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
This is a fun little passion project by Airbnb-engineer Andrew Pariser and someone known as Potch. The way it works is that it shows you a picture of a recently sold property, and you have to guess what it sold for. You get a bunch… 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
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
I was reading up on vaccine passports this morning. What is clear is that countries are scrambling to figure this out right now, though I understand Israel is already up and running, as is South Korea, which has a system built on top of the… Read More
I can’t open Twitter these days without seeing someone in the tech industry talking about moving or talking about someone who just moved to either Austin or Miami. “What’s the best neighborhood in Miami for startups? My friend just moved to Edgewater. Where did so-and-so… 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 