So, OpenDoor == CarMax for homes?
Data scientist at Opendoor here. That is a very accurate analogy.
The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that they actually disagree with you, see the comment further up this thread. >Opendoor is much more focused on the customer experience, trying to give fair offers to every home - everyday homes, not distressed ones. So do you think that this response is being a bit coy and they are in fact buying deeply discounted homes? Also, I guess I don't understand where they actually make money. If someone is un…
Longer comment on "flipping": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13835150 . > Also, I guess I don't understand where they actually make money. Sorry for not being more clear on that. When we make an offer on a home, we present a headline price ("we think your home is worth $X"), and an upfront fee for our service (6-12% depending on our estimation of the risk, where traditional real estate fees are 6%). We try to m…
Most house flippers are not some evil group going around tricking grandmas. Their typical pitch goes like this:
I will buy your house immediately. The way I can do it is to offer you a lower price than you can get if you wait to sell it. Here is my offer for 88% of what your house is worth.
If they wanted to change their pitch it would be...
I buy houses from people. I can close right away, but I need to charge you a 12% fee for a fast closing. That really only costs you 6% because you dont have to hire a broker.
Economically, they are the exact same pitch. There is nothing wrong with either approach. I do understand you not wanting to be associated with flippers, but the reality is hard to argue against.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's inherently wrong with wanting to sell quickly. If grandma died, leaving me her house 3,000 miles away from where I live, the last thing I'd want to be saddled with is trying to sell it. I know nothing about selling (or owning) a house, the real estate market in that area, etc. A fair enough price ASAP is what I'd be looking for.
Why not make one call to a local agent and have it sold for 5% more money? I'm all for paying $2 for convenience if coffee on the run. Not sure I would pay $20k to save a few hours work around selling a house.
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Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#54As a senior computer science student, who constantly tries to learn and keep up to date on his own time, I felt a little overwhelmed after reading this article. I know that they are just tools that can be learned, but my question is about junior devs. How do you go about hiring (if it is the case that you do hire junior devs) and training them?
Ah, they're just tools that can be learned. I had to run around the company quite a bit to make sure I got all the information right. We don't require experience in any of these tools to get a job at Opendoor. Most programming experience can be transferred between different technologies. We do a lot of pair programming to bring people on board, plus feedback in code reviews.
Thanks for the answer! If there is any resource that you remember had an important impact in your learning path as a scalable application programmer I'd very much appreciate to hear about it. Cheers.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#55As a senior computer science student, who constantly tries to learn and keep up to date on his own time, I felt a little overwhelmed after reading this article. I know that they are just tools that can be learned, but my question is about junior devs. How do you go about hiring (if it is the case that you do hire junior devs) and training them?
Ah, they're just tools that can be learned. I had to run around the company quite a bit to make sure I got all the information right. We don't require experience in any of these tools to get a job at Opendoor. Most programming experience can be transferred between different technologies. We do a lot of pair programming to bring people on board, plus feedback in code reviews.
Just to add to what Alex said. We also wouldn't expect you to be knowledgable on _all_ the tools we use. We have a very open team that's happy to help and mentor.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
We started in 2014 with a Ruby on Rails monolith and Angular frontend, both of which were good ways to move fast while we were very small. We use Webpack to build our frontend apps, and serve them using the Rails Asset Pipeline. Within your MVP how did you handle authentication between your Angular apps and your Rails backend? I know you implemented Paladin to handle auth between your new microservices but I'm curiou…
Hi! When we first started we used a pretty vanilla version of Devise. The angular application just used session based auth. The easiest way to get the MVP happening was to have Rails generate the landing page of the SPA so we got sessions for 'free'. As we started to add more options for authenticating to the application to handle micro-services and our mobile application we took advantage of Warden/Devise and implem…
Thanks for the quick and detailed response!
I use Devise most of my Rails apps, so in my ApplicationController I have `before_action :authenticate_user!`.
Did any of your frontend Angular apps send/request data to a Rails controller? If so, did you have to configure your Angular requests to send the session cookie so it would pass the Devise auth? This is the part that I don't quite understand yet.
In my next side-project I want to continue using Rails for the backend and scaffolding for most pages but I have a small React app that I want to include as well (keeping track of stats for a basketball game). But I'm not really sure what's the best way to go about authorizing whether or not the user has the permissions to upload data to a specific profile. I've only ever used Rails/Devise and all user input occurs through a form.
If you could point me in the direction of what I should be Googling for I'd appreciate it. Best of luck with Opendoor!
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's inherently wrong with wanting to sell quickly. If grandma died, leaving me her house 3,000 miles away from where I live, the last thing I'd want to be saddled with is trying to sell it. I know nothing about selling (or owning) a house, the real estate market in that area, etc. A fair enough price ASAP is what I'd be looking for.
Why not make one call to a local agent and have it sold for 5% more money? I'm all for paying $2 for convenience if coffee on the run. Not sure I would pay $20k to save a few hours work around selling a house.
Agents are not free! Around where I live, you can expect to pay 3% to each of the two agents involved. Selling the house for 5% more doesn't help you if you have to give 6% of the sales price to the agents. I wonder how much of what Opendoor is trying to achieve involves removing or reducing the agent involvement.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the comment -- and it's very accurate in terms of where we'd like to go. On a tangential note: empowering untrained individuals is important, but we often do the opposite too. Many of our internal tools are designed to make trained professionals/experts as efficient as possible. For more speculation on Opendoor's business and where we might take it, I think Stratechery has a good writeup. https://strateche…
yup, i also wrote a deeper analysis after someone posted about opendoor in december. what will be super interesting to watch is how the market size (i.e., annual real estate transactions) changes in response to reduced friction. historically, disruptive technology like uber widens the market substantially because it unlocks all this demand artificially suppressed by friction. because of opendoor and similar startups,…
It would be great to move as a home owner and be able to avoid the 5-6% realtor cost on both ends (10-12% total). This could enable millions of people choose better living arrangements. Unfortunately for people in California, Prop 13 will still create huge costs to moving.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! When we first started we used a pretty vanilla version of Devise. The angular application just used session based auth. The easiest way to get the MVP happening was to have Rails generate the landing page of the SPA so we got sessions for 'free'. As we started to add more options for authenticating to the application to handle micro-services and our mobile application we took advantage of Warden/Devise and implem…
Thanks for the quick and detailed response! I use Devise most of my Rails apps, so in my ApplicationController I have `before_action :authenticate_user!`. Did any of your frontend Angular apps send/request data to a Rails controller? If so, did you have to configure your Angular requests to send the session cookie so it would pass the Devise auth? This is the part that I don't quite understand yet. In my next side-pr…
If you're generating the page from your rails server then the cookie that is set for sessions would be already available and you can make calls without worrying too much about authentication. If you want to use tokens or OAuth strategies there's a bit more to it but you should be able to find lots of information on it with a bit of googling. Here's an article that seems to cover the basics. https://technpol.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/angularjs-and-devi...
I'd usually google for a collection of the tools I'm looking at. To find that article I searched for "spa authentication with rails and devise"
Good luck with your side project :D
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#60this looks quite clever, opening doors via a code? nice. that would certainly get my attention. One thing, are you guys doing any modelling using graphs? or is all your data normalized and stored in relational DBs?
I can't speak for the data science stack, but everything in the web stack is Postgresql (with the exception of Redis for background jobs and things of that nature).