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
Opendoor just published its 2021 year in review. In it are a few interesting figures about the housing market in the US. According to a recent survey that the company did, the average first-time buyer made 10 offers before successfully securing a home last year.… 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
Matt Levine’s latest column is a good follow-up to yesterday’s post about Zillow exiting the algorithmic home-buying business. In it, he talks about the differences between being a market maker and being a trader of homes. Part of his argument is that if you’re a… 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
Sundae, which is a residential real estate marketplace that connects distressed sellers and/or dated properties with potential investors, has just raised $80 million in Series C funding. Since its founding in 2018, the company has raised a total of $135 million. The marketplace is largely… 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
I’ve written about this before on the blog, but one of my qualms about architecture school was that it was too often taboo to talk about business and money. Why? Talking about and understanding the realities of the world doesn’t have to mean that you’re… 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
BRANDON DONNELLY 