How Does Zillow's Rating Actually Work?

Reviewers can also rate an agent on four sub-categories — local knowledge, process expertise, responsiveness, and negotiation skills — plus leave a free-form written review. Those sub-ratings display alongside each review rather than being folded into the single headline number.

Every review is screened through Zillow Group’s fraud filters and then evaluated by a trained human moderation team against Zillow’s Good Neighbor Policy and Review Guidelines before it publishes to the profile. Zillow’s own guidance also notes that review count, not just the star rating, drives how often an agent gets contacted — a profile with more reviews at a strong-but-imperfect average routinely outperforms a thin profile with a perfect score.

• Simple averaging — the headline rating is a direct average of "likelihood to recommend" scores across all published reviews, with no recency or Bayesian weighting.
• Eligibility — only buyers and sellers who communicated with or worked with the agent (including documented "attempted contact") can submit a review.
• Moderation — every review passes through Zillow Group’s fraud filters and a trained human moderation team before it publishes.
• Review volume — Zillow’s own guidance notes that the number of reviews on a profile influences contact volume independent of the rating itself, so a thin five-star profile isn’t necessarily an advantage over a larger, slightly lower-rated one.