Americans who bought homes since 2022 now collectively pay an estimated $65 billion annually in avoidable mortgage costs. That figure, published in new Bankrate research based on 3.2 million mortgage originations tracked in federal housing data and highlighted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal online, represents money homebuyers are losing for one simple reason: they don’t shop around for the best mortgage rate.
According to the study, for the typical borrower, failure to comparison shop compounds to more than $78,000 over the life of the loan. That’s a down payment on another house.
At a time when the statistics show that home prices have risen 54% since 2020, mortgage rates have climbed from 3% to over 6%, and the median home price hovers around $400,000, every unnecessary basis point of interest pushes homeownership further out of reach.
And at the center of the country’s home-buying ecosystem sits a company that plays a significant role in the unaffordability crisis: Zillow.
According to the company’s statements to investors, roughly 80% of residential real estate transactions involve an agent using a Zillow product, and 70% of buyers and sellers use its website. Zillow boasts that “Zillow” is now searched more often than “real estate.” Over the past few years, Zillow has also aggressively expanded into mortgage lending, growing Zillow Home Loans from nonexistence into a top-25 lender nationally, with purchase loan origination volume growing 96% year-over-year in Q1 2026 to $1.5 billion.
Unknown to most consumers, Zillow stands accused of doing precisely what the Bankrate study warns costs such consumers: discouraging homebuyers from shopping around. Multiple class action lawsuits allege that Zillow has engineered a system in which real estate agents, who are supposed to act as fiduciaries for their homebuying clients, are coerced into steering homebuyers toward Zillow Home Loans. The lawsuits describe quota requirements and reward systems: the more customers are steered to Zillow Home Loans, the more leads Zillow provides to the agent.
Zillow itself has acknowledged that when it comes to mortgages, comparison shopping matters. Zillow found that if prospective homebuyers shop around, they can “save $1,100 a year by reducing their mortgage rate by 50 basis points when they purchase a typical U.S. home.” The same research noted that such savings “would have made 22,000 more homes on the market affordable for a median-income U.S. household.” Zillow knows that rate shopping enhances home affordability, yet it stands accused of forcing homebuyers down the opposite path.
A December 2025 study by Georgetown University Professor Steven C. Salop analyzed the same federal mortgage data that underlie the Bankrate research, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records, to determine what borrowing from Zillow Home Loans costs consumers. His 40-page report compared Zillow Home Loans to all other lenders from 2022 through 2024 and found that Zillow borrowers pay significantly higher mortgage costs: approximately 10 basis points higher overall and 15 basis points higher in 2024 alone. On a typical $337,000 loan, that amounts to nearly $4,600 more than the competition.
The Zillow overcharges hit the most vulnerable the hardest. Veterans face a particularly steep premium: on VA loans in 2024, Zillow’s overcharge amounted to approximately $7,279 in net present value on an average loan of $407,860. Low-income borrowers earning less than $60,000 per year paid an overcharge of 31 basis points in 2024, amounting to $4,457 on an average mortgage of $157,118. In 2024, Black borrowers faced an overcharge of $8,225, and Asian borrowers paid $6,417 more than they would have paid elsewhere.
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Zillow has disputed the Georgetown study, calling it “inaccurate and misleading” and noting it was funded by CoStar Group, a competitor. But Salop defended his methodology, and Zillow has not produced contrary data in the six months since publication. Bear in mind, too, that Salop was simply mining public HMDA data, just as Bankrate has done.
The Bankrate research, layered on top of the Salop study, paints a damning picture: Americans are losing $65 billion a year to above-market mortgages, and the companies that dominate the home-buying ecosystem stand accused of ensuring they never shop for a better rate. We are in the middle of a housing affordability crisis, quantifiable by the quiet extraction of billions from borrowers who trusted the wrong platform. The Federal Trade Commission should investigate. State attorneys general should take notice. And consumers should know: the company helping you find your home may not be helping you afford it.
Patrick M. Brenner is president and CEO, Southwest Public Policy Institute.