I sell a competing product. Newmarket Edge has a CRM in it, which makes Follow Up Boss my competitor, and you should read every word below with that in mind. The actual privacy notice is linked at the bottom. Go read that instead of trusting my summary of it.
Short version, for the skimmers:
Zillow bought Follow Up Boss in 2023 for roughly $400 million in cash, plus an earnout of up to $100 million more. On November 15, 2025, Follow Up Boss retired the privacy policy it had been running on since 2020 and replaced it with one written for a Zillow-owned company. Zillow did not give itself the right to read your whole database. It gave itself the right to use the contacts in your database who already have Zillow accounts. In the argument that followed, almost nobody asked the obvious next question, which is how many of your contacts that actually is.
Is Follow Up Boss owned by Zillow?
Yes. Zillow Group acquired Follow Up Boss in 2023 for about $400 million in cash with an earnout of up to $100 million on top. Follow Up Boss still operates as its own brand with its own team, which is part of why a lot of agents had more or less forgotten about the acquisition until last November.
What changed on November 15, 2025
Follow Up Boss had been operating under a privacy policy written in 2020, before Zillow owned it. On November 15 of last year that policy was retired and a new one took effect.
The new notice sorts the people in your CRM into two buckets.
Agent-only customer data. A contact who lives in your CRM and has no relationship with Zillow Group.
Mutual customer data. A contact in your CRM who also has a Zillow Group account, where the account details match what you have stored.
Follow Up Boss has said the rewrite was needed because the CRM is being wired into Zillow Pro, the product suite rolling out through this year.
What Zillow can do with each bucket
For agent-only contacts the notice is restrictive, and I want to be fair about that. Zillow says it will not use those contacts to improve its other products and will not market to them. Zillow has also stated publicly that it does not sell or share agent-only contacts.
For mutual contacts the notice permits more. That data can be used in developing other products, in marketing communications, and in interest-based advertising through third-party partners.
So the protection is real. It just depends entirely on which bucket a person lands in.
The part everybody got wrong
Most of what I saw in November came down to some version of "Zillow is reading your database." That is not what the document says, and repeating it was a tactical mistake, because Follow Up Boss knocked it down in about a sentence and then the conversation was over.
There is also a reasonable argument, made by people with no stake in Zillow, that this wrote down an arrangement that already existed rather than creating a new one. Your client made a Zillow account before they ever met you. Zillow already had a relationship with that person. Putting it in a privacy notice didn't change the underlying facts. I don't fully agree with that read, but it isn't a dumb position and you should sit with it for a minute before you decide anything.
The part that should still bother you
You don't get to pick which bucket your contacts go in. Your client does, and they did it quietly, probably years ago, on a Tuesday night scrolling listings on their phone.
Now think about who ends up in each pile. The people in your database worth the most to you are the ones actively shopping for a house. The people actively shopping for a house are, overwhelmingly, the people with Zillow accounts. Which means the agent-only bucket, the one carrying the strong protections, fills up with your dead leads, your cousin, and the guy from church who said he might sell in five years.
The protection is real and it lands on the part of your database you would miss the least.
I would want to know my own number before I got comfortable. My guess is that for most working agents in California it is north of 70 percent on the mutual side. I would like to be wrong about that, and you can find out for yourself faster than I can.
What Follow Up Boss says back
Their answer holds together, and you should understand it before you do anything rash.
A mutual customer isn't only your client. Zillow already has a direct relationship with that person, independent of you. Wiring the two systems together means you get to see what that client is actually doing in real time instead of guessing at it. Steve Pacinelli, their chief marketing officer, has framed the whole integration around making agents more productive by surfacing buyer and seller signals while they still matter.
If it works the way they describe it, plenty of agents come out ahead. That is a real possibility and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
My problem isn't that anyone is lying. It's that Zillow is your software vendor, your lead vendor, and the largest competitor for your client's attention, all at the same time. Somebody has to balance those three jobs against each other and that somebody is not you. The policy already changed once, after five years of sitting still. It can change again.
Three questions I would ask any CRM company, including mine
Where does the money come from, besides my subscription? A company that only sells software has one way to win, which is keeping you. A company that also sells leads or advertising has a second set of interests, and your database is useful to that second set. We charge for subscriptions. We don't sell leads, we don't sell ads, and we don't broker contacts. If that ever changes, I'll say so out loud rather than in a policy update.
Can I get all of it out today, by myself? Not "is there an export button" somewhere. Can you, right now, without opening a support ticket, pull your contacts, your notes, your history, your calls and your emails in a format that opens somewhere else? If you can't, you don't own a database. You're renting access to one.
Who decides when the terms change, and how would I hear about it? Follow Up Boss users got an email. Most of the industry heard about it from coaches and reporters. Ask your vendor what notice they owe you and whether continuing to log in counts as agreeing to the new version. It almost always does.
If you're staying on Follow Up Boss
Plenty of good agents will, and that can be exactly the right call. It's strong software, the team is well liked for real reasons, and pulling a CRM out mid-year costs a lot more than the invoice shows. Don't burn down a system that's working over a headline, including this one.
If you're staying, do four things this week.
Read the current privacy notice yourself. Not my summary of it, not a coach's video about it. The notice.
Pull a full export now, and put a reminder on your calendar to do it every quarter. Own a copy that sits somewhere you control regardless of what happens upstream.
Work out roughly how much of your database is mutual. That percentage is your actual exposure, and it's the only number in this entire conversation that's specific to you.
Think about what you're typing into the notes field. Motivation, timeline, finances, a divorce in progress. Write what you need in order to serve the client well, and know which bucket that contact sits in while you're writing it.
What this is actually about
Your listings aren't really yours. Neither is your brokerage's brand, or the traffic that arrives through a portal. Your database is the one thing in this business you get to carry with you when you change companies, and the only thing that makes it yours is a contract you probably haven't read, with a company that can be sold without anybody asking your opinion.
That was true in 2024 and it will still be true after Zillow Pro finishes rolling out. Follow Up Boss didn't invent the problem. It just made it visible for about three weeks before everyone went back to work.
Go read your terms.
De'Andre Willis Founder, Newmarket Edge