Our new marketplace, Opendoor Exclusives

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve launched our industry-defining marketplace, Opendoor Exclusives in our Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin markets. We’ve designed Opendoor Exclusives to be a new marketplace where you can directly buy and sell a home, without any of the hassle of the traditional real estate model. We are doing this by leveraging our nine years as a leading buyer and seller of homes, opening our platform and services, and aiming to bring together hundreds of thousands of our home sellers and home buyers. Today marks a founding moment as we expand our vision to service all homebuyers and homeowners and aim to redefine the real estate transaction forever.

This is not too dissimilar to our first founding moment nine years ago in an office above the Irish pub Kels on Howard Street. We posted a sign with our goal: to make it possible to buy and sell a home in 30 seconds or less. And almost every night, as the pub got louder from happy hour to last call, we worked past midnight towards this goal. We were a small team and we loved being the underdogs.

Soon after our launch in May of 2015, I chatted with Greg S., one of our first customers, who chose Opendoor because he collected antique record players and didn’t want strangers having access to his home. It turns out Greg wasn’t alone; more than 200,000 customer transactions later, homeowners have turned to us with their particular needs whether it was for safeguarding their collections or finding more space for a new family.

While we focused on the consumer experience, behind the scenes we were building the foundation for our future marketplace. The ability to get a quote in minutes and sell in days became an engine to attract hundreds of thousands of serious sellers every month. In fact, we’ve registered 30% of real sellers in some of our top markets. Our need to price, repair, maintain, and transact on homes at scale built our transaction and operations platform. Owning inventory enables us to rethink the shopping and buying experience and attracts hundreds of thousands of buyers to shop with us. As one of the largest buyers and sellers of homes, we’ve built, improved and optimized almost every step of the customer journey.

The recent real estate market volatility has presented an opportunity to leverage our unique capabilities and launch our marketplace that we believe will set the pace of the modern consumer real estate experience.

Exclusives for Home Sellers

We’re aiming to make the sales experience as easy as selling to Opendoor. Homeowners can request an offer from our network of buyers, on top of an Opendoor offer, and sell in minutes without the need for repairs, extensive home prep, or months of open houses or listings. The experience end-to-end is designed to put home sellers in control, with no upfront commitment, flexibility to close early, and certainty of close.

Exclusives for Buyers

Buying a home can be a stressful process – typically, customers have to live through bidding wars and endure the potential heartbreak of losing out on their dream home, all while trying to navigate the complexity of dozens of steps and multiple middlemen. We’re changing that.

Earlier this year, we announced the launch of our new buyer experience, a reimagined and e-commerce-like way to buy an Opendoor-owned home. The response from our customers was inspiring, including customer quotes like, “I felt like I was shopping for a home on Amazon” and “It just made the whole process seem a lot less daunting.” We built what we felt buyers deserved and we knew this was a far better way to help future homeowners accomplish their goals.

With Opendoor Exclusives, each of our homes comes with transparent, buy-it-now pricing and an Appraisal Price Match Guarantee, meaning if the home appraises for less, we’ll bridge the gap for buyers up to $50,000. And our buyers save up to $10,000 on every home. These features dramatically simplify the process, give buyers more confidence around paying the right price, and make purchasing more affordable.

2023 Vision and Beyond

Our belief is that by building a better, more efficient, and more transparent system, we can improve the outcomes for both buyers and sellers. Marketplaces have the unique ability to layer in more trust, simplify the process, and eliminate much of the complexity, opacity, and cost. We intend to do just that for real estate.

While our offices aren’t above a loud Irish pub anymore and though we’ve just launched, we are being bold with our ambition – aiming for over 30% of our total transactions via our Exclusives marketplace by the end of 2023 and be on the path to helping the next 200,000 customers. More importantly, we are aiming to change how the entire real estate system works for the better.

Eric Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Opendoor.

Further reading