Zillow Botched Buying Homes. Opendoor Thinks It Can Do Better
WiredFollowing Mark Zuckerberg’s lead, I’ve been trying to think of a catchy way to refer to you Plaintext readers. For years, the online real estate company—best known for helping prospective buyers estimate the price of properties—had been buying homes from customers who wanted a quick, seamless sale, a practice known as iBuying. As a chastened CEO Rich Barton admitted to CNBC, “we’ve been unable to accurately forecast future home prices.” It seemed like a bad moment for iBuying, which is currently a tiny slice of the overall market but has ambitions to overthrow the way people sell houses. By giving sellers a speedy offer, this approach spares homeowners the stress of staging a sale and going through the high-pressure dramatics of a traditional closing, where at the last moment the prospective buyer might decide to make costly repair requests, or demand to keep the chandeliers you’d already found a place for in your next pad. Opendoor, which went public via SPAC last year, reports rising revenues and a gross profit, though it still loses a bundle after costs are accounted for.
History of this topic
Zillow will stop buying and renovating homes and cut 25% of its workforce
NPR
Here's why Zillow won't be buying any more homes to renovate and resell this year
NPR
Zillow will now make cash offers for homes based on its ‘Zestimates’
CNN
Zillow is losing millions on selling homes. But its CEO Rich Barton isn’t worried
CNNDiscover Related
