Don't worry black rock ( look them up on yahoo finance) with 20 trillion dollars stolen from the american people via the privately owned federal reserve will buy up all the houses in
America.
Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
111–120 of 476 posts
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#112This is kind of a big deal in the real estate sector. The only reason that Zillow would sell everything right now is if they believed that the carrying costs of the properties until they (eventually) sell would eat all of their profits. They must be seeing flashing red signs across the board that there's a slowdown in the market and that scenario is exactly what will play out if they don't exit quickly. There's no wa…
The fact that they're also laying off a quarter of their staff looks significant, to me. They can't afford to hold these properties and keep the lights on. It's a lot like Uber -- in addition to the ordinary expenses of a real estate holding firm, they've also got a website to run, and that's stupid expensive because it seems like the industry still hasn't learned from the first .com bubble.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#113Good riddance, I hope this company burns to the ground
The software developers working for this company knowingly tried to make algorithms to flip and profit off of something that should be a human right
Replacing carpets and painting walls, trying to flip for a 20% profit, the people running Z must be geniuses
As a millennial looking at 2 bedroom flats selling for £575k (780k usd, not far from a million dollars) in my area, I cannot help but have tears of joy when corporations who hope to profit off of our desperate housing situation get hit by reality straight in the face
Ask yourself who benefits from housing prices rising. If you lie to yourself that it's people who are trying to move up the housing ladder, remember that your flat appreciating 50% in 2 years means the house you want to move into by selling your flat also appreciates 50%, so you win nothing
It's the rent seeking leeches of society that think that by buying a "portfolio" of houses, they can live out their lives without contributing society in any way
Anyone arguing against this has either a dog in the race, or loose screws in the head
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#114What % of the market were Zillow purchases? And what effect has it had on prices overall? I mean one comp sale can effect 5, 10, 30+ homes, yes? All therefore also overpriced, and so on.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#115I suppose ai should stick to crappy chat support bots and deepfakes for a while. Prepare for more colossal failures like this one. Self driving cars killing people are not painful enough but once money are lost investment will dry out.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#116I don't get Zillow's play here. They were for a long time the de facto neutral party everyone used to look at houses. Great. Then they got into doing contracts apparently, still OK. Then they started competing against people and overbidding everyone, at the height of what appears to be the biggest housing boom of my lifetime. This was not only apparently financially dangerous, but an act that puts them in a bad light…
I think Zillow saw the numbers going up in the housing market and got FOMO. It's crazy to think an institution like this would get FOMO, but I think what happened is in 2020 they saw housing prices go through the roof, thought to themselves "hey we have all of this data, we can make a quick buck here" and piled in only to now get burned.
They started ZO back in 2018. I think the bigger concern was the amount of growth and threat Opendoor presented them. There was a vision that they will fundamentally change the sector and make Zillow an equivalent of what the White Pages is to Google.
So yes it was FOMO, but not based on quickly appreciating real estate.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#117damn they got the algorithm wrong.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#118Ooops
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#119Crazy. I recently sold a condo to Opendoor for significantly more than I would have even thought to list it for. When I negotiated with Opendoor after their initial offer, I pointed out a recently sold condo (days before, in similar condition, layout and finishes) in the same complex that sold for much higher than Opendoor offered. Within hours Opendoor came back matching that same selling price. The kicker? It was a…
That doesn't sound like an algorithm mistake, just like a policy to match sales nearby at the same price because of the assumption that prices will just keep going up coupled with the stupidity of not tracking what you've bought so far - yikes! Oh, on second thought, I guess it could be algo as that previously bought nearby condo could have been priced using some crazy algorithm.
Re: Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff
#120> ‘We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would result in too much earnings and balance-sheet volatility,’ CEO tells investors. That's quite a statement. The head of a company with a privileged view of the US residential real estate sector says that the market is "unpredictable." Not the good kind of unpredictable where yo…
When I use Zillow and check the Zestimate, for various properties, it seems to be super far off. If they used it for speculative property purchases, I can imagine that would go terribly wrong.