I got an email this morning from Mike Delprete about Redfin and Opendoor “pausing” buying activity due to the COVID-19 situation: By temporarily pausing the purchase of homes, Opendoor has shut off its only source of revenue; there’s no iBuying without buying. The effect is akin to an airliner losing both engines while in flight. … Read more
In the Q3/2019 writeup, I wrote that Zillow is not experimenting, but trying to pivot with great delicacy: My take on Q3 is that Zillow is in the midst of a BCG 2×2 Matrix exercise and a delicate point (in a good way) in the transition from Zillow 1.0 to Zillow 2.0. What they’re doing … Read more
One of my favorite people in the industry, Joe Rand, a broker-owner from New York, a corporate lawyer by training, and an amazing singer has penned an article for Inman titled, “Be resilient in the face of disruption: My big takeaway from Inman Connect New York.” It’s worth a read, so go do that. Given … Read more
The first interview of the New Year is with Nick Taylor, VP of Growth at Modus.
In the next couple of weeks, we’ll get earnings releases from Zillow. I wish we get earnings reports from Opendoor and Offerpad, but… hey, we can only look at what we can look at. So I completed my analysis of Q4 iBuyer numbers out of Phoenix, where I have the best dataset. Let’s see what … Read more
Over at Forbes, Peter Smirniotopoulos, a Contributor who writes about real estate, penned an article titled, “AI, and iBuyers, Oh My! Are There Structural Limits to PropTech?” It is such a great example of how mistaken Wall Street people are about the iBuyer phenomenon and how confused some of the smartest people in the world … Read more
In today’s episode of the Notorious Interview, I talk with Jarred Kessler, Founder & CEO of EasyKnock, the most interesting company in our space I had never heard of. I corrected that oversight, obviously, and I thought you should too. EasyKnock is hard to classify: it’s kind of like a blend between a bridge loan … Read more
Back in Q2, I titled my analysis of Zillow’s earnings, “Going All In” and wrote: When Rich Barton took (back) over as CEO of Zillow earlier this year, I wrote a Red Dot and titled it, “The Return of the King.” I didn’t realize then that the king was not just a fighter, but a … Read more
Back in February, I wrote a post that is one of the top read posts of 2019. It was titled, “Homeowners Net More Selling to Zillow Than With a REALTOR.” I wrote that based on the unit economics that Zillow released in its Q1 earnings call, and I have been collecting data on Zillow Offers, … Read more