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
This week it was announced that Social Capital Hedosophia II — a special purpose acquisition company associated with Chamath Palihapitiya — will merge with the real estate startup Opendoor, effectively taking the company public. Without going into all of the details, SPACs are kind of… 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
Bloomberg recently published a good summary of Zillow’s business and their move into algorithm home buying and flipping. (They are trying to avoid the “flipping” moniker because of the negative connotations associated with it.) Zillow started buying homes directly from owners last spring. They charge… Read More
I have been writing about the real estate startup Opendoor for many years here on the blog. Another promising startup in this space is Knock, and today it was announced that they just raised a $400 million Series B round (led by Foundry Group). They share… Read More
I have written a lot about Opendoor over the past few years because it is one of the most promising “proptech” startups in operation today and I am obviously very interested in the impact of tech on the real estate industry. I also have a fascination… Read More
