How to Scale a Zillow Preferred Team — Six Moves

Six moves that grow a Zillow Preferred team: speed to contact, continuous hiring, a real ramp, one weekly cadence, and getting the owner out of production.

For Zillow Preferred team owners

How to scale a Zillow Preferred team

Volume in this program is awarded on performance. So growth is roster work, not lead work. Six moves, in the order I run them.

Written by Michael Schuerman, one of 15 people on the original Zillow Go-To-Market team that brought Flex, now Preferred, to market, and two and a half years inside partner teams as a Growth Advisor. Updated September 2026.

Two teams, same six moves

First growth advisor on the team. Took owners Jake and Kelly Mullins from two agents to thirty. A new growth advisor took over when I left Zillow, and seven years in Dwelli is the largest Zillow Preferred team in Atlanta at more than 230 agents.

10 to 90 producers across five markets and three states in fifteen months.

Read the Dwelli case study

Questions team owners ask

You already know which move you skipped

Bring me that one. I will tell you what I would do in your seat.

The seat for partner teams

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Zillow Group, Inc.

Fix speed to contact before you hire anyone

Connection volume follows response time. If your team is not making live contact inside the first few minutes, adding agents multiplies the leak instead of closing it. Measure it this week, name the number out loud in a team meeting, and put one person accountable for it by name.

Hire on a schedule, not on a feeling

Teams that scale in this program recruit continuously, not when someone quits. A steady hiring loop with a set number of conversations per week is what took ChuckTown Homes from 10 to 90 producers in fifteen months. Reactive hiring produces the roster you can find, not the roster you need.

Build a ramp, and hold people to it

A new agent should have a defined first thirty, sixty, and ninety days with a conversion standard attached. Without it you will carry passengers, and in a performance-scored program passengers cost you volume for everyone else.

Run one weekly cadence the whole team keeps

One meeting, same day, same metrics, no exceptions: contact speed, appointments set, appointments held, closings, and the pipeline that is stalled. The point is not the meeting. The point is that nothing important waits for a hallway conversation with the owner.

Get the owner out of production

The ceiling in almost every Preferred team is the owner still carrying a personal book. You cannot fix conversion for thirty people between your own showings. Either you stop producing or you put someone accountable in the seat.

Address the bottom of the roster on a clock

In a program that scores conversion, an underperformer is not neutral. They consume connections that would convert in someone else's hands. Set a review point, tell people what it is, and act on it when it arrives.

How do you scale a Zillow Preferred team?

Six moves, in order: fix speed to contact, hire on a continuous schedule, build a ninety-day ramp with a conversion standard, run one weekly operating cadence, get the owner out of personal production, and address the bottom of the roster on a clock. Volume in the program follows performance, so the growth work is roster work, not lead work.

How many agents should a Preferred team have?

Enough agents to answer every connection fast without any one person carrying more pipeline than they can work. That number is set by your connection volume and your held-appointment rate, not by a target headcount. Teams that hire to a headcount goal usually end up with producers who cannot get enough at-bats to ramp.

How long does it take to scale a partner team?

With a real hiring loop and a ramp in place, meaningful roster growth shows up inside two quarters. ChuckTown Homes went from 10 to 90 producers across five markets and three states in fifteen months. Dwelli went from two agents to thirty during my chapter with them and is now the largest Zillow Preferred team in Atlanta at more than 230 agents.

Should I hire a Zillow Preferred coach to scale?

Coach is the search term, and coaching helps when the gap is agent skill. It does not help when the gap is that no one owns the number. An Operating Partner is the other option: I take an accountable seat inside the business, run the hiring and the cadence myself, and hire the full-time person who takes the seat from me.

What does it cost to bring in an Operating Partner?

The seat starts at $10,000 a month, month to month, with scope setting the actual number. Most owners start with a $5,000 90-Day Scorecard, a two-week written plan they keep, which credits toward month one if they take the seat.

What is the first thing you would look at in my team?

Speed to first contact, held appointment rate, and how many producers closed nothing in the last ninety days. Those three numbers tell me whether you have a lead problem, a skill problem, or a roster problem, and they take about twenty minutes to pull.

How to Scale a Zillow Preferred Team

Six moves that grow a Zillow Preferred team: speed to contact, continuous hiring, a real ramp, one weekly cadence, getting the owner out of production, and managing the bottom of the roster.

Six sequential moves a partner team owner can run to grow producer count and conversion inside the Zillow Preferred program.

Michael Schuerman is an Operating Partner for founder-led businesses doing $5M to $30M in revenue, based in Atlanta, Georgia. He takes a seat inside the business, runs the revenue moves the owner has been deferring, and leaves a team that runs without them. Book a 30-minute call at michaelschuerman.co.