Opendoor acquires Open Listings

Opendoor, a four year-old, San Francisco-based company, has from the outset intended to make it possible to buy and sell residential real estate with a few key strokes. It seemingly gets closer to that audacious vision by the day. The company closed on $325 million in new funding in June in a round that brought its total equity funding to $645 million to date — and its valuation to more than $2 billion. Opendoor’s  cofounder and CEO, Eric Wu, previously cofounded two other companies. There’s no question the company is one of the most capital-intensive startups on the scene currently. Opendoor bids on homes sight unseen, agrees to buy them, then — contingent on an inspection to verify the quality of the home — it sells them, charging a fee of “about 6 percent,” he says. To date, the company has largely been working with people who need to sell their homes quickly because of a new job or other life event. By using Opendoor, they don’t get stuck paying for two mortgages when they can’t afford it. The company has just acquired Open Listings, a four-year-old, L.A.-based startup that has aimed to make it easier and cheaper for buyers to purchase homes by automating much of what an agent would do, thus reducing the fee an agent would traditionally take. The deal was also a very natural fit, suggests Wu. He says he met Open Listings cofounder and CEO  Judd Schoenholtz in 2015. Schoenholtz “reached out and wanted to share what they were trying to solve in real estate, so we met up and talked about problems we saw and our respective approaches . . . Judd was starting with the buyer side, and we were starting with the sales side, and we continued to share notes on how we were solving both.”