Zillow Group 2019 Consumer Housing Trends Report Survey Methodology

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the behaviors, motivations, pain points and successes of consumers of residential real estate in the U.S.-and how they work with professionals to help achieve their housing goals-Zillow Group partnered with independent market research and data analytics firm YouGov® to conduct a nationally representative, online quantitative survey. The self-administered study was fielded between April 17 and May 22, 2019. The results underwent substantial internal analysis and review by a team of statisticians, researchers and economists at Zillow Group.

Completes & Qualifications

This survey gathered information from a total of 13,000 key household decision makers who self-identified as one of the following consumer groups:

In addition to the subgroup-specific definitions stated above, all respondents surveyed were adults (18 years of age or older).

Research Design & Analysis

The survey gathered information on a wide range of areas, including but not limited to:

• Home and community characteristics
• Behaviors and attitudes surrounding the process of finding, living in and moving to and from a home
• Resource usage
• The role of professionals (e.g., agents, property managers, landlords, mortgage providers, etc.)

Because of rounding, certain percentages expressed throughout this report may not add up to exactly 100%.

Sampling & Weighting

To guarantee robust base sizes for analysis, data were collected via both general market and additional targeted subgroup sampling. Several steps were taken to ensure adequately representative sampling. The initial recruitment to the general market sample was balanced to householders from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2017 (ACS) and from the 2015 and 2017 American Housing Surveys based on age, ethnicity/race, education, region, and gender. The general market sample was divided into relevant consumer groups for the study based on responses to screening questions. Additional targeted subgroups were sampled based on all key household demographic characteristics. The general market sample and each consumer group was further balanced to subgroup sampling frames from the American Community Survey 2017. Each sample was matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, education, census division, marital status, and number of bedrooms. Propensity scores were constructed to estimate inclusion into each sampling frame. As a final step, the propensity score weights were post-stratified to balance based on daily Internet usage, household income, parental status, gender, age, race, and education.

Quality Control

The study was blinded: Zillow Group was not revealed as the sponsor to reduce response bias. Several additional quality-control measures also were taken to ensure data accuracy:

• Proprietary digital fingerprinting techniques were employed to identify and terminate any professional respondents, robots, or those taking the survey on multiple devices.
• Speed checks ensured that those surveys submitted by respondents who rushed through the screener or survey did not count as complete.
• In-survey quality control checks identified illogical or unrealistic responses.

Speeders, those identified via digital fingerprinting and those who failed quality-control checks within the survey were removed from the study, and their survey submissions were not counted as completions.

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