After nearly two decades at the firm, Zillow veteran Sara Bonert has announced her departure from the listing portal giant.
In a post on LinkedIn earlier this week, Bonert said there was no “perfect way” to write a post summing up how she feels about leaving the firm after nearly 20 years.
In an emailed statement, Bonert clarified to HousingWire that she was part of the 500+ person layoff conducted by the company earlier this month. While she said she does not know exactly who was impacted by the layoffs, she noted that she was the most tenured employee impacted by the cuts.
Bonert joined Zillow in October of 2006 as the company’s director of broker services. She went on to serve as the vice president of broker services and the vice president of industry engagement, a role she has held since January 2023.
“Over the course of my nearly 20 years at Zillow, I had the opportunity to work on many of the initiatives that helped shape Zillow’s relationship with the real estate industry and, ultimately, how listings and data moved through the ecosystem,” Bonert wrote in an emailed statement. “When Zillow launched, I helped lead the effort to get the first listings onto the site and help create Zillow’s first listing syndication strategy.”
During her time at the firm, she helped establish Tech Connect, an API that enabled more than 100 real estate technology vendors to bring Zillow lead data directly into their systems, and she helped shape Zillow’s IDX strategy. Most recently, Bonert said she was part of the launch of Zillow’s coming soon product, Zillow Preview.
“What I’m most proud of is that my career wasn’t centered on one particular product or initiative. I had the opportunity to be part of Zillow at many different stages of its evolution—from the early days of getting listings onto the site, to building the technology infrastructure and industry relationships around the platform, to helping launch new products nearly two decades later,” Bonert wrote. “It’s been an extraordinary opportunity to watch both Zillow and the industry evolve, and to have had a hand in that evolution along the way.”
Zillow conducted the layoff that impacted Bonert in early August, cutting roughly 7% of the firm’s workforce company-wide. The company said the layoffs were part of an “organizational restructuring” effort focused on helping the firm “operate more efficiently and support the investments” it is making in the business.
In an FAQ sent to employees about the layoffs,obtained and verified by Zillow, said employees chosen for termination were selected based on things like “position elimination and/or [their] work performance.”
Additionally, a Washington State WARN schedule of affected jobs chart shared with and verified by HousingWire showed that out of 91 Washington state-based employees impacted by the layoffs, six held director-level roles, five held program manager roles, five held principal-level roles, five held managerial positions and 49 held senior-level positions across a variety of departments.
When previously asked about the elimination of so many senior roles, a spokesperson for Zillow told HousingWire that the company had no additional comments beyond theblog postit originally shared after news of the layoffs broke. In the post, CEOJeremy Wacksmandescribed the decision to lay off so many employees as “difficult,” adding that the choice reflects “both the strides [Zillow is] making in [its] strategy and the reality of what is required of [Zillow] to grow at scale.”
Zillow did not return HousingWire’s request for comment regarding Bonert’s termination.