The housing market has been on a tear over the past year.

And one of the companies that's benefited from that is the real estate website Zillow.

Our colleague Will Parker has been writing about it.

Zillow was actually getting a lot of positive attention from people.

You know, during the pandemic, people were cooped up at home and they were on Zillow looking

for a bigger, better place they could be cooped up at home with maybe a pool in the backyard

and a screen in porch.

And how much time have you spent personally on Zillow in the past year?

Almost none.

I guess I know I don't have a lot of housing options as a journalist in Manhattan.

So...

Zillow is mostly known for being a place to just browse home listings and maybe get connected

with a broker.

But in the past few years, Zillow has expanded into actually buying and selling homes directly

and the company predicted that it could make a lot of money doing it.

But last week, Zillow announced it had a big problem with its new home buying business.

Zillow said it lost more than a half billion dollars buying and flipping houses.

It said it's closing its home buying business and cutting 25% of its workforce.

The stock was hammered down 25% and one day...

Zillow had sort of bet its future on being able to do this.

That this was the direction.

The real estate market was moving in and Zillow had to be a major player in it.

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