The postmortems surrounding Zillow’s exit from the algorithmic home-flipping business are starting to surface. Here’s an article from the WSJ and here’s Matt Levine’s take on it. The latter piece is very Levine-like and is called, “Zillow tried to make less money.” The obvious story… Read More
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… Read More
Algorithmic home buying companies (or iBuyers) have now started to expand into Los Angeles. If you recall, most of these companies started in smaller markets where the homes are more homogenous, relatively inexpensive, and generally less liquid. Places like Phoenix. By tackling the second largest… Read More
Inc. Magazine just did a profile on Opendoor, which is a company that we have, of course, talked a lot about on this blog and that I continue to follow closely. It’s interesting to read about some of the challenges that they’ve been having as… Read More
There’s a lot of money at work right now trying to reinvent the way that homes are bought and sold. Perhaps the most popular trend is “instant buying” or algorithmic home buying. I have been writing about this for years, mostly because of Opendoor. But… Read More
The Urban Institute has a new study out that looks to explain why Millennial homeownership rates are lower than that of previous generations. The typical refrain is that Millennials have a lot more student debt and that the cost of housing in urban centers has… Read More
I’ve written about Opendoor.com a few times. As far as I can tell, they are the furthest ahead in terms of disrupting the residential real estate market. So I like to follow them quite closely. They’ve recently launched some new features, so I figured it… Read More
I just backed this project on Kickstarter. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2 I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it… Read More
Urban Explorer by Andrew B. on 500px Laneway housing is becoming an incredibly popular topic here in Toronto. Lots of people seem to be interested in building, or least living in a compact ground-related laneway dwelling. A big part of this, I think, has to… Read More
Earlier today a friend of mine sent me this Fast Company article talking about bitcoin and the future of home buying. I’m really glad he did. Both because I wasn’t yet sure what I was going to write about today and because this is a… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 