{"id":50084,"date":"2026-05-11T21:23:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T18:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/ceo-kaz-nejatian-says-opendoor-has-fixed-its-fatal-flaw\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T21:23:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T18:23:57","slug":"ceo-kaz-nejatian-says-opendoor-has-fixed-its-fatal-flaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/ceo-kaz-nejatian-says-opendoor-has-fixed-its-fatal-flaw\/","title":{"rendered":"CEO Kaz Nejatian says Opendoor has fixed its \u2018fatal flaw\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been less than a year since Opendoor<\/strong>\u2019s stock skyrocketed<\/a> on the heels of a post <\/a>made by hedge fund owner Eric Jackson on X<\/strong>, which ultimately led to the resignation<\/a> of its CEO and Kaz Nejatian<\/a> taking the helm. According to Nejatian, things at the iBuyer have vastly improved since he took over in September of 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to contracts, this was our single best quarter since 2022,\u201d Nejatian said during Opendoor\u2019s Q1 2026 earnings call with investors and analysts last Thursday. \u201cCohorts are performing better, resale velocity is improving, and we\u2019re scaling growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Opendoor, its Q4 2025 and January 2026 acquisition cohorts \u201chave the best combination of margin, margin stability and resale velocity of any corresponding cohort in company history (excluding the COVID-era),\u201d and each of those four cohorts are \u201cselling faster than any corresponding cohort since COVID.\u201d Additionally, Opendoor claims that acquisition contracts have doubled quarter-over-quarter and are back to 2022 levels, while aged inventory has been cut from half of its inventory book to one-tenth of its total inventory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This \u2018isn\u2019t an accident or small scale luck,\u2019 says Nejatian<\/h2>\n

During the firm\u2019s last earnings call<\/a> with investors and analysts, Nejatian highlighted the October 2025 homes purchased as an example of what Opendoor 2.0 was capable of doing. Although this was not Opendoor\u2019s largest cohort of properties by volume, it was double the size of those a few months prior. Nejatian argues that by continuing this trend during the rest of Q4 and into Q1, it shows that October was not just luck, but rather a trend illustrating that Opendoor is on track to increase its acquisition size.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFour consecutive months tell us something October alone could not. This isn\u2019t an accident. This isn\u2019t small scale luck. Mortgage rates are still far too high and the listings are at all-time highs. But in a housing market that was supposed to break us, our cohorts are delivering,\u201d Nejatian said. \u201cOctober wasn\u2019t a fluke. It was just the first month we could see it. We\u2019ve now sold through over 80% of the October cohort and 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. So we\u2019ve seen about a 3x improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Financial results don\u2019t paint the same picture<\/h2>\n

Despite the improvements<\/a> highlighted by Opendoor\u2019s executives, the financial results aren\u2019t painting the same picture. During the first quarter of 2026 Opendoor recorded $720 million in revenue, down $433 million from a year prior, while net loss jumped from $85 million in Q1 2026 to $173 million in Q1 2026. In addition, the number of homes sold during the quarter fell from 2,946 homes a year ago to 1,921 homes, while the number of homes purchased fell by 1,135 homes annually to 2,474 homes. But as executives highlighted, the number of homes in inventory at the end of the quarter was down 3,660 homes from a year ago to 3,420 homes. Executives also noted that Opendoor entered into contract on over 5,000 homes, twice as many as in Q4 2025 and three times as many as in Q3 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even with the drop in revenue and increase in net loss, Nejatian remains positive about \u201cOpendoor 2.0,\u201d noting that its contribution margin has increased every single month since the firm bottomed out in September and October, November, December and January.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the past, Nejatian said Opendoor made \u201cmade directional bets\u201d based on where the company assumed home prices would be going in the next few months. When the company got their predictions wrong, it did things like widen spreads and slow down acquisitions in order to stave off additional damage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery defensive move was the thing that was actually killing us. We were playing prevent defense when we were down by a touch down. So of course, we were losing. We widened the spread to protect ourselves, but in doing so, we changed their funnel,\u201d Nejatian said. \u201cWe 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\u2019t just have a risk that we could not calculate. We actually built a machine that amplifies it. Every move made everything worse. That was our fatal flaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Old model caused company to slow down<\/h2>\n

According to Nejatian, this \u201cold model\u201d caused the entire company to slow down. In order to change things, he said the company didn\u2019t just improve the pricing model, but it changed the question the pricing model was meant to answer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA year ago, the most important input into every decision was our home price appreciation forecast. Today, it\u2019s how fast we can sell the home we\u2019re 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,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the timeline improvements, according to Nejatian, are due to a series of products the firm launched during the quarter, including the acquisition of title firm Doma\u2019s escrow division, a rebuilt offer page for sellers, a portable assessment schedule for sellers that allows them to get their home assessment done when they want, the launch of Opendoor Mortgage <\/strong><\/a>in Colorado and the tripling of the Cash Now, More Later product.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Nejatian and his team look to achieve adjusted net income profitability <\/a>on a 12-month go-forward basis by the end of the year, he is remaining positive about what the future holds for Opendoor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I joined Opendoor, I did it because homeownership matters,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is the single thing that leads to better families, better neighborhoods. When people buy a home they love, they\u2019re buying a share in this country. We don\u2019t buy homes at Opendoor to hold them. We buy them so we can get them into the next family faster, with less friction at a better price. And every family we help move is a family that puts down roots. It\u2019s a neighborhood, we\u2019re getting better. It\u2019s children that get to grow up in a home that their parents love. Faster is what this company was built to do.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been less than a year since Opendoor\u2019s stock skyrocketed on the heels of a post made by hedge fund owner Eric Jackson on X, which ultimately led to the resignation of its CEO and Kaz Nejatian taking the helm. According to Nejatian, things at the iBuyer have vastly improved since he took over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mk.gen.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}