicked.
What this does not fix
Being straight about the ceiling, because this is a free profile and not a strategy.
It will not out-compete paid placement. Both portals sell visibility. A complete free profile competes well against other free profiles, which is a real but bounded win.
The surface is rented, and it changes without warning. Realtor.com deleted profile video from its search experience and re-pointed lead forms; agents found out from an industry FAQ. Any effort you invest here sits on someone else's platform under someone else's roadmap — which is the whole reason we argue for owning the assets you can actually keep.
It is corroboration, not the thing being corroborated. A well-built portal profile makes you easier to verify and easier to name in an AI answer. It does not produce the closings, the reviews, or the local knowledge that make you worth naming.
Which is the right way to hold it. Two free, high-authority, fact-dense pages carrying your name are worth an accurate afternoon — and worth exactly zero additional dollars. If you want the full sequence this fits into, the DIY playbook puts it at step four, next to the other profiles worth claiming.