Opendoor is ready for its new era.
The company’s third-quarter earnings results came in below expectations on Thursday, but the numbers were quickly disavowed by the company’s executives, many of whom assumed their roles midway through the quarter.
“These are the results of the old Opendoor,” said interim chief financial officer Christy Schwartz on a live-streamed video call. “What matters now is what comes next.”
Opendoor reported a net loss of $90 million, worse than last year’s third quarter net loss of $78 million. It reported a third-quarter adjusted EBITDA loss of $33 million, below its guidance for the quarter of a loss of between $21 and $28 million.
Opendoor’s revenue of $915 million came in above the high end of its guidance of $875 million.
The company reported $962 million in cash on its balance sheet. It also announced that it refinanced roughly $264 million in convertible notes with equity.
The company’s stock fell almost 20 percent to $5.33 at the market open following Thursday’s earnings.
Executives who spokes on the earnings call were focused far less on Opendoor’s third-quarter performance than on its future, which CEO Kaz Nejatian called “Opendoor 2.0.” Nejatian, the former chief operating officer of Shopify, took over the top job midway through September after a group of activist investors pushed the company’s stock price up and former CEO Carrie Wheeler out over the course of a roller coaster summer.
The call itself — hosted as a video livestream on Robinhood — marked a significant shift in how the company is positioning itself as one that speaks directly to retail investors rather than Wall Street, a group for which Nejatian expressed repeated disdain.
“I never worked on Wall Street, and I generally don’t understand why these people do what they do,” Nejatian said in response to a question about short-sellers. “It just seems deeply boring and like, just bad for the soul. I mostly just pity them. They don’t really build anything.”
Nejatian also announced that shareholders would receive a dividend of tradable warrants, in an effort to no longer “take shareholders for granted.” For every 30 shares, equity owners will receive warrants that expire next year, entitling them to purchase shares at escalating strike prices starting at $9.
Nejatian laid out a vision for Opendoor as a fast-paced, artificial intelligence-driven market maker in the residential real estate market. He criticized the previous management team for being overly cautious, inefficient and paying a “well-known” management consulting firm millions of dollars.
“I think it’s reasonable to ask, how can we move so fast right now, when we used to move so goddamn slowly,” said Nejatian, who claimed the company nearly doubled its weekly homebuying activity in the last six weeks.
He said he plans for the company to benefit from flow and tight spreads, rather than making “bets on the direction of the economy.” He also called out a number of operational inefficiencies, citing one example of a team of 11 employees that were used to copy-and-paste information from PDFs into spreadsheets.
Nejatian said the company currently employs 1,100 people, down from roughly 1,500 employees at the end of 2024.
Nejatian also said he expects the company to be profitable on an adjusted net income basis by the end of 2026.
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