Opendoor: Q1 2026 Earnings - [Business Breakdowns, EP.245]

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1:32Again, all this work would typically take hours and hours and hours. It's at your fingertips now. Visit portraitresearch.com to start your free trial today. This is Matt Russell. And today I have Kaz Najation, CEO of Open Door, fresh off the first quarter 2026 earnings release. And we get into what is driving the strong execution quarter to quarter here. We've seen the product rollouts, the sales velocity, and the margin improvements that have opened door EBITDA positive as of April 1st, 2026, and on track to be adjusted net income positive by the end of the year. Kaz is a fascinating CEO to watch, to follow, to listen to, and he does not disappoint.

2:17So please enjoy our conversation.

2:24I actually want to start a bigger picture here. If you go back to February 2025, you are still at Shopify. You're ready to sell all of your possessions, lever up and buy Open Door, take it private. You end up becoming the CEO in a much more traditional way, I would say. But if you just look back on your thesis then, compared to where you are now, having run the business for some period of time, how much has changed since you've taken over and been inside the operation? Like two things. First, it was my wife that wanted to sell all of our possessions to take Open Door. Or at least she was one who encouraged me to think about it.

3:05But there are two things that have actually held in my mind. I try to be thoughtful about this. the first is the company is actually structurally in much better shape than I thought it would be. Like the underlying models of the company, the underlying databases, the underlying processes are just in much better shape than I expected they would be. I think the company had kind of started this doom loop of going down and down and down, but it does feel a lot like in Raiders of the Lost Ark when there's a guy guarding the cup. There's a bunch of people here who were still guarding the cup and that had kept it in a really decent shape.

3:47But actually the underlying model is just honestly just very good shape. We've invested a lot in it, but I'm actually very impressed. Second, I significantly underestimated the attach opportunity. I have basically done this whole like attach services thing my whole career. and I did not expect our first crack at this to go so well. Those are two upsides. Generally, I'm just very impressed. The main downside, honestly, just to be very self-reflective, I was honestly shocked by how the company was basically being run by outside consultants for so long. It feels like the people who were making decisions for the company basically had almost no stake in the outcome of those decisions.

4:37So the OPEX was just honestly stupid. And not just stupid, but like spent on the wrong things. And I think that was actually offensive. Based on the OPEX metrics today versus when you stepped in, you've done something about that. So I think it's been reflected in terms of your actions. I want to go back a little bit to your point on the attachment and even just higher level. When I first came across Open Door, I had a very simple view that it was essentially a real estate asset manager based around tech. And that is overly simplified. But you clearly distinguished it as a software platform. How do you think about the capital intensity and the underwriting skill set required to run the business when you're clearly aiding all that with the technology?

5:32But how do you think about that aspect of it, which I think many, let's say, traditional investors, the East Coast types can get hung up on? I think that the underlying assumption about the business are just fundamentally wrong. And by the way, I say the underlying assumptions are fundamentally wrong. Those assumptions were held by some people inside the building for a while. But it's not like people in New York were wrong. People in San Francisco were also wrong. Saying Opendoor is an asset manager that happens to have software is like saying Amazon in its early day was a warehauser of books that just happened to have software.

6:15Did Amazon warehouse books? Sure. But was it a warehauser of books? No. Like that's not where the leverage comes from. Right. The very real difference between being a prop desk and a market maker, if you're a prop desk and you hold assets for profit, you do one set of things. If you're a market maker and your fundamental job is to not hold assets for profit, you do a different set of things. Opendoor is a market maker, not a prop desk, a core asset level. So do we have to be very good at underwriting? Damn right we do. We have the best underwriting engine in the business. There's nothing close to it, right?

6:57And I say this as an honest-to-goodness nerd. But there is a very real difference about where that underwriting engine is pointed towards. If you look at a company like Citadel, Citadel gathers a crap ton of data. Why do they do it? Like the end matters as much as the means matter. I'm coming to appreciate many people got caught up with trust the process. I think you're really like trust the outcome and trust the endpoint. You're putting that into vogue, which I can appreciate. And on that point, I think it's a really great way to distinguish market maker versus prop desk. it gets into this concept around spread versus velocity.

7:42What does it mean in practice to really focus on velocity? Is it really focusing on markets where there's higher turnover of homes? Is it really just focusing on capturing less spread? Therefore, we can sell faster. If you were to rank the really important drivers to that focus on velocity, what would those be? If you think about it, Opendoor has an embedded advantage compared to every other buyer and seller of real estate in our cost of capital. We're just bigger, right? We're just relatively big. We're a great capital markets team. But that has not been adequately used by the company. The best reason why you want to always be in a flow market, at the end of the day, like hard counters at the blackjack table play every hand.

8:30The reason they play every hand is to get more information. The information is the point, right? When we buy lots of homes and sell them very quickly, we get very live feedback about actual market conditions. Not just about the clearance price. Also about the renovation process. Also about the demand that impacts every other demand. We actually pick up data in a way that no one else does. And by the way, we're ahead of the market. So even if you were scraping all data you could from MLSs, we're like 90, 120 days behind us because we're picking it up live. We have access to data in a way like very few people do, right?

9:11Like when you are a market maker at a stock exchange, everyone sees the up and down. We have a 90 to 120 day advantage on the market. It's a very real thing, but you can't use that advantage if you decide you want to have very high margin on every single trade. Let's say you want to have high spreads in buying an asset. So I come to you, you think your home is worth$400 ,000. I agree it's worth$400 ,000. If I offer you$300 ,000 for it, you will tell me to take a hike. The only scenario under which you will not tell me to take a hike is if you know things I do not know. I am paying for a negative feedback loop.

9:58I'm not actually getting$100 ,000 a spread. There isn't that much ARB in real estate. But if I actually am able to have very tight spreads such that you can say, look, if I list my home, I have to pay realtor fees, taxes, holding costs. I have to have an odd of the home falling through. I have to have 90 to 120 day hold periods. That has a cost to me. If I can add those up and I can come to you saying, look, I will do it for you faster, cheaper, more certain. you'll say yes to me as a rational human being and I still have significant room for margin. If I can just compress that so I can buy from you at a better deal with more certainty that you would sell into a market and sell to the next person at a better deal more certainty that you would buy from the market.

10:42I'm just increasing my information advantage. And by the way, as we've shown, we also have significant attach opportunities. Right? We own a title and escrow business which is growing very quickly. We have a mortgage product, which is just excellent. And the things you need to do to underwrite a home to acquire it, underwrite a home for mortgage, and underwrite a home for insurance are all identical to each other. In a traditional market maker world, like in the stock market, the attached opportunities aren't as significant, whereas in this world, the attached opportunities are significant. So as long as I can move fast, the business works.

11:25If I were to ever want to sell my house, why would I pick Open Door? Because I could do it faster. I could get the offer quickly, the likelihood of closing. I know there's still not every contract you go into closes. But that's focused on speed and almost removing the inconveniences associated with real estate sales, which there are many. Would you say that's an accurate depiction or am I shrinking the customer base too widely when you think about who the ideal partners are? No, you're shrinking the customer base too widely. I think what you're saying was true of the company some time ago, where the people who sold to Opendoor were people who wanted to move fast at a high cost, right?

12:10Death, divorce, delinquencies. If you look at the family that we talked about in earnings, the Watsons, they weren't in that much of a rush. They wanted to move from California to Colorado. They could have moved at any time. But Open Door, they bought a home from Open Door because it was a great deal. They took a mortgage from Open Door because it was a great deal. And they sold a home to Open Door because it was objectively a great deal. But it wasn't that like, they value certainty, obviously. But they could have tested the market and they would have been worse off. My job is to go to a family and say, the product genuinely is better for you.

12:52And that's what we want to do, right? And I put it away, like, overwhelmingly that is true. Like, now, we are going to get better and better at this. Our spreads are going to get tighter and tighter over time. But my job is to make sure that when you want to take your next move and you want to buy a home, sell a home, that you think of Open Door the way you think about Uber, the way you think about Amazon, the way you think about your market maker. To your point on attachment possibilities, you've started to roll out some of these various options out there. And I am curious, when you think about long-term, that spread being tight, seeing more velocity going through, what do those represent just in terms of the profit pool and the pie for the business?

13:38What are the things that naturally attach to real estate? And what are the embedded margin, or at least the embedded gross cost opportunity? Right? There's a transaction cost of 6 % to 7%. Everyone understands it. The title and escrow cost of 1 % to 2 % there. There is mortgage where the average margin is 300, 350, 400 basis points there. There's insurance where the average margin is, you know, 100, 200 basis points there. There is home care. There is satellite. There's satellite. There's solar. All these things add up, right? Some of these are friction. Some of these are premium products. Some of the things you have to have.

14:22Like mortgage isn't an option for most people. You have to have a mortgage provider. Now, if I can take a series of services in a highly fragmented market, all of whom have very low NPS scores, and jam them all together and say, great, all the profit made by all these players in the stack and all the inefficiencies by all these players in the stack because they all have to pay for CAC, and I don't, they all have to pay for gathering of information. I don't. That's like the opportunity. And look, it is the single largest market in the world. It is significantly bigger than the stock market. And I think you can believe whatever you want about the underlying business of Opendoor.

15:18You have a variety of opinions about Opendoor and me. What I think is very hard to say is that the largest real estate company on the public market in the United States should not be very large. There isn't a$100 billion market cap real estate company in the public markets in the U.S. That does feel like a flaw in the matrix. On the attachment opportunities, you are often mentioning that you don't like to announce or tease products before they are formally launched. But if you just think about prioritization, which is a big thing for you in rollouts, do you have an order of operations or an order of focus when it comes to mortgage, title and escrow, attachment rate, just generally speaking, anything along those lines?

16:13What you want to create in order to simplify a system is a thin waste. You want to be able to actually have a thin waste so you can simplify the rest of it. For e-commerce, that's checkout. The checkout is what actually runs the business logic on either side of that transaction. That doesn't exist in real estate. For us, the priority is creating checkout for real estate in the United States. That by necessity means we care a lot about title and escrow. like title and escrow is a thing we care a lot about on title and escrow like once we solve that lots of other things the system just becomes simpler it's public that we have a mortgage product live in Colorado and we'll have a bunch of other states soon that's obviously second I think home warranty is very high on the priority stack than insurance and then a bunch of other services I think for what it's worth I think like it's not that hard to imagine why Opendoor is almost an ideal provider of solar services.

17:15Give me that vision. We buy homes, lots of homes we buy, lease their solar panels from someone else. It's very easy to imagine how we can buy those solar panels and then lease them to the next seller. That's just the easiest version of it. There's a couple of versions that get slightly more complicated. But more importantly, just go down the stack of financing. You're an ex-banker, you're good at this. So imagine what it takes to underwrite the risk of any given asset class. How correlated is a risk to leasing someone a solar panel to the underlying home? How correlated is that risk to a mortgage?

17:56How correlated are all these risks to insurance? I think that you'll get to a point where you used to actually buy, Cars have a very interesting history. You used to buy your engine separately from the carriage. It was actually a real thing. There were people who would make the body of the car, there were people who would make the engine, and they'd go buy them. But we decided that was exceptionally dumb. But we still buy homes the same way. The way we buy cars is we usually get financing from the person who sells us the car. And the car usually comes the way we want it. But the way we buy a home is we deal with a couple of dozen different parties in the system, and they all hate each other.

18:42It's a very, very weird hack on the system that has been maintained. When you think about introducing those various things that you could attach to the purchase or sale of a home, each one does potentially involve friction. You know, the mortgage doesn't go through or the insurance, any one of these things. How do you solve for that when, yes, it's naturally, you know, would be a great thing. But could they add friction, slow things down in terms of velocity? Tell me where that thesis is wrong or how you solve for that. Matt, I think you're just straight up wrong, man. I think there's a very real thing.

19:19I think there's a lot of FUD that comes from people who provide point solutions that say, my point solution is so complex that you could possibly never mix it with another one. Let me give you an example. You have two products at Shopify, Shopify Payments and Shopify Tax, both of which had extremely high penetration rates and used by basically everyone. If you happen to own a restaurant in New York and you went to get your payment provider and said, hey, I'm considering getting this tax, can you do tax for me? that, oh, no, you should stay with us because it's so complicated. Look, are there complexity in the system?

19:59Of course there are. Of course there are. But for 80 % of people, 100 % of these services are relatively vanilla. 80 % of people are the margin opportunity that pays for 20 % of complexity. That just seems terrible for those 80%. So do I think someone who wants to buy a$14 million mansion, who has no U.S. residency, who has trusts all over the world and multiple cars should be able to use open-door home loan and open-door insurance and all the other services we provide? No. I don't think they should use us. But I don't think the average American living in South Dakota should pay for that subsidy.

20:45Like, our job is to make life easier for the average person, like the school teacher, the plumber, the electrician. Like, they should not have to pay more because complexity exists in the system. And by the way, I say it as a guy who has complexity in his life. There's no reason why the average person should subsidize my life. That sounds insane. But, like, that's what we have. That's the world we live in, right? My job is this at Open Door. I want the teacher in Kansas City to have a one-click mortgage, title, escrow, and home buying experience and home selling experience. That's what we're going to work on.

21:24We're going to solve this for a teacher in Kansas City. The dudes living where you live with their Maseratis can go to someone else. No Maseratis in the garage. In terms of the go forward, you brought up multiple times. You have this path to profitability, but also you're not afraid to invest in the business. And I just want to think about that philosophically, how you approach that, because sometimes you want to heavily invest when there's an opportunity to go after something. You've made it clear that that path to profitability at certain points in time in terms of EBITDA positive and adjusted net income positive by year end.

22:05And how are you balancing that with whatever need there is to reinvest back in the business or how you're going to balance the investment back in the business with that? My wife wanted me to work out. So she bought me weights and a bench. And then I just totally ignored them and didn't work out. So she then put the bench at our bedroom door and the weights on it. I couldn't get out of the bedroom without actually seeing those things. I think open door requires some of that energy. I think Opendoor has had too little discipline when it comes to being a for-profit business because it has been able to reach for capital markets over and over again.

22:47And I think that has been actually bad for Opendoor. So I think it's incredibly important for us to be incredibly disciplined. And this will be painful as hell. It'll just be painful. This will hopefully be the last job I ever have. and I care about my job and the company I'm running a decade from now. And the best thing I can do for that company is ensure this company is the most disciplined and most aggressive tech company in the market. That's the real answer. Now, am I foregoing area of growth that I would not foregrow if I had lots of profits? Yes, I am. For sure I am. But I think there's a very real thing, man, where I think this is healthy discipline.

23:30I think it's healthy. And I think it's important that Opendoor be funded by its cash flow. I think it actually would surprise people to learn how few engineers work at Opendoor. Opendoor has fewer than 70 engineers. I think that would surprise most people. We're getting a crap ton done with those 70 engineers, but I promise you I know what every single one of them is working on because we don't have the luxury of waste. I heard you mention in another interview that you've had some people make some pretty powerful changes within the business along the lines of engineering changes, but they did it with AI system.

24:10So it's actually a nice segue into that question. I mean, how much is your ability to operate with 70 engineers, just the power of both those engineers and those without an engineering background able to do a lot more in that regard? Our engineers are just excellent, just genuinely excellent. Our head of data is an ex-signal intelligence officer who used to run a very complicated system for one of the world's largest militaries. We have multiple YC founders in the building that have joined in the last few months, two from my batch at YC alone. So we have excellent, just genuinely excellent engineers here.

24:51We have excellent engineers, but there's like a division of labor between systems that create leverage for other people and those front ends, right? So our engineers spend their time creating systems that allow other people who are not engineers to create leverage for themselves. When I got here, we had an entire service whose job it was to calculate, and was maintained by an engineer, whose job was to calculate RSU allocations for employees. I can't tell you how nutty a waste of time that is for an engineer, but basically all companies have this. I'm like, why is an engineer working on this? Like, look, if you cannot, using Claude or ChatGPT or Codex or Grok, write a SQL query, you should not be working at a tech company.

25:43This is a tech company. I can see actually our head of internal comms right there. Our PR consultants all quit when I joined. They actually on Rage quit. And I can tell you, the head of internal comms who now actually, side of her desk, does this work for us. And it's most of her time on Claude. And so is everyone else in the company. And I think that is different than most other companies. Thank you very much for taking the time after that conference call that you just had. I appreciate it. And I will say the words that are always important after earnings. Congrats on a great quarter. Have a great day, dude.

26:17Likewise.

26:22Business Breakdowns is a series of conversations with investors and operators diving deep into a single business. All opinions expressed by hosts and podcast guests are solely their own opinions. Hosts, podcast guests, their employers or affiliates may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.