The morning I attended the release of Venturon's 2024 Sustainable Proptech Report. What's great is that it includes a list of all the (known) companies that are active in this space in Canada. It also summarizes venture funding by region. Interesting to see Alberta punching above its weight and coming in second behind Ontario. It has roughly half the population of Quebec.
As part of the event, the following companies also gave short presentations:
Panergy -- they make a prefabricated insulated wall system
Darabase -- they are creating an advertising ecosystem around augmented reality; one that will allow building owners to monetize in a new digital world
Axe Buildings -- they make simple, prefabricated homes; they are optimizing for speed and price, not quality
QEA Tech -- they use drones with thermal cameras to tell you where your building envelope is leaking and wasting energy
I don't know anything about these companies other than what I heard this morning, but all are working on important problems. Darabase is perhaps the most future oriented in that it appears to rely on AR / spatial computing becoming a thing. I believe this will happen, and so I found it particularly interesting.
The 2024 report is available online, here.
My most recent post about Opendoor, the so-called iBuying company, is about how it wants to become the "transaction layer for homes." What that means is they would like to start facilitating third-party transactions between buyers and sellers, and move away (either partially or completely) from actually owning homes for a period of time.
The company is still trying to sell homes that it purchased in Q2-2022, which, as we all know, was a very different kind of housing market. So by doing this, Opendoor would be both reducing the market risk that it takes on and making its business model less capital intensive.
Knowing this, I actually think that "iBuyer" is the wrong moniker for their business. As I see it, the long-term objective is not to just be an iBuyer of homes. The objective is to ultimately facilitate transactions in a capital efficient kind of way. The point of iBuying is/was to seed their two-sided marketplace with sellers.
As we have discussed before, two-sided marketplaces usually always have a chicken-and-egg problem. No sellers equals no buyers, and vice versa. So you have to figure out a clever way to attract one side. Of course, now that Opendoor has sellers, the company can start to aggregate the demand side (i.e. buyers). And that is exactly what it is doing with Opendoor Exclusives.
Exclusives works like this:
The inventory consists of "off-market" homes that have yet to be listed on MLS
The homes are discounted about 2-4%
They are available for 14 days
You can't negotiate the price -- it's first come, first served
If your appraisal comes in lower, Opendoor will price match
And finally, Opendoor will not pay any buyer commissions (which is reflected in the above discount)
As I understand it, if the home doesn't sell, it then gets listed on MLS and all of the normal terms and practices would apply. But before that happens, the key objective is to facilitate a quick transaction in one of two ways.
The first way is for the seller to request an offer from Opendoor's network of buyers. In this scenario, Opendoor never needs to own the home or perform any improvements (which is usually what it does when it iBuys). It is an intermediary earning some sort of take.
The second way is for Opendoor to do its usual thing and make an instant offer to buy the home. But here's the thing. With enough buyers on its platform and by creating a sense of urgency (hey, here's a lower price!), presumably the idea is that it may never need to close on a number of these homes. It just needs to find another buyer within 14 days.
If it works, this could be an interesting business.
We have spoken a lot over the years about Opendoor. And for a period of time, iBuying seemed like a very good idea. Zillow go into it. Redfin got into it. Everybody was iBuying. But then this year everybody started losing money, mostly due to algorithms that could not contend with falling prices.
It turns out that being a market maker for homes can be a tough business because there is a lag between when you buy the home and when you hope to sell it. And so right now, few people want to be an iBuyer. Zillow no longer does it. Redfin no longer does it. And Opendoor's stock is, at the time of writing this post, down 87.19% YTD.
It is pretty easy to be pessimistic on this space, and that pessimism may be warranted. Though it may not be. My thinking has always been as follows. The process of buying and selling a home will eventually move online. The industry is ripe for change and there is no debating that. The real question is: how the hell do you do it? Everybody, including me in my late 20s, has tried.
Two-sided marketplaces are tricky, because you always run into a chicken-and-egg problem. If you don't have buyers, no seller is going to bother with your real estate marketplace. And if you don't have sellers (i.e. homes), no buyer is going to bother with your real estate marketplace. So generally speaking, the way to build a marketplace is to start with one side, somehow get them on and using the platform, and then open it up to the other side.
And this is exactly what iBuying hopes to do. Today it is largely a tool for sellers. It is a tool that says, "I will give you instant liquidity for your home so you don't have to worry or care about who might actually buy it." This is, of course, convenient for sellers, which is why people have been using it; but it is capital intensive and, as we have seen this year, it transfers some risk to the iBuyer.
In the world of Opendoor, they call this a first-party (1P) transaction. It is them buying directly from sellers. But the larger vision is for Opendoor to become more of a transaction layer and instead just facilitate third-party (3P) transactions. This is currently being done through Opendoor Exclusives and the objective here is to match buyers and sellers directly, so that Opendoor can avoid taking on the risk of actually owning homes for a period of time.
Will this work? I don't really know. But I do think it is exciting and I do think it is the way to think about what Opendoor is ultimately trying to do with their business.
Reminder: I am long $OPEN