All right, we're gonna get started. I'm Dae Lee, J.P. Morgan's internet analyst, and we're pleased to have here with us Opendoor CEO, Kaz Nejatian.
That was good. That was as good as anyone does that last name, man.
That's great. I practiced. Opendoor is the leading digital platform for homes, buying and selling, powered by AI-driven pricing and operations. In 1Q, Open had contracts to purchase over 5,000 homes, which is a lot, probably the biggest home purchaser in the U.S. It's the highest acquisition level since 2022.
Kaz became CEO in fall 2025 after time as COO at Shopify and leadership positions at PayPal and LinkedIn. A builder, and a tech native, he is the architect behind Opendoor 2.0, a faster volume-driven AI-powered model. We'll dig into all of this today. Kaz, thank you for coming.
Thanks for having me, man.
All right. Let's start with, how you or the reason why you joined Opendoor as CEO last fall. Walk us through your decision to take this role. What did you see in-
Yeah
Opendoor's platform, or market positioning that convinced you this was a generational opportunity? What was it that you felt like you can do for Opendoor?
Yeah, I mean, I honestly, like, I had been at Shopify for six years, and I never thought I would leave the company. Like, I thought Shopify was gonna be my last job. Opendoor felt like a flaw in the matrix. Like, I could not believe that the whole world wasn't running towards this company because from what I was seeing from the outside, I'm like, "Okay, this is just, there's something wrong about it." Let me talk through why I think that was. The first is let me just broadly talk about the mission. Kids that grow up in homes that their parents own have better life outcomes. When people buy homes, crime goes down. Like, it is as close to a panacea as we have in the world.
Owning a home is incredibly important. The mission felt like one that I wanted to dedicate my life to, a deeply meaningful one. Second, I'm a startup founder. Like, I'm a honest to goodness nerd. I learned how to speak English by coding. The thing you learn after you have a few startups is that nothing beats native intent and proprietary data. Like, if you have native intent and proprietary data, like, that's two-thirds of the ball game. Opendoor has had stupid native intent. Like, in core markets of Opendoor, one in five Americans who sell a home try to sell it to Opendoor. Like, that's just, like, approximately a bajillion dollars worth of marketing spend wouldn't get you that. It's a very real thing, the data moat of Opendoor is one that nerds love.
It's the single largest asset class in the world, Opendoor has like, proprietary data on it that no one else does and can't get. That's a second thing. The third thing that just, like, drove me nuts was Look, I think there's a lot of people say a lot of words about AI, but, like, a lot of it's become, like, buzzword bingo for CEOs, and it's just deeply boring. The cost of a transaction in real estate is the single highest human labor cost per transaction in the world.
Like, there's no transaction that costs this much in the world.
If you think of, like, the, you know, companies that AI should be helpful to their native mission, the mission's important. There's proprietary data and native intent. The company seems to have been built perfectly expecting that AI would fall from heaven.
I think those three things have just been, I just couldn't get out of my head. I also, I think it's well leaked that I considered taking the company private, people have not talked about it.
I'm genuinely, like, very, very excited about this, and I never thought I would leave Shopify.
Okay. Yeah, I agree. The intent, the data, and the tech foundation, I mean, I agree that those are all important things for Opendoor.
I felt like real estate industry, covering it from outside in, is an industry where there, like, tech disruption just has not.
Yeah
worked like it has in other industries.
I felt like Opendoor is in that position.
Has all of the building blocks. Like, what, I guess with that said, like, what, like, coming in, like, what were the two or three most impactful changes that you've made so those building blocks can start clicking together and propel Opendoor?
Yeah
in a newer direction?
Yeah. Like, can you just, that you know me a bit, so you know I'm tend to go on rants.
Stop me if you want me to stop. I wanna actually talk about the first thing first, which is in the history of the internet.
Yeah
every asset class that has gone online has gone through the same progression. Like, first internet solved discovery, then internet solved trust, then internet solved underwriting.
The best way to think about it actually is e-commerce, eBay solved discovery, PayPal solved trust, Amazon solved all three.
Like, short-term home rentals, Craigslist solved discovery, Airbnb solved discovery, trust, Like, this has been the pattern.
Basically all that's happened in real estate is the flyers that used to exist in offices of real estate agents have now been jammed into a browser.
Everyone's like, "Cool, we're done." That's just not how the internet works. Someone's gonna solve all three of these things. I think it'll be Opendoor. It's very clear, like, where value accrues. I, like, I'm not a guy that talks like this, but it's, like, been clear. The single biggest change we've made at Opendoor has not really been, like, a change in pixels or underwriting, although we've made lots of changes in pixel underwriting. It's been a change in the company's stance. I think this is why the market appropriately valued Opendoor a year ago, which is Opendoor's key decision was trying to answer a year ago was what will home prices be a year from now?
Like, the company was basically a prop desk buying homes. Predicting what home prices will be a year from now is about as fruitful an endeavor as predicting what the lottery will be a year from now. Like, it's just a dumb thing trying to answer. Like, it's just not a useful value. We can't get value out of it the real way as a company like ours. What we have changed is we no longer try to be good about predicting asset prices a year from now. We try to be good about predicting when will this home sell.
We try to be right about time.
not right about value. Try, like, you know, we're, like, much more of a market maker-
than a prop desk. Just imagine. I mean, a bunch of folks here run hedge funds. If the market is going down and you're a long-only hedge fund, what do you do? You just, like, withdraw from the market, right?
If you're a market maker, what do you do? Just turn faster if the market's going down. Just turn faster and you'll be fine. That has been the key underlying fact about Opendoor. If you look at Opendoor, six months ago, or I guess two quarters ago, over 50% of our homes had been sitting on the market for more than 120 days.
We talked last quarter, that number is less than 10% now, or 10% now. We have significantly decreased the amount of time we hold the home for, and that has let us just buy a lot more homes, and this is what you're seeing. We publish our numbers every week.
I think we're the only company in the open market that does that. accountable.opendoor.com and see our markets. You see that our acquisitions have 6x year-over-year.
We're, like, beating seasonality right now.
That has been the biggest change.
Okay. That's good to hear. I guess there's a disconnect, or there could be a disconnect from what you're seeing from within and I guess what the market is seeing from outside.
Where do you think the biggest disconnect is right now?
Yeah
I guess, is there, like, a timeline or timeframe in which we might be able to see what you're seeing from within? 'Cause there's clearly positive changes happening.
Yeah
in terms of volume acquisition, but I think people value seeing that in the P&L.
Yeah
of investors. Just curious in how you're thinking about that.
I mean, look, I'm not a good investor. I should not have your job. I've bought two stocks in my life, Shopify and Opendoor. like, I'm not that guy, but I do think there's a very real thing. Let me tell you the thing we have said publicly, like, it's real.
I came in and I said our goal was adjusted net income break even on a forward 12-month basis end of this year, right?
We announced last earnings that Opendoor is now Adjusted EBITDA break even on a 12-month go forward basis.
Like, that's what we're working towards. You have seen margin improve every single month since I took over. October was better than September, November was better than October, December Like, every single month.
We said we guided that our margin will be between 5% and 7%, which is what we thought, we said it should be.
in order for the company to work. All the external metrics are like, doing what we said they would do. Opendoor is a cohort business.
Like, the way to value Opendoor is to look at the cohorts of home we buy and what those cohorts do. We published the cohorts in the last earnings. If you look at the cohorts, they look fundamentally different than they used to do. Opendoor's cohorts used to start and then just have this massive collapse down as they sold through. We published October, November, December, January cohort, and they're basically flat lines.
They're selling faster, margin degradation is lower, margin maintenance is higher. I think if you're just waiting for those cohorts to bake, those cohorts will bake on the timeframe we've told you they will bake.
Like 120 days-ish is when they bake, and you can see, like, literally it flow through. It's not magic that our margin is higher. We're buying better homes, selling them faster. That tends to increase margin.
I don't, I actually don't know when the P&L will show the things that people want it to show, but I can tell you there is a very real thing that if you assume Opendoor is a company it was a year ago, your models are wrong. The company is just fundamentally different in nature.
Okay. All right. Well, hopefully my models are closer to being right than wrong at this point, but we'll see.
I mean, I think you follow the company more closely than the average investor.
Yeah. We'll let the numbers do the talking in due time. Okay, I guess moving on, I think a critique that Opendoor has faced before was that it is highly dependent on the housing and the.
macro environment. Do you feel like you've made the changes, or has there been enough changes where you feel like you've kind of disconnected the two?
Yeah
You should be able to thrive in current environment?
Look, I mean, it is folly to say macro doesn't impact Opendoor. It's just dumb, right? Because macro impacts everyone in retail and everyone. I used to work at Shopify. I understand what macro does, and we have assets, so macro has a real impact. The question is Opendoor defined by macro or impacted by macro? That's a real thing. Opendoor is not defined by macro anymore. You can actually literally see it. We publish all critical cohort, and you can actually literally see in other cohorts we published. Home prices have gone down about 3.5% since we bought them in October. Our margins have gone up and stayed steady.
Right? We are less than 1% of homes in the U.S. today. I mean, we're about 5 times bigger than we were last year, this time last year, but we're still less than 1%. We're not capped by clearance. We'll have 4 million homes trade this year. 4 million homes is plenty of homes for Opendoor to do what it needs to do.
We're not assuming macro will rescue us. You can see we've bucked seasonality.
We publish our numbers every week. Our margins have bucked macro. TAM is not constrained. I mean, are we impacted? Yes. The very real thing, most CEOs would sit here and tell you that like well, macro will help, like we're waiting for macro to recover. I'm actually saying the opposite. I like the fact that we're running this company and turning it around in tough macros. Like I actually really like this about the company.
What I saw happen in tech during the ZIRP era was everyone was hitting singles pretending they were hitting home runs. Like when the water went out, no one was wearing shorts.
It's like, did that really happen? Like, we're building the company and proving steady and increasing margins in the toughest macro. Like I like this environment.
Like this is where we build our muscle. If you look at the homes we're buying, dispersion is up, DIP is down, days in possession is down. Like, I think we're building the right muscle, and I like this environment. Like I mean, I think it's odd to hope for macro to do anything.
But it's hard. Actually, sorry, I'm just gonna go on a rant for a second here, just because I haven't ranted enough today. If you look at world-defining companies, almost all of them were built in tough macros. Almost all of them.
Like let's go back in time. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, like more recently, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb. Like tough macros are what allow you to build the muscle you require and the shape that you require, such that you don't allow yourself to think you're winning when you're losing.
Like Amazon is such a clear example of this. Like Amazon, the Amazon that exists today got built in 2001. That's. I like the macro we have right now.
Okay. Yeah, certainly challenge builds character, so I agree with that. Let's talk about AI a bit, in that like there's been a lot of talks about how AI is impacting the industry.
How do you feel like AI will, one, affect the real estate industry broadly, and two, how are you better utilizing or incorporating AI into how you guys operate at Opendoor?
I think there's like the bingo card AI CEO thing I have to do, like which is like I think if you don't do it, they take your CEO card away. I think that's just a very like, odd, boring thing, so let me just answer the non-boring answer. Look like AI is basically like manna from heaven for us, but there's a reason why it is. If you think of old SaaS software, like what was SaaS? SaaS was a discovery that you could build UX on top of a CRUD database that enforces business logic.
You could increase productivity while lowering the cost of software, right? That was like the SaaS like revolution. If you are AI, with AI, like that becomes deeply odd 'cause a business logic is no longer useful to enforce 'cause you can literally have AI enforce it. You don't need software to enforce it. The CRUD database is less useful. Like, this is what's happened to SaaS. Like point solution SaaS is like very odd.
in this day and age. This has been what we've proven. This will take a long answer, so give me rope. This is what we've proved. We launched a mortgage product in six weeks.
Like we launched a mortgage product in 6 weeks with 3 engineers.
We couldn't have done that without AI. That's a very real thing. I would put the penetration of AI at Opendoor against any company. Not any company, any company in tech.
Like we're relatively AI-pilled. Structurally, for like what it will do to industry is insane. If you think what AI will do, it will take human labor and make it far more efficient.
The structural knock against what we do was that it took too much human labor.
That was a structural knock. The structural knock is you require too many people to do this well.
Opendoor's headcount has gone down. That's public. I'm sure every hedge fund in this room scrapes LinkedIn. Our acquisitions have gone up.
We used to have 11 people review every home, we now have one.
Dispersion has gone up, margin's gone up. Like, you can build a machine exoskeleton around a person such that our underwriters can review an order of magnitude more homes than they used to, and be better at it.
I think AI is for housing and for clearance of this market, like structurally a different thing. It's like trying to pretend you're in transportation before railroads existed.
Like, these are different markets, different will have different clearance. Last, I promise this is last, if you look at the talent coming into Opendoor today.
The ML talent, and the engineering talent, and the data talent, I would put it up against any company. Not any company in real estate, any company in tech.
You will find that the quality that we are hiring, the work we're getting done is just insane, and I think that has been like. Now look, are sales AI-pilled? Yes. Supportive AI-pilled? Yes. All the AI stuff that other people say is also true here.
It's just that we're not, like, buying off-the-shelf randomness and pretending we're good at this.
Okay. Yep. All right, so you've got the talent. Let's talk about the data advantage that Opendoor has. Like, what do you feel like What's most unique about what you guys see from a data perspective?
We're the single largest buyer and seller of homes in the U.S.
Yeah.
We buy more homes than anyone else, and we see more homes than anyone else.
We have pictures of more homes than anyone else. We've looked at more foundations than anyone else. Like, you can build a really good dispersion model based on quality of roofs.
You can build a good dispersion model on foundations, on clearance, on demand, the slope of the driveway. We just have data on our servers that you could scrape MLS from now to, like, end of time.
Not get relatively useful data to build a real model with. What happens is not only do we have proprietary data. What you need is proprietary data and a right eval model, right? You can't build a good eval model without real-time signal, right? Whether we buy a home or not buy a home, we see what happened to that home.
We see it 120 days before everyone else sees it.
Like, the guy who leads our We actually have a bunch of new people on our data team. One of them came from building data models for one of the largest market makers in the world in commodities, and one of them is a former signal intelligence officer that used to track where bombs would land. Like, these guys are just, like, having Like, they just cannot believe the amount of proprietary data on our servers.
We're just, like, we have now, I think this is a fair thing to say, before I arrived, Opendoor had not run a model in shadow mode for some time. We now have multiple models running in shadow mode this week.
Which means you get to have this amazing thing where AI competes with AI for predicting the best vision of the world.
It can backtest it.
which no one else can.
Okay. That's interesting. Okay, it kind of feels like, again, you guys have all of the building blocks
I think you said earlier, was it five, one in five sellers?
In our core markets, one in five sellers that sell a home come to Opendoor to sell it.
Right. If that's the case, what do you think is preventing more sellers from selling to you guys?
We are far from great at doing our job. Like, we're less bad than we used to be, to be clear. Like, we're just, like, we're better than we used to be, but we're very ordinary about ourselves and our opportunity. If, let's just go back 6 months, because I think it's important to talk about it. Let's say 100,000 people came that month to sell a home to Opendoor. Half of them would come in the door, we'd say, "Sorry, not available where you want to sell us a home." Great. Lost half. We'd say, "Your home, outside our buy box. Please go away." Lost another half, so I'm now down to 25%.
We'd say, "Okay, this 25%, I will buy your home at a 20% discount to its value." Everyone else who was sane would tell us to please go away. The people who would sell us the home were people who knew something about their home that we didn't know.
We're paying for negative feedback loops. It was, like, amazing. What did we do? We launched nationally. Why did we launch nationally? It's a really dumb idea when someone comes to you and says, "I would like to deal with you," for you to say no. It's like free CAC.
Our CAC is much more efficient. Like, our marketing spend has gone down, our acquisitions have gone up. There's, like, no magic here. We just improved the funnel. We expanded our buy box, so we basically can now buy almost every home in the U.S. in the lower 48 now.
We expanded our partnership network, so we can actually renovate almost every home in the U.S. now. Now we shipped a product, 4 weeks ago? That tells you more information about your home than you can discover otherwise, you can decide if this is a good deal or not. That improved conversion by a double-digit %. Look, we don't need to spend a significant amount of money telling people Opendoor exists. We don't. We just need to be better at converting the volume that's already coming to opendoor.com.
What you have seen, this significant increase in our contract, we're like up 5, 6x, whatever, we had like 550 contracts last week, in a worse housing market, isn't caused by us spending money on brand. Like, we actually literally took our ads off TV for a while.
It's just, we just need to be better at converting it, and we're getting better at it every single day. Like, genuinely every single day, we're getting better at this.
Okay. All right. The opportunity's already knocking on your door. You just gotta open the door and let them in.
Yeah.
Welcome them in.
I would have killed for this when I was at Shopify, man. I would have killed to have one in five Like, my biggest problem at Shopify was going to entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs, and they would say, "What is a Shopify?
That was, like, my biggest problem. Like, Shopify was a default for choice at the time.
I am shocked by the volume of people who come to Opendoor trying to sell us their home. We just need to do a better job buying these things.
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. All right. We talked a lot about the opportunity, let's talk about some of the risk a little bit.
I mean, what are the biggest risks that you see, as you go down, you know, this mission path? I guess put differently, like, what keeps you up at night?
I have 4 kids, the youngest one of them is 2. like, kids keep me up at night.
Right.
Um-
I feel that, yeah.
I used to joke around that I sleep like a baby. I wake up every 2 hours. I think the responsible answer to this question is this: Opendoor takes assets on its classes, as balance sheet. Those assets have 4 distinct risk periods. The way we're dealing with those risk periods is by shorting the number of days we're in each risk period.
Like, why do we have a mortgage product? If you come to Opendoor with a Wells Fargo mortgage, that house takes 45 days to close. If you come to Opendoor with an Opendoor mortgage, that house takes 14 days to close. There's a difference between 14 days of risk and 35 or 45 days of risk. Why do we buy the homes we do? 'Cause on average, we start renovations on day one right now rather than day 45. Like, why do we buy the dispersion? 'Cause we've shortened our Like, like, that, the responsible answer.
shortening time we're in each risk for a while, so we can calculate better. More importantly, Cash Now, More Later allows us to share that risk.
with our customers. A significant portion of our asset book is now asset lighter.
You can imagine how we'd launch an asset light product eventually.
Totally.
Those are the real answers. That's honestly not what keeps me up at night.
That's what keeps Judd up at night. What keeps me up at night is this: I feel a depth of responsibility to the world because the worst thing you can do is take a trillion-dollar opportunity and build a billion-dollar business out of it and pretend you were smart. It's offensive. Lots of people go around wearing fancy watches and flying private jets who have done that, and I judge myself not against that, but against the history of people who have solved large problems for the world.
I don't wanna wake up and have to tell my kids that story.
I had a great job at Shopify. It was just, like, a dream job. I was, like, I was clearly winning. I didn't leave it to build a small but successful business. We're on a mission here, and it's not like a random thing. I literally, like, on my first day at Opendoor. Actually, that's not true. It was a Saturday, so it was before my first day at Opendoor. The first thing I changed was Opendoor's career page. Literally logged in, GitHub push, change the career page. The career page used to say some bullshit corpo word about, like, I don't know what the fuck it used to say. It now says, "This is hard, valuable, and fun, and we're on a mission to tilt the world in favor of homeowners.
It tries to convince you very hard to not come work at Opendoor. Like, that's what keeps me up at night.
is waking up Like, I think there's a, there are people who question, who have your job and who live in hedge fund world, whose job it is a reasonable one, which is like, will Opendoor survive? That's a reasonable question for people to ask. That question has been answered in my mind. Like, we've answered that question. I know where it's going.
The question is, will Opendoor be the default in the world for this problem? Defaults matter on the internet.
That, as I'm answering this, I'm seeing our CFO out the eye of my corner, and she's like, "Really doesn't like this answer." But it's true. It's like, this is what keeps me up at night.
Nice. It's fair. Yeah, I mean, housing is consumer's biggest asset that they purchase, so, you know, the, solving that challenge of ownership, I think, is an important one too. Okay. Like, based on everything we talked about, feels like velocity at which you're purchasing and selling a home, how long you're holding those homes for are the 2 most important KPIs that you might be tracking. Is there anything else that, I mean, you're look-
If I were outside Opendoor, I would track the following things to know if Opendoor was failing.
This is it. We publish what we need to do to get to ANI breakeven.
We're succeeding, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Like, if we are not buying the number of homes we say we should get to ANI breakeven, like, you know, we're failing.
Just like, it's important to tell people to know how you're failing, 'cause then you can hold yourself accountable to it.
Part of the reason we did accountable.opendoor.com was to hold ourselves to account.
If we buy fewer homes than we say we need to buy to get to ANI breakeven, we're failing. If our average days on market goes back to where it was in Q4, you know we're failing.
If the cohort curve start collapsing, you know we're failing. If we continue to buy the homes, number of homes that we need to buy.
If the average days on market continues to be low, and if our cohort curves continue to be flat, then this is a fundamentally different company than it used to be.
I think that's how you can judge us, or you can just wait for the quarter release also come out, and you can judge that.
also. In the toughest housing market in a while, we've had our margins go up.
Like, our margins are going up as the industry's margins are collapsing. Our listings are clearing fast as delistings is going up. Like, delistings went up, our listings cleared faster.
Like, we're bucking the market, bucking seasonality, and bucking history. I don't know how long we need to do that for other people to say, "Oh, there's something different here.
Internally, because we see further than folks externally see, we are all incredibly bullish about the mission.
Okay. All right. We'll hold you accountable for that. Last question. We talked a lot about your core product.
Let's talk about what you're doing outside of the core.
Yeah.
We talked about CashPlus.
The mortgage.
Like, how are you envisioning, like, Opendoor, let's say, like, 3-5 years?
Yeah
down the line?
I think there's a very odd thing that happens in the world, man, where people try to think of companies as verticalized things.
Yeah.
That's not how you build software. You do not build software by verticals. Like, if you do that, you will fail.
The way you build great software companies is you build a very thick platform upon which you build very thin verticals, right? Whether we buy a home or not, whether we give a mortgage to that home or not, and whether we eventually give insurance for that home or not, those are exact same decisions. They're the same decision. Like, the price of the home, the mortgage issued on the home, and the insurance of the home are highly correlated things.
We will build a very thick underlying model to actually value those things and very thin lines. Let me give you actually an example. When I launched Shopify Capital, which was our lending product, in the United Kingdom in 11 days, in a country where we didn't have a bank account or an entity or employees. It took 11 days. Why were we able to do that? 'Cause we built a very thick platform. Mortgage is our just first attempt at this at Opendoor, and we are proving, by the way, like, there are ways from the outside we can cover this up, figure this out.
Our mortgage attach is much higher than I thought it would be in Colorado, and the people who are buying a home from us and taking a mortgage from us often tell us that they have a home to sell to close that mortgage, and guess what? We're buying that home. The loop is closing, and I think the attach opportunity is larger than I thought it would be.
Okay. All right. All right, that wraps up.
Thanks, dude.
Thank you for coming.
I appreciate you giving me a chance to rant. I know this is usually different than these conversations go. Thanks, man.
No, thanks for coming.
Thanks, dude.