Opendoor is best known for allowing homeowners to instantly sell their homes online. Enter your address. Get a cash offer. And then choose a closing date. (The commissions are around 5%.)

Today, Opendoor announced something new called cash-backed offers. What it does is help to reduce the friction on the buy side and how it works is that Opendoor literally backs your offer with cash.

If for whatever reason you can't come up with suitable financing, Opendoor will buy the home themselves and you'll have 240 days to figure out your affairs and buy it back from them for the same price and at the same terms.

The idea is that it helps to improve the attractiveness of your offer, which is particularly useful in competitive low interest rate environments, such as the one we're living through right now. (Already about 36% of the market in the US is compromised of all-cash homes sales.)

Opendoor started by dramatically reducing the barriers to selling a home (supply). And now they're trying to make things easier on the demand side of the marketplace. At the same time, the process is going digital. I think this is great for consumers.

For more on the trends shaping home buying in the US, check out this report that was published by Opendoor last month.

Full disclosure: I am long $OPEN.