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Opendoor buys homes directly from sellers and resells them to buyers, charging a fee for the convenience.
Opendoor is a house flipper at industrial scale, but the twist is that it uses software to do it. You go to its website, type in your address, answer a few questions about your home, and within a day or two you get a cash offer. If you accept, Opendoor buys your house, makes small repairs, and lists it for sale again. The seller pays a service fee — usually around 5% — plus some repair costs. That fee is how Opendoor makes money. Its customers are ordinary people who want to sell fast without staging, showings, or strangers walking through their home.
Think of it as the CarMax of houses: instead of listing your car and haggling with buyers, you sell it to a dealer for less than you'd get privately, and you pay for that speed and certainty. Opendoor's whole business depends on two things: buying homes at a price where it can resell them at a profit, and moving them quickly so its money isn't stuck in unsold houses. When the housing market is hot and prices rise, that's easy. When prices fall or mortgages get expensive, Opendoor can get stuck holding homes it paid too much for — and that's exactly what happened in 2022 and 2023, when the company posted large losses.
Lately Opendoor has been shrinking its home-buying operation to stop the bleeding, cutting costs, and leaning on its newer services like title, escrow, and mortgage through its app. Its revenue has fallen sharply from the pandemic boom years, when it sold over $14 billion in homes annually, down to a few billion. The company went public in 2020 by merging with a blank-check company, and it's headquartered in San Francisco. It doesn't pay a dividend and doesn't buy back meaningful amounts of stock — any cash it generates gets plowed back into buying more homes. The big question hanging over it is simple: can it ever reliably buy houses, resell them, and pocket a spread without getting crushed when the housing market turns?
Saved answer · last researched 12 Oct 2026