All right, hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Matthew Cost, the Morgan Stanley U.S. Internet team. Very pleased today to be joined by Carrie Wheeler, CEO of Opendoor. Thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So I'm just gonna quickly go through the disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your MS Sales representative. All right. So maybe, maybe let's talk about online penetration. Residential real estate, broadly, is one of the largest TAMs of consumer expenditure, but, but it also is one of the lowest online penetration rates. So maybe start high level. Let's talk about why you think iBuying is the right approach to change that adoption curve.
Yeah, I mean, you said it already. I mean, residential real estate's this massive market has seen very little disruption so far outside of discovery in terms of online transactions for real estate. And more important, maybe than the size of the market, is, like, the enormity of the problem. I mean, for the average consumer selling your home through the traditional listing process, it's pretty wretched, right? You've gotta find an agent, list your home, you gotta do repairs on spec, you've gotta hold a bunch of open houses. And assuming you do all that and you get a buyer that you've probably negotiated with, the chances of that transaction falling through are 1 in 4. So then you start the whole thing again. So, we're going after a problem that affects millions of people a year, a year, and it's super stressful. It's super uncertain.
Most people would say, like, selling your home is, like, a top three, four stressor in life. So that's the problem set. Big market, big problem set. The reason why we think our offering is so superior is because it takes all those pain points, all that friction out of the system. It lets you have a cash offer, it lets you transact with simplicity and total certainty. There's no listings, there's no showings, there's no repairs on spec. All that stuff goes away, and what you have is control for the first time over what is probably the most important transaction you're ever gonna have as a consumer. So that's something we feel really good about in terms of our purpose and what we're here to do. Yeah.
So obviously, you know, having been through the process and the heartache of trying to, you know, get an offer on a home and falling through it, I think it's very clear your point about how this is a superior consumer experience. So I guess, you know, I guess from a home selling perspective, maybe more than buying in my particular case. But what is the roadblock or the adoption challenge you need to work with? Is it just awareness? I mean, how do you get people on board with this, I think, clearly, you know, strong consumer experience?
I mean, awareness is clearly key. We have been around for a decade, and yet still today our aided awareness is relatively low. So making sure that people understand that this is an alternative that's real, is paramount. We've been focused on how do we put our offers and our, our just our placement out there in front of more people. So that's been expanding partnership channels and expanding brand investment to make sure that people are aware. When people understand what they can do, they say yes to the offer. That's why our NPS is 80. That's why we've served 250,000 sellers and counting. So it's really it's been an awareness and then also an expansion over time. I mean, we have been very deliberate about how we've expanded, whether that's buy box expansion or market expansion, because we wanna be deliberate about execution.
You know, ultimately, this should be a mass product, nationwide product.
Mm-hmm. Got it. Let's talk about spreads. How do you manage spreads, and use it as a lever to move through the cycle with the business? And how does that play into your risk mitigation and strategy around expenses?
Yeah. So for us, spreads are the lever by which we're thinking about managing those trade-offs between growth and margin and risk.
Mm-hmm.
So, for everyone who's not familiar with the story, Spread's another way to think about what's the discount in that offer we're giving to a consumer. The lower my Spread, the lower that discount, the more I can drive growth because that consumer's more apt to say yes to an offer and convert on that. And we saw throughout 2023, after the market kinda took a downturn, that, you know, Spreads were really high, conversion was low, acquisitions were muted as a result of that. And as we've been able to do the work to reduce Spreads durably through cost savings and improving price accuracy, we've been able to increase our acquisition pace quarter to quarter throughout 2023 and then contract growth going into this year.
So really, that trade-off between growth and margin, we wanna grow, but we also wanna deliver within that 5%-7% annual margin target. The other lever that we use spreads for is just really to manage our macroeconomic risk and also home-level risk. So, again, if you're less certain about something, spreads will widen. The tighter I can be in terms of understanding that home or understanding kind of, like, feeling good about home price stability, the tighter I can be on spreads.
Right. Maybe we can talk about some of the ancillary or add-on products that you have at Opendoor. You know, so obviously, the majority of your revenue today comes from the core business by far. But when you think about things like T&E, the marketplace, you know, is there one where you see the company prioritizing investment and focus and trying to grow versus others? And, you know, do they—can you talk about how they enhance your core unit economics?
If there's been one watchword for us over the last, say, 18 months, really 2023 going into this year, it's, like, focus.
Mm-hmm.
We're gonna focus on our core product because, as we said, it's still relatively nascent in terms of understanding, awareness, and share. The good news is, as we think about how do we get to a size and scale so that we are positive cash flow, like, adjusted EBITDA positive, we can do that today in our current core product set. We don't need to rely on any ancillary revenue whatsoever.
Mm-hmm.
To do that. So that's number one. It's, like, focus, deliver on cash flow profitability with what we have today in the ground, the number of markets we have, our buy box, our core proposition. But we want ancillaries over time too. So we have a title and escrow business. It's very profitable. It attaches at 80%+ kinda rates. It's accretive. It shows up in our gross margin line. And then we're also working on mortgage, which is I mean, sorry, not mortgage, marketplace, which is the third-party product we talked about, which is, you know, attaching buyers and sellers and being a bit of a market maker in the middle of that. That is a longer-term initiative for us. It's not gonna change whether or not we are cash flow positive near medium term.
But it's something that we are wed to strategically as a long-term initiative for us. I think the most important thing is, like, based on what we have today, we don't need to underwrite anything in terms of product expansion, ancillaries to get to a level where we're cash flow sustainable and then can grow from there.
Got it. So I think, you know, just to revisit that, it would be fair to say then that it really is this very laser focus on the core product right now. And these ancillary products are things that you care about, that you intend to grow over time, but they're not the driver of the business.
Correct. There's a long list of them outside the ones we talked about. I mean, we can certainly think about all the other things that come with a home transaction over time, whether that's insurance or warranty or moving or personalization. Those are all there for us to get. It is just not the priority for 2024.
Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the rate of home acquisitions, I guess, in that core business. So towards the end of last year, you spoke to plans of doubling the home acquisition rate from 1,000 homes a month to 2,000 by the middle of this year. So I guess, is that still the goal? And how are you tracking towards it?
Yeah. So that was part of the framework we put out there. We said, "Hey, we're at 3,000 homes per month right now. And to get back again to that cash flow break-even, we wanna be actually at 2,200 homes per month.
Mm-hmm.
Which is about $10 billion of volume. That's the magic number by which we're cash flow sustainable. The short answer is, given what I said earlier on spreads, we feel good about where we are today to be able to kinda get back to that level and then beyond. I mean, that's a milestone for us. It's not an endpoint. Obviously, our aspirations are well beyond that $10 billion number.
Mm-hmm.
But given where our spreads are and what we're seeing in terms of the market right now, which is pretty good home price stability, which for us is the most important thing, to be able to kinda price homes with a reasonable view to kinda where they're gonna end up in the 4-6-month holding period we have, we feel good about our ability to execute against that.
Mm-hmm. And when you look out of the market to decide, you know, how quickly you can execute along that path of growing the rate of home acquisitions, is it what are the metrics that you're looking at? Because the first thing that comes to my mind is homes available for sale. But of course, you're also trying to create willingness to sell by offering a superior product. So I guess, what are you watching to determine, "Hey, over the next 6-12 months or 12-18 months or whatever time period it is, we have confidence to go out to the market or to investors and say, 'We can grow to 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 a month'?" What tells you that that's in the cards?
Well, a couple things. First of all, there's a lot of focus on what's happened with the transaction velocity.
Mm-hmm.
Certainly, it's a horrible time to be a home buyer. Affordability's been constrained. Sellers have felt frozen because of the lock-in effect of mortgages. But what gets lost in all that is that 4 million people are still moving.
Mm-hmm.
Like, there's 4 million people who are moving. And against that 4 million people, we have a $600 million addressable market based on our buy box. So we don't need to believe that much to go from 1,000 to 2,000 to 3,000. That's going from, you know, less than 1% share to something a little bit higher. So we certainly don't feel constrained from the market environment, from an overall transaction velocity side. The constraint is, like, do you feel good about the home price velocity from a variability standpoint? And home price has been pretty stable. So that's number one. What was the second part of your question, Matt?
Talking about just what you're looking at externally to get confidence to, you know, so I, I feel like you were kind of addressing also the second part.
I think it's really even in the home price stability side of the equation, which have been pretty stable, frankly, even though supply's depressed, buyer demand is depressed, they're relatively in line.
Mm-hmm.
That has been a good setup for us in terms of how we can set spreads and offer reasonable prices to customers.
That sets up very well for where I wanted to go next, which is just about the amount of transaction volume in the market. I think it's no surprise to anyone in this room that that's slowed down, and there are a lot of reasons why. But interest rates are probably by far the biggest one. I guess, do you have a view at Opendoor on what rate level we would need to see to see a meaningful increase in the amount of homes available for sale? Or is that even the right metric for us to think about as sort of, like, the milestone we need to hit?
Yeah. I mean, really kinda banging back to the earlier comment, we care most about what is the trajectory for home prices and how stable are those home prices.
Mm-hmm.
Again, we're a small player in what is an enormous market.
Mm-hmm.
And while transaction velocity and sales are down 20% this year, they're at 1995 levels. Like, they're certainly depressed. Given where we play, that's not the constraint. The constraint is, do we feel good enough about the home price environment? And we do. That's the reason why we took our spreads down so much last year. It's a reason why we're able to put marketing dollars back into the system right now, but be up 50% quarter-on-quarter, because we like where we sit in terms of our ability to offer you something that feels reasonable. It's really not about market volumes.
Mm-hmm.
Not, but not the share level we're at today. Again, the 4 million people we're talking to.
Right. So the thing that matters, if I understand that, is your ability to tighten spreads. And that's what matters first.
You think about what's in a spread. Spread is, where do we set our contribution margins?
Mm-hmm.
It's our cost structure.
Mm-hmm.
Can we reasonably price that home in terms of accuracy? And then the last part of it is, like, how will that home fare in our ownership period in terms of when we go to sell it? We control 1, 2, and 3. 4, I don't control. We don't have a crystal ball. So we're really focused on the first 3. And so long as this last 4 is within some relative range of reasonable, we can be much more efficient in how we set spreads and drive growth.
Got it. I guess so you're currently active in 50 markets right now. I guess, how should we think about the pace of expansion to additional markets? Like, what would you say your approach is to balancing investments towards adding those new markets versus growing share in the markets where you currently operate?
There are two main ways for us to think about expanding our market footprint. One way is just what you said. It's more cities, right? 50 today, expanding that to be nationwide over time. And the other lever is really, and how do we define our buy box, right? What is the universe of homes within a given market that we feel like we have the algorithm, the pricing, and the operating capabilities to be able to underwrite against? And that by far has been the most significant lever for us.
Mm-hmm.
If you think about where we were in 2019 versus today, we've taken our Buy box up by 4x. So today, I think it was at $160 billion or something like that in 2019. Today, it's at $600 billion. And that's through buy box expansion and some cities. For sure, we doubled our city footprint. So sitting here today with again, with that less than 1% share and that $600 billion market opportunity, there's zero headroom in terms of our ability to grow. So less of a focus right now on additional cities. We wanna do those over time. We wanna be nationwide. But it's really within our existing buy box, we underwrite 57% we can underwrite 50 or 7% of the transactions in where we sit today, capturing more and more of those transactions when customers think about selling. That's really the lever for growth for us.
Mm-hmm. So talk a little bit more about the buy box, how you think it through and how you see it changing.
It's changed a lot. It's just gotten wider and wider over time as we've improved our ability to price certain homes. We define it by price point.
Mm-hmm.
We don't wanna be too low, not too high, a little bit of Goldilocks, just right. That varies by market. So, we wanna be in the most liquid part of the market, when we think about pricing. It can also be constrained by age. It can be constrained by, you know, for a home that we can't price is 'cause there are enough comparables in the market. It's not dense enough. There's not enough liquidity.
Mm-hmm.
It varies by market, but that's how we define our Buy box.
Got it. Got it. I guess on the competitive landscape, I guess, how do you think about competition in the near and the long term? I mean, it's changed quite a bit from a couple of years ago in terms of how many entities there were focused on being in iBuying. And what are the factors that you compete on in the markets where you do face stronger competition than others?
It has changed, but in some ways, it hasn't because we really define our competitive set as the traditional listing process. I mean, that's who we compete against day in, day out. If you're coming to us and asking us for an offer, you're either gonna take our offer, odds are, or you're gonna list your home on the MLS and go the traditional route. And so that's those 99% of offline transactions is our competitive set. And we love that we love that setup for us 'cause we think what we offer is vastly superior. You're referring to players who are in the market who may have left the market, you know, in the last couple of years, given some of the shakeout, or people who are pivoting away from the market. I'd say this. We have built the system over the last decade to be entirely purpose-built.
Mm-hmm.
So from day one, how do we build the pricing algorithm? How do we build the operating capabilities to complement that? We're a very offline-online business. And we really stand alone today to be able to deliver that at the scale we do so. We really there really is no competitive set that we think about, doing what we do at the scale we can do it.
Mm-hmm. So I think the fact that in a very buoyant housing market, there were so many different companies trying to enter iBuying probably speaks to, at the very least, the size and probably also the attractiveness of the opportunity. Do you see an environment, you know, maybe a more positive housing environment at some point in the future where maybe you do have new entrants? And do you feel that your moats will be even deeper by that point in time? I mean, will it become harder as time goes on for new entrants to come up behind you now that some very big, well-funded entities with a lot of data have kinda backed off from iBuying?
We like our strategic positioning right now a lot. I mean, a lot of the people you were alluding to in your earlier question right now, partners of ours.
Mm-hmm.
We're on their platform. That feels pretty strategically important to us.
Mm-hmm.
Those are partnerships we care about a lot. For someone else to come into this environment right now with our 10-year head start in terms of data, insight, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of homes we've been in over time, all to the benefit of making sure that our pricing information is better for that next set of homes, it's pretty hard. It's a real compounding advantage against that.
Mm-hmm.
Then there's the operating component, which, again, we do run a capital-intensive, low-margin, but, you know, operationally intensive business. We have built the technology, the systems, and the processes to be really good at that.
Mm-hmm.
To be able to do it in a centralized way. I think someone would have to come into the market pretty de novo to think about how they do that. It's not very purpose-built in terms of the system and the platform we have.
Right. Right. Talk about the NAR, a major topic in the industry right now. I guess we've seen quite a few headlines, a lot of speculation, a number of different legal cases, playing out. But can you just remind us of your view at Opendoor of what is at stake here, what could change, and what impact, if any, it could have on your business?
Yeah. So for everyone who's not reading about all the NAR news,
Mm-hmm.
This is about the traditional practice of the seller and the seller's listing agent paying for the buyer's broker commission when you come along with your agent.
Mm-hmm.
And there's been a lack of understanding among consumers that they get their buyer's agent for free. This is about unbundling that.
Mm-hmm.
Potentially having the buyer's agent be paid for by the buyer, and the seller just borne by the seller. Short answer to your question is, like, number one, we make no revenue from the buyer broker commission. Zero. That's not our business model. Unlike a lot of people who are in this industry, and they make most of their revenue from buyer broker commission, that's not our business model. We're very seller-focused, and we kinda stand alone in the seller focus we have. So that's one. Two, it's a cost to us today. It's a significant cost. When I go to sell one of our homes, you come along with me. You probably have an agent in tow, and we then pay 2.5%-3%.
Mm-hmm.
in the form of that buyer broker commission out to you. If you think about our contribution margins, 5%-7%, that's a pretty hefty portion of our cost structure. So assuming that over some period of time (we'll see how these lawsuits shake out), either that commission rate becomes unbundled, and the responsibility, sole responsibility, of the buyer, there's compression over time, those costs to us get reduced. It's either a pass-through. So it's the worst case, it's neutral to us. And maybe there's some benefit over time. I think the more important point for us is, like, everything we do is, like, to bring total transparency to the customer. They know exactly what they're transacting and what they're paying. And then two, they have choice. If you wanna and you want an agent, and you wanna work with Opendoor, great.
We'd love to partner with you. If you wanna come to us directly, and you wanna buy and sell, great. Love we've built the platform, the only platform, to be able to do that. So we're agnostic in this fight. We wanna be a market participant. We want, we're gonna see how this all shakes out, I'm sure, over many, many years. It's not, it's not a cost. It's not a, it's not a threat to us in any way. It may be a benefit. We'll see.
Right. So I think you just explained very well how it's a cost on the back end, you know, the fee that you pay to the buyer's agent when you sell a home.
Right.
But is the service fee that you charge effectively when you buy a home from a home seller, is that in any way linked or connected, economically to the rate that a home seller might pay to a listing agent? And if that fee goes down, could there be some pressure on the service fee?
There could be. But again, that would be a pass-through for us, right? We would pay less in cost, and we would take down the revenues. I think it's net neutral long term.
Mm-hmm.
For us.
Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. So I guess in the past, you've talked about leveraging AI to drive operational excellence. Maybe let's talk about that. It's been a very, very big topic over the past 12 months. I guess how are you using AI today? And where is there room to put in more use cases for AI going forward?
Yeah. It's a big topic for us too, internally, as you might imagine.
Mm-hmm.
Everyone's talking about it. We've been using AI really since inception in our pricing algorithm, like, neural networks and machine learning, what have you. We see broad application of AI across our entire business in pricing, operating excellence, and inventory management. On the pricing side, we are using AI to take imagery in the form of video or pictures, or sometimes we're using the ability to capture conversation with customers and be able to take all that information in a way that is more structured and feed that back in so we understand home condition level better, and we can feed that back into having more accurate offers. So there's a huge amount of work around improving price accuracy vis-à-vis AI.
One example is applying LiDAR in all our homes so that we can understand square footage very accurately, which is it's a huge input into thinking about how you price a home. And also not just understanding square footage, but understanding layout. You might have a 3,000-square-foot home, but you might have a funky layout. And that might really impact marketability. That's something that maybe we won't know until we own the home, but now we can understand that. We can understand, wow, this is gonna be a tougher sell potentially 'cause of the way it's laid out. Sunken living room, who knows, right? We can now understand those things better, using AI. So we're excited to start to do more of that on the pricing side. On the operation side, we're building Copilot for our home project managers.
These are our colleagues who are in the field who are understanding, like, what do I have to do to get this home sale ready and back on market so I can list it? What's the repair we need to do? And having something in their pocket, so to speak, in the form of a Copilot that allows them to scope home repairs to make sure that the full set of questions are being asked, and then also to understand how, like, quickly price it and be able to kinda generate a work order very, very quickly. We're excited about doing more and more of that. And the last thing is on inventory management. We've done a lot of work to understand home conditions better.
Mm-hmm.
Do we really understand relative and absolute home condition so that, again, we can make sure that we are turning homes quickly. We are pricing accurately.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of application for us on AI.
That's interesting, I guess, on understanding, for example, the layout of the home or the condition of the home. You know, a lot of that is, I guess, capturing both information and analyzing it, more quickly than you were in the past. Is that the right way to think about the role that AI plays in those particular functions, or?
I mean, you're thinking right. Like, so today, for example, we'd have a Home Project Manager do what we call a day-one walk. We own this home now, and now we gotta figure out well, we scope the repairs during the assessment process, but now we own it. Now we really gotta.
Mm-hmm.
Make sure that we understand home condition, and the pictures are off the wall. The furniture's moved out. Looks a little different. So now that HPM, Home Project Manager, can walk through and potentially, with the benefit of AI, can understand, you know, instead of, like, looking down at the iPad as they do a checklist, they can be looking around and being cued by AI. Here are all the things.
Mm-hmm.
They'll be taking pictures and imagery. AI may capture things that the average you know, the average person might miss as they do a full-house walkthrough. They may be cued as they get more information to, "Oh, what about this? What about this?" They may catch things that are different. And they can also hold themselves to repair standards that today, you know, definitely take some layer of human judgment. So again, this is about bringing more systematic tools and processes to the system.
Mm-hmm.
So, I mean, those are just a bunch of examples. We're definitely thinking about chatbots with for customers. We can offer a more personalized experience to the home seller who shows up, answer more questions. We're seeing early, early signs that that actually improves conversion. And by the way, there's a lot of paper in real estate. There's a lot of paper in the title business. So intelligent document processing, being able to just, you know, HOA, homeowners association documents, and being able to do that with AI, like, there's lots of benefits for us.
I'm sure a lot of people would love to have an AI to deal with their HOA. So, on the partnership side, you know, you were talking about this before, and I think it's a really important point. So you have a number of important strategic partnerships, including with companies like Zillow and Redfin. I guess, you know, they've been a growing source of home acquisitions. How do you think about the opportunity to expand those partnerships? And is there a mix that you're thinking of long term between partner-sourced versus organically sourced?
Yeah. I mean, partnership channels, as you said it, they're a meaningful part of our business, a meaningful part of our acquisition volume. And it goes all the way from home builders to the online real estate players, to agents. And we've leaned into all of them. Just in 2023, when our spreads were high, marketing spend was less efficient. The good thing about partnership channels for us is, first of all, we can just be in more places. We can talk to more sellers. We can show up in more channels, so that people are aware of the product. And they come at a fixed customer acquisition cost. So they're relatively efficient, less impacted by where spreads may be, where we might find paid marketing to be inefficient at a time of high spreads. Channels are pretty stable.
So we, on the online real estate side, last year was about ramping Zillow. We had 2 markets going to 45. Now it's ramped. We re-extended our partnership with Redfin so it continues to, like, just be the de facto cash offer choice when people are thinking about selling their home and they're online looking at Zillow, late at night, or Redfin, or what have you. Agents, really being a partner to agents. Like, we're not a foe to agents. We're a partner to agents. We think we're a tool in their toolkit. And agents now understand, "I show up for a listing appointment, and I have an Opendoor offer, and I have the listing option for that customer." And different customers, for different reasons, may choose different things.
For a customer, it may be perfect for them to sell to Opendoor 'cause it's super efficient, and may maximize the outcome that they want to given objectives for certain inconvenience. For the agent, the return on their time is fabulous, right? I mean, they're managing a small book of business, and they're assisting and so to be able, for you know, do that for a customer very efficiently and quickly while the commission rate is lower, the ROI is higher. So agents are a growing channel for us. We just went live, I think, this week or last week with eXp.
Mm-hmm.
Which is, you know, the largest brokerage in the company in the country, growing very quickly. And now when they go to that portal, an eXp agent will sort of see the option to show up at their next listing appointment with an Opendoor offer in hand for their customer. We think that's, obviously excited about that. And then the last piece is on home building, which we've been doing for a long time, but that's, like, a perfect trading customer for us, right?
Right.
I don't want you to be a contingent buyer these days. And so we unlock that for someone who's looking to do a new-built home, which obviously, there's been a lot of interest and demand for new-built homes. So all those are important. I think we said a couple quarters ago, so 40% of our mix and growing.
Mm-hmm.
Where that goes over time, who's to who's to say, but I think there's a lot more to be done on the partnership side for us.
Mm-hmm. So I wanna give a minute, in just a few minutes to the audience if there's any questions that are there.
Sure.
But I wanna revisit one thing you just said just about eXp and the agents. What is that conversation like? Because I would think and you alluded to this pretty clearly. I would think that agents would view Opendoor's involvement in a transaction from a knee-jerk perspective negatively, because to your point, it, you know, may be a higher ROI, but they see things just in terms of, like, the fee pool. So obviously, you have an important or so important partnership that you signed there.
Mm-hmm.
So you've gotten over the hill, and you know what the pain points are. So what was that conversation like, and how did you get them over the hump?
Yeah. I mean, it's not just EXP. I mean, we do business with thousands of agents and many brokerages across the country.
Mm-hmm.
I do think there's a change in sentiment. You know, early days in the early days of Opendoor would have been like, "Oh, you're trying to disrupt the entire real estate business. You're trying to put agents out of business." No, no, no. Again, we wanna meet customers where they are.
Mm-hmm.
So if you have an agent and you wanna work with an agent, that's fine. If an agent decides that their customer wants to maximize their outcome by listing, we understand that.
Mm-hmm.
But if they have a customer where they don't wanna go through the traditional listing process, "I wanna get my home ready for sale. I wanna do a bunch of repairs. I don't wanna endure six open houses, and you wanna sell in a way that is much easier, much faster. I know exactly my close date. I know exactly what I'm gonna realize. And we can help you do that," that's a great tool for an agent to have.
Mm-hmm.
I've used this example before, but we were on the phone with one of the leading brokerages in the country, and they said, "You're kinda shirking your fiduciary responsibility if you're not telling the customer these are the panoply of options you have. Like, one is a listing, and one is this certain cash offer." And again, we're not saying it's gonna work for 100% of the customers. We understand that. But for those who want it, it's incredibly powerful. And for the agent, again, they're managing a whole book of business. So that we pay them a point when they deliver one of those leads to us, but the ROI on their time.
Mm-hmm.
They don't have to do the listings. They don't have to do the open houses. It's pretty powerful.
Mm-hmm.
We're a tool in their toolkit, and we're happy to be one.
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Happy to take anything from the audience. Oh, and there's a mic coming.
Carrie, just a quick two quick questions. One on the partnerships that you were just talking about, the 40%, is that of the funnel, or is 40% of the actual new home acquisitions that are happening through the channel?
40% of the acquisitions.
Okay. And then.
We're coming via partnership channels.
Okay. So then, what have you talked about, the contribution margins on those relative to the kinda status quo business?
We haven't. The thing I would say is that, and we don't disclose the unit economics for partnerships, but, again, it has the attractive benefit of having a fixed customer acquisition cost. And we pay on contract closes. So it's not a lead proposition.
It's more certain, I guess.
It's just a more certain, yeah. So.
Okay. Got it. Okay. And then second question, kinda coming at Matt's question a little bit about what you look for to get more aggressive in new home purchases. 2023, I would have thought, was a very good backdrop for to ramp acquisitions or i.e., lower spreads. Like you said, volumes don't matter. Prices matter. And prices were stable through 2023. So why now? What, what are you kinda seeing now? Was it just four quarters of price stability, and so now you feel comfortable, or is there something you wanted to work through the book of business that you were working through before? Just trying to understand why you feel now's the time to kinda hit the accelerator.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think all of 2023 felt like it was gonna be perfectly stable. I think we were all, like you know, we had to be right? In retrospect, having come out of 2022, we wanted to make sure that we were building into a new book of business, with margins that we liked as we cleared the old book of business, home prices, and the trajectory of where mortgage rates like, that's, we can't crystal ball it. So, we wanted to be pretty disciplined in how we're building that new book. And we were. Like, we had, I think, 8.3% contribution margin on the new book in total for 2023. And to your point, we over-earned a little bit, right? Home prices did better than we were underwriting, and I think we were deliberately conservative in some of that.
And so to the benefit of an 8.8% contribution margin, having now kinda had 2023 behind us and given where we're sitting, we've done two things. One is part of spreads is about what we can control, right? It's cost structure. So we did a lot of work in 2023 to reduce our cost structure, and we fed that back into spread. So we've taken down our spreads to allow us to grow faster and just turn into more volume. And part of it is, like, the, the setup feels okay, okay-ish, right? We care most about home price stability. And I think sitting here in 2024, given that setup of supply-demand, we feel pretty good about the ability to lean into acquisition volumes. I'd also say, like, this is the time of year where it's the most liquid.
It's the most appropriate to be the most risk-on, because this is when home sellers are coming into the market. This is the you know, this is the spring selling season. This is our Christmas, right? This is what we lean into. And so, again, that's a time to be leaning into acquisition volumes. And I would say, given last year too, where what we didn't have is, as we were working down spreads very high to much lower, and then we kinda exited the year where we are today, marketing was inefficient. We basically had to turn off the marketing. Those dollars didn't make sense. And so we didn't get the benefit of having that either. So now we're at a place where we can start to invest those dollars in a more efficient manner.
Anything else in the audience?
Yes. Just I almost wanna ask the opposite side of that question, which is, like, if I had to guess a year ago, I would probably guess, like, today, we'd be closer to that 2,000 homes a month kinda pace than we are right now. So I guess, like, I'd love to understand, what has driven this sort of, like, a slower recovery in the purchase volume and, like, the acceleration throughout the rest of the year. Does that reflect sort of, you know, our intention to kinda take risk back up slowly, or does it reflect, like, operational reasons, like, it just can't mechanically happen that quickly?
Just to make sure I understand your question, why, why 2,000 now versus last year?
For why haven't we seen that already?
Okay.
And then just if we're gonna start seeing that, why throughout the rest of the year and not, you know, pretty immediately?
Yeah. I mean, as I said, like, we had to reduce spreads meaningfully throughout the course of 2023. So we weren't in a place to drive; we weren't gonna see the kinda conversion at those spread levels that we'd get if anywhere near the 2,000. So part of it was taking spreads down, partly through cost-savings initiatives, partly just feeling better about the environment, right? We were pretty risk-off going into 2023 on the heels of 2022. That was one. Today, I mean, I feel good about our setup to kinda lean into more volume for all the reasons I just said. We were not feeling that way necessarily middle of last year 'cause the environment was still pretty uncertain. Like, interest rates up, interest rates down, what's gonna happen with the Fed?
We wanna make sure that whatever we're doing, we wanna do it in a way that feels really durable. We can lean into spreads. We can lean into spend and drive growth at the expense of margin and the expense of risk. Those are trade-offs that we're not willing to make right now. I think we learned those lessons in 2022. What we wanna make sure is that as we build the system for more volume, which is very much in our control right now, our view, given the macro and all the work we've done, we're gonna do it in a way that's durable. We're gonna do it in a way that's sustainable. Like, we're gonna, like, get to a new baseline and then grow from there. There's lots of things we can do short term. We're not gonna make those moves.
We're gonna do the long term.
All right. I guess maybe we can close on this one. Just looking out longer term, you know, if you're looking out five years or maybe farther, what I don't wanna say typical, but what do home transactions look like? How will that have changed in terms of the role that Opendoor or companies like Opendoor are playing? Like, where can market share go? Where can home buyer and seller awareness go? Where do you think we'll be in five-plus years?
Yeah. There's a chart that we have in our investor deck, and we segment our markets from the most mature to the least mature. And you think about the most mature market, still low, but, you know, aided awareness is 40%, under newer markets, 20%. Address entry, like people's willingness to engage with Opendoor, you know, 40% for a mature market, much lower for a small market. You know, 10 years from now, I don't think those charts are, like, irrelevant because everyone should start their selling journey with an offer from Opendoor. Like, that should be paramount. I think.
Mm-hmm.
Everyone should be tapping their address, and we shouldn't be capturing 40%. We should be capturing 90% of people in the markets we're in. So everyone is starting their selling journey on our platform to understand, like, what do I really own? What's the value of it? And they can go from there. And then our job is, over time, what we wanna do is expand the ways we communicate with sellers and also our offerings so that we really meet sellers where they are. If you wanna cash offer, great. If you wanna list your home with the certainty of the cash offer in your pocket, we can do that too. If you wanna put your home in the marketplace, fine. We should be meeting sellers where they are. And that's really our vision, like, 10 years from now. It'll be a verb.
You'll be starting, you know, it'll be top of mind. You will be starting your home journey with Opendoor, and then we are servicing all sellers. And so our product is, you know, maybe less spread-dependent depending on what channel you use, and our market share, obviously, much higher.
Great. We can close there. Thank you so much for being here.
Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.