Hey, everyone. Welcome to Opendoor's Q1 2026 Financial Open House Earnings live stream. I'm Michael Judd, Opendoor's Head of Investor Relations. A few quick housekeeping items before we get started, like all things Opendoor, we're gonna do this faster. Details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our earnings release, which can be found at investor.opendoor.com. The following discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Opendoor's financial condition, anticipated financial performance, business strategy and plans, market opportunity and expansion, and management objectives for future operations. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, undue reliance should not be placed on them.
Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Opendoor's most recent annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025, as updated by our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026, and other filings with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made on this webcast, including responses to your questions, are based on management's reasonable current expectations and assumptions as of today, and Opendoor assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. The following discussion contains references to certain non-GAAP financial measures.
The company believes these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors as supplemental operational measurements to evaluate the company's financial performance. For a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see our website at investor.opendoor.com. With that, let's get into the open house with Kaz and Christie.
Good afternoon, everyone. I opened the Q4 financial open house by showing you a clip from the Q3 financial open house. I did this because I think among the most important things you can do to build trust is to just do what you said you would do. Don't promise the moon and deliver dust. Just do what you said you would do. Our last open house might as well have been called the look at the October cohort open house. With that in mind, let's once again take you back to our last financial open house. That the October cohort is going so well is not a plan, it's a proof point. The product launches I'm going to talk to you about aren't promises of things that might work. They're the explanation for why October happened and why it's repeatable.
Now, look, because we're committed to transparency, let me get ahead of a couple of things. October was not our largest cohort by volume, but it was about 2x the size of what we were doing just a few months ago. Given how the past few weeks have gone, I believe we're on track to significantly increase our acquisition size, as we said we would do. What October shows is that the structural changes we made under Opendoor 2.0 are working. Then we're compounding those learnings into every single cohort going forward. During that call, I told you that Opendoor 2.0 cohorts would perform fundamentally differently than Opendoor 1.0.
Back then, some folks said October was a fluke, or that we'd fall apart when the markets got harder or the sample set got larger. One of my favorite investors said, "Look, Kaz, one month does not make a trend." That was fair. Fair enough. Here are the facts. We now have a few more months of data, and we should compare the first full four months of Opendoor 2.0 against the last couple of years of Opendoor 1.0. Don't pay attention to me. Look at the chart. These are the cohort arrival curves. They show what happens when a group of homes margins on the Y-axis, as that group of homes sells on the X-axis. Every one of those purple lines is an old Opendoor cohort. They all do the same thing. They bleed margin as we sell through.
Look at the blue curves. Margin doesn't drop the way it used to. This is a step function change in how this company operates. Four consecutive months tell us something October alone could not. This isn't an accident. This isn't small sample luck. Mortgage rates are still far too high, the listings are at all-time highs. In a housing market that was supposed to break us, our cohorts are delivering. October wasn't a fluke, it was just the first month we could see it. We've now sold through over 80% of the October cohort, our trends have continued. Margins for our core cash products have come down only 90 basis points from where they were at 10% sold to over 80% sold. Last year, that same journey cost us over 260 basis points.
We've seen about a 3x improvement. November, December, January, they all showed the same pattern four months in a row. In fact, Q4 of 2025 and January 2026 cohorts have the best combination of margin stability, and resale velocity of any cohort in Opendoor history, obviously excluding the COVID era. Our cohort curves or the slope of our margins as homes sell through are basically flat, and we're doing this at great speed. Every single cohort from October through January is selling faster than any corresponding cohort since COVID. We're meaningfully scaling growth. In Q1, we entered into contract on over 5,000 homes. That's 2 times bigger than Q4 and 3 times bigger than Q3. In fact, when it comes to contracts, this was our single best quarter since 2022.
Cohorts are performing better, resale velocity is improving, and we're scaling growth. How can we do this? Well, let's talk about it for a second. 2 quarters ago, I laid out the blueprint and told you exactly what we were going to do. Underneath this all, there was 1 simple goal: make Opendoor faster. Last quarter, we graded ourselves and we're green across the board, and I promise we will do this every single quarter. Let's do that. Step 1, profitability. Break even by the end of 2026. We're on track. We'll be ANI positive on a forward 12-month basis by the end of the year. As of April first, Opendoor is Adjusted EBITDA profitable on a forward 12-month basis. Step 2, unit economics that make the model work. Positive Contribution Margin while increasing velocity. We're on track.
Our Contribution Margin has increased every single month since we bottomed out in September, and October, November, December, and January cohorts, they're all selling faster than any corresponding cohort since COVID. We're improving margins, speeding up clearance. We're doing all of this in a worse market. Acquisitions are growing. In Q1, we entered into contract in over 5,000 homes, 2x what we did in Q4, 3x Q3. Our Q1 D2C acquisition contracts are up more than 4x compared to Q3 2025. This was our single best contract quarter since 2022. Step 4, we're making really good progress on our capital-light products for sellers and transacting directly with buyers. Opendoor Checkout has now helped us sell homes in a bunch of states. More than one-third of our acquisition contracts in Q1 were cash now, more later.
This time last year, that number was exactly zero. That's our scoreboard. We're green across the board. This quarter, the scaffolding came down, and what's underneath is a company that finally knows exactly what it is and how it wins. For a long time, the core assumption of Opendoor was that we had to be better at predicting the future than the rest of the world. We operated like a prop desk. We looked at the macro and made directional bets based on where we thought the prices were going to be in three, six, nine months, and then we pushed billions of dollars onto the table. The issue was never the people and not the model. The problem was the wrong problem to solve. Even if our models had been perfect, they were still pointed in the wrong direction.
Everything flowed from a single question: Where are home prices going? That one guess drove everything. It set the spread, which set what we bought, and determined whether or not we made money. When we got the answer wrong, we blamed the market every single time. Macro became our excuse for everything. Look, when predicting the future is your North Star, the reflex in a down market is always the same. Widen spreads, slow down, pull back, pray for the market to recover. Every defensive move fed the thing that was actually killing us. We were playing prevent defense when we were down by a touchdown. Of course, we were losing. We widened the spreads to protect ourselves, but in doing so, we changed the funnel. We changed the thing that was making the company work. We got worse homes. Worse homes meant worse margins.
Worse margins went back into the model. The system got more conservative, and spreads widened even more. We didn't just have risk that we could not calculate. We actually built a machine that amplified it. Every move made everything worse. That was our fatal flaw. In a business where time is risk, the old model taught us to slow way down. Once that reflex exists, every department in the company, product, operations, finance, everyone, starts running the same defensive operating system. The default everywhere was slow down just to protect ourselves. Look, I'm a nerd's nerd. I think models are really cool, but they're incredibly worthless when you have the wrong strategy. What we did wasn't just improve the pricing model, we changed the question that it was meant to answer. A year ago, the most important input into every decision was our home price appreciation forecast.
Today, it's how fast we can sell the home we're looking to buy. Market makers do not win by being right about direction. They win by controlling their exposure to being wrong. They win by being right about time. When a prop desk gets scared, it pulls right back. That's how the spiral starts. When a market maker sees risks, it does the exact opposite. It speeds up and prices to clear. The faster you move, the less any single home can hurt you. Velocity is how we know our pricing is right. A home that sits doesn't give us any signal. It just increases risk. Opendoor 1.0 was, it was Kobayashi Maru. It wasn't a game we should have played. Without fundamentally changing it, we would have just totally killed the company. You don't beat that game by getting better at simulation.
You beat it by changing the program. We're now running on a velocity OS. The difference is totally structural. We have rebuilt our engine around a totally stacked team of high-frequency thinkers. Signal intelligence officers, hedge fund quants, and they're all maniacally focused on data loops. They have a mandate, ship a change every single week, optimized for both margin and velocity. As our models get better, and they're getting better every single week, the whole machine moves faster. The whole company runs faster. We now run on a weekly cadence across the company. Products ship every single week. We don't need to be perfect in order for this business to work. We just need to be faster. With hundreds of acquisitions a week, we see pricing signals, renovation costs, and clearance patterns faster than anyone else in this market. Every home teaches us something.
Every single day we shave hold times, our capital turns go up, and our returns go up. Speed. Speed pays for everything. In a bad market or a great one, the variable thing that actually matters is time. When you ask what has made the change, what makes this whole thing work, it's one word, faster. I wear a T-shirt at every financial open house that says one thing, faster. You can see it. I'm wearing one right now. Most of you think, it's just a personality quirk, right? A founder nerd thing, a costume of a wartime CEO. It's really not. Look, we used to be in a business that lived or died on whether we got the future right. Now we're in a business that lives or die on whether we move fast. Faster isn't just our competitive advantage. It's an absolute moral imperative.
Let me just say this again so you don't think I'm being subtle about it. Faster is not just our competitive advantage. It's our whole reason for being here. It's our moral imperative. Every day someone is stuck and cannot move is a day in their life that they cannot move on. They're on hold. If we're in the business of helping people move, then days matter. It's a job offers they haven't accepted, a planned retirement put on hold, a family not started. The traditional home sale process is more than just inconvenient. It holds these people back. 40 million homeowners in this country want to move in the next 12 months, but only 1 in 5 think they can actually do it. Not because moving is too expensive, but because everything about it is just too uncertain. Here's a simple test for any system.
Would you design it this way if your family had to live in it? The legacy real estate system fails the test. It's our job to fix this. Every product decision Opendoor goes through goes through one single filter. We only care about one thing. Are we returning time to people? Last week, across all sellers, Opendoor gave back over 100 years of time. Over 100 years of time. Over 500 families said yes to an Opendoor offer and reached certainty about 90 days sooner than they would have in a traditional process. You do the math. In just one week, we got rid of a century of human waiting, time that got returned to families who got to move on. Faster is a moral imperative. It is a good in and of itself. That is what this company is for.
Every product launch ultimately serves one question. How do we move faster for sellers, for buyers, for Opendoor, for everyone? Let me run through some product launches. This quarter, we expanded cash now, more later coverage. Every week, hundreds of families who would have heard, "Sorry, we can't help you," are now getting real offers. We totally rebuilt the foundations of our buyer apps. We acquired Doma's escrow division. Noah, our AI underwriter, prices normal homes in Phoenix now. We rebuilt every message a buyer gets from us. Six different systems became just one conversation. We rebuilt our offer page, giving customers the type of information they would have gotten from an expert who was at their kitchen table. We also built a portable assessment scheduling. You can now get your home assessment done on your own terms.
More than half of our assessments are now seller-led, 6,000 in March alone. We migrated our component library to an AI-native front end. While we were in there, we killed our legacy cake service. A transition that had failed 3 times in 4 years got finished in 6 weeks. The platform is what makes everything else faster. Talk to any Opendoor engineer, and they'll tell you this is a really big deal. We built an AI audit tool that automatically reconciles inspection scopes with actual repair decisions, giving our field teams real, actionable feedback to improve operator compliance and cost discipline. At title intake, it used to take us up to 5 hours. It now takes 15 minutes. We launched Opendoor Mortgage in Colorado. One of our marketing managers replaced our half-a-million-dollar lifecycle legacy email system with 1 cloud skill.
A field manager in our Southeast division runs 5 states on cloud. A finance team turned 20 hours of SOX deliverables into 1-minute query. None of these people, by the way, were engineers. We also tripled our cash now, more later product. Our voice bots dropped seller contract time from 30 minutes to 5. We replaced 72 manual exports a month with 1 pipeline. We built a new listing operating consoles in 8 days. We merged 8 different HR systems into 1. In the process, we killed dozens of point solutions. Now, that's not the full list. It's just what I had time for before they played the walk me off stage music. As you can tell, we've changed a lot, but I also want to tell you what we haven't figured out. Look, I'm a Leafs fan.
I know what it feels like to be promised lots of things and get absolutely none of them. I know what it feels like to watch the same group of people over and over again give you false hope and give you nothing. I've thought about this more than I probably should. I've decided that a promise is not the same thing as a proof. You do not get credit for what should have happened. You only get credit for what actually did. I know what it feels like to have momentum in March and tears in May, which is why this T-shirt says faster and not done. Faster is a setting. It's not a destination. We don't get to celebrate signals. Every quarter is just another shift for us. We're not done. We're not even close.
Mortgage is live. The early data is honestly going a lot better than I thought it would go. We're getting really good attach rates. Our customers love it. Look, it's early. We don't fully know how the product is going to work across different market conditions in different home price tiers. We have a thesis. It's working really well. We haven't proven it at scale. cash now, more later. It's growing really fast. It's over a third of our growing pie. That's just really remarkable for a product that didn't exist a year ago, and that was totally reworked just three months ago. We're iterating how it works. We're fine-tuning it, trying to get the balance right between what the seller gets and what Opendoor keeps. Let me be honest with you.
Every product that Opendoor ships has to earn its place in our portfolio. cash now, more later is earning it, but we're not done changing it. Like we said earlier, the housing market, look, it just remains what it is. We believe the model we have built on faster works across macro cycles. We're no longer dependent on a macro. We control our own destiny. October, November, December, January cohorts, they were all bought during the most aggressive expansion in our history in a market that I don't think anyone would describe as favorable, and this is the best evidence we have. That's just what it is. It's evidence. It's not proof. Proof will take more time, more reps, more shifts, more aggression, more products shipped faster. We've said this before, and you'll always hear us saying this.
We're not asking you to take our word for it. We're asking you to watch and to hold us accountable. Christie is going to walk you through the numbers in a minute, but before she does, I want to close with this. I've been asked a lot what Opendoor is. We changed our LinkedIn profile from real estate to software, but software is too generic. Look, Opendoor is on a mission. Our job is to get people who are stuck moving. We're a machine that helps America move. When I joined Opendoor, I did it because the homeownership matters. It is a thing. It is the single thing that leads to better families, better neighborhoods. When people buy a home they love, they're buying a share in this country. We don't buy homes at Opendoor to hold them. We buy them.
We buy them so we can get them into a next family faster, with less friction, at a better price. Every family we help move is a family that is putting down roots. It's a neighborhood that's getting better. It's children that get to grow up in a home that their parents love. Faster is what this company was built to do. The T-shirt, that's just a reminder. The Opendoor machine is now running, and every day it runs, every single day it runs, friction disappears and people move. We do not need a better market. We just need a better machine. Last week, we gave back over 100 years. That's 100 years of human pain just gone. That's not corporate jargon. That's just families moving and building better lives. Please track it. Please hold us accountable. Christie.
Thank you, Kaz. I'm not wearing the T-shirt, but I promise I'll match the pace. Three things to know about Q1 before we get into the details. One, we reduced aged inventory from 51% to 10% in two quarters. The book is the freshest it's been in nearly four years. Two, margins bottomed out in September and have improved every month for six months straight. Q1 closed at 4.4%, up 3.4 points quarter-over-quarter, and we expect the upward trend to continue into next quarter. Three, acquisitions are up 45% from Q4, Q1 was our strongest quarter for signed contracts since Q2 2022. The headline behind those three, starting in Q2 2026, we expect to be Adjusted EBITDA profitable on a 12-month go-forward basis. The machine is working. Let's get into it.
As a reminder, we are executing against three management objectives on our path to profitability. The table in our earnings release shows our progress on each. Let me walk through the highlights. First, scale acquisitions. We purchased 2,474 homes in Q1, up 45% from Q4. This is the second consecutive quarter of meaningful growth. Signed acquisition contracts, our leading indicator, tell an even stronger story. March was our highest single month for signed contracts since June 2022, and Q1 was our highest quarter since Q2 2022. An acquisition contract will typically close about a month later. Q1's 2,474 purchases are mostly from late Q4, early Q1 contracts. Late Q1 contracts will close primarily in Q2. Also, we wanna be clear, we don't close on every home we go into contract on.
Under Opendoor 2.0, we're deliberate about which contracts we take all the way to purchase, the funnel narrows between contract and close. More contracts mean more opportunities to be selective, and the trajectory matters. In a short period of time, we've gone from our lowest contract volume since COVID to our highest since 2022. This is the tempo required to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves, and we're building the volume and the discipline at the same time. You can continue to track our weekly progress on accountable.opendoor.com. Volume only counts if the quality holds, and our second management objective is the scorecard for whether we're delivering the right kind of growth. Second, improve unit economics and resale velocity. This is where the work really shows up, and there are 3 data points I wanna highlight.
1, resale Contribution Margin has improved every month since September 2025, closing Q1 at 4.4%, up 3.4 percentage points quarter-over-quarter. 2, our Q4 2025 and January 2026 cash acquisition cohorts have the best combination of margin stability, and resale velocity of any corresponding cohort in company history, excluding the COVID era. 3, the percentage of homes on the market for more than 120 days fell to 10%, down from 33% at year-end and 51% at the end of Q3, a 41 percentage point improvement in just two quarters. Let me stay at this point for a moment. Two quarters ago, more than half of our homes had been sitting on the market for over 120 days. At the end of Q1, that number was 10%.
That is the lowest it's been since Q2 2022. To put it in perspective, the broader market was at 23% two quarters ago and rose to 33% at the end of Q1. We are now carrying a book that is materially fresher and healthier than the market. Inventory health is both a leading indicator of forward margin and evidence that our approach is working. A faster moving book means lower holding costs, less market exposure, better resale outcomes, and more efficient use of capital, and that's exactly what's showing up in our margins. This didn't happen because the market got friendlier. It happened because of tailored underwriting, disciplined close to listing workflows, and resale systems designed to move homes quickly while protecting unit economics. Third, build operating leverage.
Fixed operating expenses were $33 million in Q1, down $2 million quarter-over-quarter and down $6 million year-over-year. Our trailing twelve-month operations expense as a percentage of trailing twelve-month revenue held steady quarter-over-quarter at 1.3%. We are holding the fixed cost base flat while simultaneously investing in the AI and infrastructure that powers our product, and it's worth pausing here for a minute. We're going all in on AI, and we're doing it responsibly. There's a lot of noise right now about companies blowing their 2026 budgets on AI before the second quarter. That's not us. We're focused on results, not token leaderboards. We have an internal Slack channel called Default to AI where teams celebrate measurable impact. Some highlights in addition to what Kaz shared earlier, an AI-powered repair negotiation tool cut our buyer fall-through rate by over double digits.
Field managers are using AI scoping feedback, helping to reduce pre-list renovation spend by up to 10% to 20% per home in pilot markets. A ticket triage automation redeployed three full-time employees from classification to resolution. What's notable is that most of these tools were built by operators, not engineers, using the AI infrastructure we've invested in. We're cutting waste and reallocating into capabilities that move the business. Our flat fixed operating expense is the output of that discipline, not the absence of investment. Three objectives, three quarters of consistent progress. The plan is working. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $999 million in unrestricted cash, our highest cash balance in years. That's a product of two things, the strength of our parent level capital position following the work we did last fall, and the health of our inventory book.
We held 3,420 homes in inventory at quarter end, representing $1.1 billion in net inventory. Our non-recourse asset-backed borrowing capacity remains robust at $7.1 billion, with $1.5 billion committed. Between liquidity, facility capacity, and the quality of what we're financing under those facilities, we have meaningful flexibility to execute against our plans. Let me give you the guidepost for Q2. Acquisitions. You can continue to track our acquisition contracts on accountable.opendoor.com. We've updated our contract roadmap for the remainder of the year. The ranges reflect our current outlook inclusive of typical seasonality, and we'll continue to update them each quarter as we learn more. Revenue. Our Q1 increase in home acquisitions will start to flow through to resales, leading to expected revenue growth of approximately 25% quarter-over-quarter. Contribution Margin.
Our Contribution Margin bottomed out in September and has been improving every single month since then. We expect the Contribution Margin for Q2 2026 to fall in the middle of our 5%-7% goal we shared in the first Opendoor 2.0 financial open house. Adjusted EBITDA. We expect Q2 Adjusted EBITDA to be break even, plus or minus a few million dollars. We see Q2 as an inflection point. We expect to be Adjusted EBITDA profitable on a 12-month go-forward basis starting in Q2. In closing, last quarter I said you can't build a great business in a spreadsheet. You build it by shipping product, operating with discipline, and learning from the market. Q1 is what that looks like when the machine starts to work. Acquisitions, margin, resale velocity, inventory health, and cost all moved the right way at the same time.
That's not a lucky coincidence. That's a system that's working. Two quarters ago, we laid out our plan. Every quarter since, we graded ourselves against it and delivered. We have a lot left to prove. We intend to keep doing exactly that. With that, Michael, I'll turn it over to you for questions.
Great. Thanks, Christy. Our first question comes to us via video submission from Mike Alfred.
Hey, guys, it's Mike Alfred, founder and managing partner of Alpine Fox LP, as well as a board director at IREN and Bakkt. Great job on the execution side. I really like the way the business is integrating AI into everything you're doing. My question is about the longer term implications of AI. Do you believe when you look at the strategic direction of the company that we are well prepared for all the things that AI is likely to change about the way the real estate market operates in the coming years? Thanks, guys.
Oh, wow, that's a great question. Look, I think the answer of this is like in a bunch of layers. I kind of think about the layers, so let me just go through them. Layer one is the, like, the earning call answer. AI is important. We're leaning right in. We're spreading across the entire business. You kind of hear that from every corporate CEO. I mean, it's true, but it tells you like nothing actually useful. Layer two is actually important. That's like the software leverage story. Like the original SaaS era, the insight was that you could take a CRUD database, wrap business logic around it and some workflow around it, and then you'd find that people could do a lot more, right? Software would get cheaper.
People could do a lot more because you could encode the rules and the processes and the decision-making into software. The leverage was just insane. AI extends that by quite a bit because you're now encoding judgment on top of rules, the leverage becomes really high. That's real, it's important, we're capturing a lot of this, but that's just a story of software broadly. It doesn't say anything specific about Opendoor. We just happen to be honestly just really good at this. Layer three is actually fundamentally more interesting. It's like the automation versus the collaboration split. AI as collaboration software is very misunderstood. Let me talk about that for a second. Look, our goal isn't to use AI to cut 15% of our expenses by doing the same things we were doing, just cheaper, right?
Like, that's automation applied to cost. The goal isn't that, like, a black box replaces a human process end to end. Right? That's just not what we're doing. Like, what we want to do, given everything AI can do, is to rebuild our processes from scratch, from a blank piece of paper, so that we can use AI to have a fundamentally different process. Layer 4 is actually our complexity as a structural advantage. This one is important to understand, and this is why we're not afraid of AI as the way like some software incumbents are. Real estate is atoms and risk and not just bits. It's also some bits. The underlying transaction involves a level of complexity and condition and local dynamics and human emotion, and all of it, like, makes the system very complex, and that's actually our advantage, right?
AI doesn't eliminate this complexity. It just makes navigating it a lot, a lot easier. What we don't need to do here is just get to some hypothetical end state. We just need to be meaningfully better than the alternative and the legacy process at every step. Like, this is a Red Queen's race dynamic, and it works in our favor here. Look, we've been running in this very complex environment for years, and we have a crap ton of operational knowledge, and that is deeply useful. Okay, last, I promise this is the last layer. I like five-layer cakes. The fifth layer is about what AI does to the other side of transaction. Like, there are two parts to this, right? What the customer feels and sees and what it does to the category.
On the customer side, look, the traditional real estate process is defined or by information asymmetry, right? That's just not an accident. That's the foundation of the whole process, right? Experts who know the market make profit from transaction friction because the parties themselves can't navigate it. AI totally dissolves this asymmetry, right? What that means is the customers are being, like, upgraded. We can build AI concierge things that feel to the customer like the expert is sitting at their kitchen table, right? That's an incredibly important thing, and it's what we're doing. On the category side, this is the actual meta bet, right? Every major internet transition, every industry has had winners that didn't just jam the Sears catalog into a browser, they actually helped with the transaction. Travel, retail, fintech. That's been true across every internet.
It just hasn't happened in real estate. Real estate's, like, honestly the last, major holdout. Not because the category is fundamentally immune from this, but because the underlying complexity made it a little too messy to transact at scale. AI just totally removes this constraint. I think I should have actually started the answer by saying yes. Yes, we believe we're well-positioned. It's honestly On the inside, it feels as though our business was built waiting for this manna to fall from heaven, and it now has.
Great. We had a few questions submitted via Say Technologies that all kind of clustered around profitability, so I wanted to pull out 2. The 1st comes from Heejun C., who's asking, "You said in the last earnings call that turning profitable by the end of the year was achievable. Now that the 1st quarter has passed and interest rates remain high, is that still a realistic goal?" Arun Jacob V. asks, "How confident are you today in the Q2 positive EBITDA and year-end profitability forecast? What are the key swing factors from here which might influence it?
Those are great questions. Thank you. We reconfirmed our goal and expectations earlier on the call. I'll say it again here. We expect Opendoor to be break-even or profitable, adjusted net income profitable by the end of this year on a 12-month go-forward basis. Arun, to answer your question, we also shared in the call earlier that we're going to reach an important milestone on that path to profitability, in that starting in Q2 2026, we expect to be Adjusted EBITDA profitable on a 12-month go-forward basis. Our management objectives that we report every single quarter are the three legs to the stool that help ensure we're on the right path. We're building momentum. Acquisition closes are up. Acquisition contracts, the leading indicator to closes, are also up. In fact, Q1 2026 had over 5,000 contracts. That's the highest quarter of contracts since Q2 2022.
Resale Contribution Margin has improved every single month since September. We guided Q2 to the middle of our 5%-7% targeted CM range. Long-held inventory went from 51% to 10% in two quarters. We did all of this while holding fixed OpEx down. The last time acquisition contracts exceeded 5,000 in a quarter, our fixed OpEx was double where it is right now. Yes, double. That's the AI investments and operator empowerment that we talk about every single quarter. That's what's happening here in fixed OpEx. We have made meaningful changes to what is required to run Opendoor 2.0. We are beginning to demonstrate that those changes are durable as the volumes return. We're clear on our profitability goals. We will continue to check back in every quarter with updates.
Can I, can I add something here? I think Warren Buffett famously said you find out who's swimming without shorts when the tide goes out. I have four kids, they actually sometimes go swimming, and I have to worry about them wearing shorts. I feel for Warren. Right now, like, the tide is out in housing, right? In the real estate market, the tide is out. Most CEOs will tell you that they wished conditions were friendlier. I'm telling you the opposite. When I took this job, I knew the tide was out. That was the entire point. I didn't take this job because I was hoping macro would turn, and it would bail us out. Like, I wasn't looking for a company of sunshine patriots.
I think Kelly Clarkson famously retweeted Nietzsche, and said, "What doesn't kill you actually makes you stronger." I chose hard mode. We choose hard mode because that's what's going to make us stronger. Look, we do not need permission from the Fed to put on our shorts to go swimming. Everything we've accomplished so far, everything has been done in the face of an unforgiving macro. I think we've told you how it looks like when we're winning. Some of you are watching this. I think I should tell you what it would look like if we were losing, if we could not do the things Christie said we will do.
This is the thing most company CEOs don't do because they're afraid they're gonna end up losing, and they wanna be able to hide it, but I want you to hold us accountable. Here's how you would know. Cohort curves start looking like they did with the purple lines. They would start high. We'd have massive losses as we went through. Contracts would plateau at the low end of our range or below the low end of our range for a whole bunch of weeks. Homes greater than 120 days on the market would go back to what we had in Q4. If those 3 things happen, if all those 3 things happen, then we're not doing what we said we would do, right. It's all about slope, acquisition, inventory health. That's the business. Those 3 things.
Look, I don't think any of those 3 things are gonna happen, and I don't think all 3 of them are gonna happen together because we believe we've built a model that works better. Faster is the key. We can't ignore the macro. We're not stupid. It will never be our excuse. Good excuses don't make great companies, right? We control our own destiny. We don't need the market to recover. We don't need rates to fall. We don't need perfect conditions. We just need to keep moving more families faster and faster through a machine that's already working. As I've said before, look, we're not asking you to take our word for it. We're just asking you to watch those 3 things that Christie talked about.
Great. Our next question, Andrew L. asks, "As you accelerate acquisition velocity, how are you ensuring the underwriting quality remains high and that you won't need to raise equity to fund this expansion?
Thank you for the question, Andrew. It's important to know that we're not accelerating acquisitions, by driving, like, blunt spread compression. It is driven by a combination of tailored underwriting that allows us to give really compelling offers to high quality homes, product expansion through our cash now, more later product, geographic expansion, and just conversion improvements realized from such things as making improvements to the offer page. While we've removed the requirement for a first in-person visit from pre-contract to post-contract, we still perform an in-person inspection before we purchase the home. This sequencing change helped remove friction from the contracting process, and it saved the cost of an in-person inspection for higher intent sellers without compromising our understanding of the home we're about to acquire. What I just described isn't proof that our underwriting quality remains intact and high.
The proof is in the cohorts themselves. Our October, November, December, and now January cohorts are each coming in with higher Contribution Margin, improved margin stability, increased resale velocity compared to their prior year cohorts. On the capital question, our cash position actually grew as we acquired more inventory, which reflects the underlying health of our inventory book. Younger homes with shorter days on market are structurally easier to finance, and we have sufficient warehouse capacity to more than keep up with our acquisition pace and plans. We also have warrant structures that provide additional capital optionality. To the extent any future capital decision is made, we expect to be opportunistic rather than necessary, and we will continue to evaluate the capital stack with an eye toward minimizing dilution.
Sorry, I'm just going to say a couple of things here. Like, first, there's a persistent myth that to move fast, you have to be sloppy. I just fundamentally reject this. Look, there was a rumor when I joined Opendoor that Opendoor was a best buyer of homes with foundation issues. Like, whether or not that was true, it's definitely not true anymore. Today, we use AI to remove this toil we had accrued. We no longer have 11 people touching every single home so the one person that does touch it can actually do their job well, right? That's actually all I want to say about underwriting because I don't want to give away all of our secrets. On the equity piece, let me add to what Christie said. I said it in my very first earning calls, but I want to repeat it. I despise dilution.
If we issue a share, it has only one job: to make every other share worth more for our existing shareholders. We will never issue shares to extend the runway. That's not what we're gonna do. The goal is for Opendoor to never be in a position where it has to raise money to survive. In the history of this company, it has raised way too much money. We're going to stop doing that. The discipline we need going forward is that we're going to fund this business from the cash flow we generate. I'm not interested in, like, building a company that needs a life raft every time. I'm interested in building a ship that actually floats, right? What Christie talked about isn't the best case scenario. It's the only way we were going to run this company.
Great. Our next question comes from Heejun C., who asks, "I'm interested in your 4.99% mortgage promotion currently exclusive to Colorado. Are there plans to expand this offer to other regions or states soon? If so, please provide an estimated timeline or a list of upcoming locations. Thank you.
Well, I mean, look, first of all, it wasn't a promotion. I wanna be clear about that. That was the actual rate. We don't run rate gimmicks here. We charge what the math allows us to charge, right? Look, mortgage is early. Right now, we're live in Colorado. Loans are doing well without any optimization, right? Attach rates are above even my, like, most optimistic expectations. I'm not gonna give you a launch calendar for every market. We're in flight on licensing in about just over 20 states right now. We expect to kind of roughly double that by the end of Q3. We're rolling this out as fast as we can. We've gotten some early feedback that I think is helpful.
One of the customers told us that our rates blew the other lenders out of water. And I wanna, like, talk about our math and why our rates blow other lenders out of water, right. The math here is simple. Big bank lenders take about 340 basis points in revenue per loan. Most of that is just a toil tax on a borrower, right. It pays for branch offices, loan officers, manual underwriting, paper shuffling, terrible ads, and, like, expensive lunches. We built an AI native mortgage platform from day one. No legacy system, no commission driven sales force, right. As few humans as possible to get the job done. So we're not just discounting our way to a lower rate, we're actually building our way towards this.
That structural advantage means that the regular mortgage on our homes will always be the lowest rate the customers can get, right? Today our rates are running about 100 basis points below the market average, that translates to about 10%-15% lower mortgage rates per month. That's the gap, right? Our job is to just chip away at this to make sure that we actually make housing affordable in this country.
Great. James M on Say asks, "Tokenization of real estate?
That was the question? That was the whole thing?
That's the question.
Ha. Okay. Well, I think this is a question that gets asked frequently, and I have a rule of not announcing product launches before they're ready. I think the worst thing tech companies do is, they mistake software for PowerPoint presentations, and that just sucks. Like, it what makes people hate software companies. Opendoor exists to tilt the world in favor of homeowners, right? Simpler, faster, fairer. You do that by reducing the friction tax. Like, the embedded friction tax in the system today on a given transaction is a double-digit % of the home's value, and tokenization is an incredibly important way of reducing this. Here's, like, how I think about it, and it's important to be mindful of this.
The patterns that we treat today as the natural order of things are usually just the last hack that someone installed on our machines, right? This is when Judd starts rolling his eyes. It matters, so I'm gonna talk about my favorite topic, history of money. Look, we went from barter to coinage to bills of exchange to checks to ACH to SWIFT, right? It really does feel like we're living, in the future, but the entire system of money that we rely on runs on banks running COBOL software. This is a programming language from 1959. The infrastructure powering our banking system that moves trillions of dollars is older than the Moon landing. We feel like we're in a stable place, but the people who were bartering also felt like they were in a stable place, right?
These are not permanent solutions. None of them are permanent because of the following: they all require intermediaries between people to get anything done. That cannot be the end state. On-chain settlement is the first time in the history of money where you don't need permission from other people to move value between two parties. This isn't an incremental improvement. It's the inevitable category end. Within our lifetime, we're going to see what it does, and everything we do today will seem antiquated. Title is the same story. It's just about 100 years behind. Animals marked their territory physically, and humans mostly have done the same thing for most of history. The real innovation here was in medieval England. We formalized this with a clod of dirt and some witnesses, and now we have some paperwork.
All that has happened between then and now is that some of these are searchable on the internet. That's the entire innovation, that these paper records that live in courthouses are now searchable. Look, the fact that there is a lobbying group defending the current way of doing things is the most reliable evidence that we're due for the next thing. It's like the petition of the candle makers against the sun. When I look at a housing transaction, I find it really hard to imagine that title to the most expensive asset in our lifetime does not live on-chain. It's hard to imagine that we have 3 transactions doing the same thing, title, insurance, mortgage, and they all have data trapped in silos. These will all move on-chain.
Look, I'm not announcing any of this today, but we are doing work that's on the green path to this end. Our acquisition of Doma's escrow business is one example, right? We're taking the closing infrastructure of America, building checkout for real estate. This is not tokenization, but it's clearly the step in the right direction. In that world, title and mortgage and insurance, all of it can move on-chain and this all gets better.
Great. Thanks, Kaz. Can't wait for the TED Talk. Our next question comes to us from Dae Lee from JPMorgan. "Kaz, you've now been leading Opendoor for over half a year and have had time to implement meaningful changes across the product and operations. As you reflect on the moves you've made, which specific change do you believe is having the most measurable impact on seller conversion rates and acquisition volumes today, and what does the data tell you about that's compounding across your markets? Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunity to structurally drive more homes purchased per market without proportionally scaling OpEx?
Dae, I want you to know that I know that that was 2 questions. Let me answer them 1 at a time. On what's actually moving the numbers, look, I don't think any single thing we shipped is moving anything by itself, but the real structure change in our system is, right? Like, think about the classic sell me this pen story. The old Opendoor was the guy who would say, "This pen is amazing. It's so smooth. It's lovely." The guy who'd aggressively show up and give you 1 choice, right? That was the old cash offer world. We'd show up at your door, give you 1 choice, say yes or no. That's not how people transact, right? The new Opendoor starts by asking the customer what they want. What do they actually need? What are they worried about?
How much cash they want upfront, what do they want later, what timeline they want. Cash now, more later isn't a single offer. It actually allows the customer to change Opendoor's business logic so that it works for them, right? The new offer page also does the same thing. It is the digital equivalent of sitting down with someone and explaining to them the realities of their neighborhood, their home, instead of just flashing a headline number, right? We want the customer to have the full picture and make the life choice that is best for them, and we want to be helpful in that process. Most people think that in order to do that, you need a human at a kitchen table. I think that's just wrong. Most people just want the information themselves, so they can decide for themselves what's best for themselves. That's the shift.
That's driving the conversion improvement. We also used to believe we'd need boots on the ground everywhere we had homes. I actually insisted on launching every state in the lower 48 because I wanted to test this hypothesis. Turned out that if you have a good underwriting model, a good product, and a good partner network, you can buy homes anywhere. Like, we closed a home in South Dakota this week, and we have 0 employees in South Dakota. That actually helps a lot. To your second question on OpEx, I mean, I think we've already answered a lot of this. The same machine does both of these things, right? More offer types mean more sellers. More sellers per market means we can have more transactions without adding headcount city by city.
Look, the big prize obviously is the tens of millions of people who want to move who can't, right? Between supply and demand, there's friction, right? If you reduce friction, you move both supply and demand lines. I actually saw this every day at Shopify. We made entrepreneurship easier, therefore we created more entrepreneurs. The same dynamic is true in housing, right? As we make things easier in buying a house, selling a house, mortgage, title, and eventually insurance, all of this will increase the demand and increase the supply, and none of this requires, like, significant incremental headcount. Now, like look, none of this works if the underlying engine isn't good, but I think we've shown you that we're no longer peanut butter spread across cohorts, and we've shown you we have now 4 cohorts of data, and Q1 was our largest contract quarter in years.
The last time we had this many homes in contract, our fixed OpEx was twice as high. I think that answers your second question.
Great. Andrew from Citizens is curious to help us understand a little bit more about seasonality kind of through the balance of the year.
Sure. I'm happy to provide some color on seasonality, and I'm sure Kaz will be happy to add something as well. Each quarter we provide a series of macro charts. Those charts show a consistent pattern. In every macro, strong macro, neutral macro, challenged macro, one thing remains the same. It's the seasonal pattern. They present themselves year after year. Macro changes the level of the curve. Seasonality is the shape of the curve. The selling season kicks off shortly after the Super Bowl, peaks in early summer, tapers through fall and bottoms out in December. This affects our resale velocity, which is considered in our spreads and therefore impacts our acquisition cadence. Days on market lengthens in the back half, margins compress in Q4. Our acquisition cadence runs inversely to market resale activity.
We acquire less in late spring when we'll be selling into weaker demand, and we build inventory throughout the fall in anticipation of the spring selling season. You'll now see seasonality more reflected in our estimates on accountable.opendoor.com. We've updated our projected acquisition range with the shape easing through spring and summer and building through the fall.
Thanks. I will add something. Look, seasonality is just like gravity. It's like a rule of nature. You don't blame gravity. If you try to fight it, you tend to lose. We know how to fly planes. We don't do it by fighting gravity. We just build math to fly them, right? While we can't flatten the curve entirely, we can collapse the impact over time. That's what we're working on. Opendoor is like a retail like Walmart, like Home Depot, like Amazon, like Shopify. These retailers have known seasonality, like obviously Q4 is a better quarter for them because of Christmas. Q1 numbers are always lower than Q4. No one would argue that Walmart's strategy has failed because January sales were lower than December sales. That would just be, like, insane.
The shape is just the shape. The same general seasonal shape that shows up in housing in 2021 when the market was on fire, in 2022 when the rates spiked, and in 2025 when delistings hit record highs, that's the shape. They're different macro environments, the same calendar, since Pope Gregory invented it, I guess. Opendoor knows more about the shape of the curve than almost anyone else in the world, and we shape our underwriting engine around it, right? We underwrite homes based on when we plan to sell them. That's what our underwriting engine does. I think it is working better and better every day. Look, I wanna end this answer with what I said earlier. We committed to being ANI profitable on a go-forward 12-month basis at the end of this year.
Hard macro or not, we will do that. Our floor model assumes this hard macro will continue. If there's an interest rate cut or the macro improves, our floor will be higher. I think we're running out of time, so let me just close what this is, okay. Look, we're not asking you to believe in vibe here. We're asking you to watch the scoreboard. The cohort slope, acquisition contracts, inventory health. That's it. Those are the tells, right. If we keep moving the way we moved this quarter, then the machine is doing exactly what we said it would do. The market didn't bail us out here. Rates didn't save us. The team just did the work. They rebuilt the company's operating system. They shipped products. They cleaned up the book. They grew contracts.
They did it way more efficiently than anyone thought we could do it. That doesn't just give me optimism. It gives me confidence. We will have a lot left to prove, and we always will. When we reach profitability, the next part is how much? It just won't stop, right? We're going to keep shipping. We're gonna keep showing you the data, and we're going to keep moving faster because families matter. Okay. That's it. Thank you, thank you, and see you all next quarter.