Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff

Post by 93po » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

dogman144 wrote: post #214

anchpop wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because they would outbid people who actually want to live in those homes If they outbid everyone who actually wanted to live there, who were they planning to sell to? :P Buying things you think are underpriced and reselling them is not frontrunning. (Ever since GME, a lot of people learned the word frontrunning and started using it in every possible situation.) Zillow's plan was to act as a market maker. Market ma…

Lol at trying to explain these practices as some sort of Randian perfectly functioning market.

Post by 93po » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #202

maxsilver wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing wrong with that. Zillow was literally scalping housing , a basic human need that all people must buy. That's generally considered very immoral by most reasonable people. And they didn't just do it once or twice, they did it at ridiculous scale (tens of thousands of homes sold last quarter, was a sale to a scalper to artificially drive up all housing prices). Most reasonable people would consider this behavi…

I don't consider it evil. When you buy a house, fix it up, and resell it, you're essentially providing a renovation service to whoever will buy it next. There's no meaningful difference between you renovating a house and selling it and an owner-occupant buying the house and renovating it themselves. In this case, Zillow bought houses too high and sold them too low. As a result, the market punished that irrational beh…

Post by 93po » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #33

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #3

For some reason I can't reply to dang's comment, but this is Zillow basically saying they are giving up completely on flipping, whereas the article this morning said that they were pulling back and delaying buying more houses to flip (not giving up, but in trouble). So this is pretty big additional news from the context of this morning's article.

7k homes isn't going to move the national market remotely. There were rumors that Zillow was trying to test if they could manipulate small markets - and they were trying to buy a significant portion of listings in those markets. If true - in those areas - they could get completely destroyed if they list a lot of places at once. And if true - I hope they get a huge fine for trying to manipulate the housing market.

Post by nradov » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

selcuka wrote: post #220

derefr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> house prices have a fundamental ceiling, and it is determined by the size of the monthly payment that banks will allow the typical homebuyer to assume when approving a loan. In the more irrationally-hot markets, why assume that housing is even being purchased on a mortgage by your average home-buyer, rather than being purchased cash-in-hand by a private or corporate investor looking to park wealth they've already g…

If the current value of something is over a "fundamental ceiling" it means that it's already inflated. Why would an investor park their wealth in such an asset?

Post by thomasjudge » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 2:13 AM UTC

djanogo wrote: post #85

Sold my house at the peek few months back to Zillow, they then sold it about 8% loss last month. The $/sqft price Zillow paid us is THE highest for our city EVER under Didn't make any sense to us at the time on why Zillow (and also Opendoor) was making such a high offer, the process was very smooth AND fast. Too bad they won't be around.