I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
[deleted]
The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's defining it a bit narrowly isn't it? You guys buy homes, do a (little) work on them and then sell them for more, all in a short time frame. Maybe your innovation is in doing lots of small flips but it still seems like flipping to me.
I'm going to speak for OpenDoor here so someone from them can probably jump in, but the company I started and shut down was around financing house flippers and I have a background in both capital raising and real estate. There are many types of 'house flipping' and most of the differences are just various shades of grey. For illustration purposes: At one extreme: Focus on buying dramatically undervalued assets, putti…
I mean you get appraisal A (original house), then you know what additional profit and features to add to get appraisal B. There is a lot of slack in the remodel business and economies of scale to exploit so you can probably guarantee a nice return. Especially if you can guarantee a pool of work to contractors (start with having them bid on it and then maybe get a few in house contractors). You can probably get exclusives on materials as well.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you please write an email to your Marketing Department and pass along a note? Here's the text: "While effective in your goal of creating Brand Recognition of 'Open Door' please be informed that the blitz campaign with the radio ad featuring the sound of a doorbell ringing, followed by the company name, 'Open Door,' was one of the most unabashedly Pavlovian ear-worm manipulation techniques I can recall. It almost…
I am sorry about that ad. We cut it after two weeks, and modified it after the first week to be less intrusive. I'll take fault for letting that through review; I got your email the first time it went live. I learned a lot from it, as did the team.
Yeah it was really bad and hurt the brand. Subsequent ones are a lot more appealing and, not kidding, very high quality and effective.
Glad you've decided to take a more mature tack in advertising, but as we all may well know, you only get one chance at a first impression. As such, I don't intend to brow-beat you or your team, just let you know that certain choices have consequences. That commercial was essentially a landmine and if shrapnel happened to take off a limb or two of yours in the process, I hope it's a good learning experience.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#74What an amazing business model. Not something I would have considered as I would consider the capital requirements too high to purchase almost any house. They will walk a fine line between being too picky and excluding an average consumer or having too high a price and losing money. But regardless it is very cool and potentially disruptive, much more than Redfin. A silicon valley version of "We buy your homes for cash"
EDIT: As commentors on BiggerPockets are saying, it is just like Carmax.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's defining it a bit narrowly isn't it? You guys buy homes, do a (little) work on them and then sell them for more, all in a short time frame. Maybe your innovation is in doing lots of small flips but it still seems like flipping to me.
Perhaps another way of thinking about it is in terms of being a market maker versus a speculator. I think of Opendoor as more like the former, where traditionally a flipper refers to the latter.
Market makers make money on the spread and facilitate liquidity. Speculators hold an asset (sometimes short term) for a rising price.
Flippers traditionally do benefit from a rising market because of longer hold times.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#76Earlier 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.
Also, real estate agents are just as incentivized to sell the property as quickly as possible. Selling a property at say $1M in one week (3k commission) > 1.05M in three weeks (only $150 more for two more weeks of work).
I wish real estate agents commissions where tiered. 1% for selling at market rate but 10% for anything over the market.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sorry about that ad. We cut it after two weeks, and modified it after the first week to be less intrusive. I'll take fault for letting that through review; I got your email the first time it went live. I learned a lot from it, as did the team.
Yeah it was really bad and hurt the brand. Subsequent ones are a lot more appealing and, not kidding, very high quality and effective. Glad you've decided to take a more mature tack in advertising, but as we all may well know, you only get one chance at a first impression. As such, I don't intend to brow-beat you or your team, just let you know that certain choices have consequences. That commercial was essentially a…
Always appreciate the feedback.
Like most companies, we used an agency and gave them a brief containing benefits we want to convey, which they turn into a script and produce. We learned that getting closer to the ads is quite important. We don't work with that agency anymore.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I never said they were free.
If getting an agent on your own cost 5%-6%, and opendoor is charging 12%... you are losing 6-7% by using opendoor. That is a LOT of money.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm just a little over a year out of school myself, so I'm far from an expert, but happy to share some things that come to mind.
I haven't had a chance to look through it in-depth yet, but this looks pretty interesting: https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
As far as things that have had an important impact in my learning path, I do have a few Ruby books I really like (the key here is to get your hands dirty with code as you read along): - https://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Under-Microscope-Illustrated-Int... - https://www.amazon.com/Metaprogramming-Ruby-Program-Like-Fac... - https://gumroad.com/l/rebuilding_rails
I think reading about (and looking at the code) for things you use and trying to understand how they work under the hood has been super useful: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
Having smart people around to learn from is extremely helpful too.
Happy to chat more if you'd like. Just drop me a line: connor[at]opendoor[dot]com