Steven Levy over at Wired recently wrote a short piece comparing Opendoor’s iBuying approach to what Zillow was doing when it was in the space. (Thank you Robert Wright for forwarding me the article.) As we have talked about before, the fundamental problem with Zillow’s… Read More
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
Things are happening in the algorithmic home-flipping business right now. A few weeks ago I wrote about Zillow pausing this part of its business. It was then later revealed that the company was set to take a loss on many/most of the homes that it… Read More
Zillow just announced that it has paused its (algorithmic) US homebuying business for the remainder of this year. The company acquired some 3,800 homes in Q2 of this year and, apparently, it now has a backlog of repairs and sales to work through. As a… Read More
Packy McCormick’s latest “Not Boring” essay is up and it’s about Opendoor. It’s a good follow up to last week’s announcement. Maybe that’s why housing is one of the last major categories that technology has left alone. Sure, companies have tried. Tons of them. The… Read More
I would like to revisit the post that I wrote last week about the Brazil-based real estate startup, Loft. In it, I said that they are doing in Brazil what Opendoor, and others, are doing in the US. They are buying and flipping homes using… 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
BRANDON DONNELLY 