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