The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
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Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#2I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#3[deleted]
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#4Just as interesting to me as the tech stack is the business stack. There have to be some really tightly-managed pipelines of deals because Opendoor is fronting capital to buy up the houses. Interesting scaling challenges there on the capital side.
If Opendoor works out how to quickly vacate the newly-bought property, then automate much of the project coordination activity that is done to flip the property by automatically scheduling and bringing in contractors and inspectors, that could lead to some really interesting returns. Even if the sprucing up is not to flip for huge amounts, just the usual repairs and freshening changes, combined with an empty house to show, could easily lead to semi-automation of a buy-low sell-high, high-volume business of conveniently buying a lived-in house, and selling a nice-looking, nice-smelling, high-curb-appeal house for much higher than the original property owners could bring. Automate the scheduling of staging and unstaging, and goose the numbers even more. I can see all sorts of other follow-on monetization streams from this simple change in the process you guys introduced, thanks for the thought-provoking write up, I look forward to reading much more about your successes in the future.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#5this 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?
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#6I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
Thanks for popping in!
It's mentioned that the "projected cost" logic outgrew Rails, but there's no mention of what that microservice eventually wound up running. I'm curious what you had success with.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#7I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
I like that you do code reviews of every commit, do you have any issues with getting people to spend time reviewing? Also, it looks like you have a very broad code base (backend, frontend, mobile, machine learning...), do all of your engineers review code for all of those areas? I've found that in small teams sometimes only one person really understands a particular section of code, which can result in poor quality code reviews. I'm interested to hear if you've experienced that, or if you've managed to work around it.
FYI, the title of https://www.opendoor.com is: "Opendoorflexible-dateno-repairopen-houseonline-processfair-inspectionfast-closinghome-readycustomer-supportfair-offertransparency | Sell your home the minute you're ready.", which looks like a mistake to me. Probably need to add another test ;)
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#8I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
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 makes 'Head On - apply directly to the forehead' look like high art. DING DONG - OPEN DOOR! DING DONG - OPEN DOOR!
Because of this tactic, I will never, ever reflect upon the brand of Open Door with anything but disgust. Yeah, you got market share, good for you. How you did it, however, makes me want to puke."
It might sound extreme, but I have a sensitive brain. That goddamn commercial was everywhere. And terrible.
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#9I'm a software engineer at Opendoor- happy to answer any questions!
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 curious what auth looked like in your MVP.
Thanks!
Re: The Stack That Helped Opendoor Buy and Sell Over $1B in Homes
#10Just as interesting to me as the tech stack is the business stack. There have to be some really tightly-managed pipelines of deals because Opendoor is fronting capital to buy up the houses. Interesting scaling challenges there on the capital side. If Opendoor works out how to quickly vacate the newly-bought property, then automate much of the project coordination activity that is done to flip the property by automati…
But it basically is flipping isn't it? Maybe they can work out how to flip a little cheaper with technology but this model only works because flipping is so hot right now.
http://www.housingwire.com/articles/39523-home-flipping-hits...