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)… Read More
We have spoken a lot over the years about Opendoor. And for a period of time, iBuying seemed like a very good idea. Zillow go into it. Redfin got into it. Everybody was iBuying. But then this year everybody started losing money, mostly due to… Read More
Matt Levine’s latest Money Stuff column does a good job explaining why a lot of smart people are trying to figure out a market-making model for homes (see companies such as Opendoor): People want to apply the market-making model to homes. This makes sense. Buying… Read More
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
BRANDON DONNELLY 