The iBuyer’s $1.1 billion in Q4 revenue wasn’t enough to offset a loss of $113 million. However, CEO Carrie Wheeler said the company entered 2025 as “a leaner, more efficient business.”
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IBuying giant Opendoor spent the final three months of 2024 grappling against a tough market, with a new earnings report showing rising losses but a meaningful jump in revenue.
In total, the company brought in $1.1 billion in revenue between October and December, the report shows. That’s an increase of 25 percent compared to the final quarter of 2023. The company also sold 2,822 homes, which is a 19 percent year-over-year increase.
Despite those strong numbers, however, Opendoor still lost $113 million during the quarter. That’s up from a $91 million loss during the final months of 2023, according to Thursday’s earnings report.
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The company also bought 2,951 houses in Q4 of 2024 — a 20 percent drop off compared to the previous year.
Carrie Wheeler
Opendoor CEO Carrie Wheeler struck an optimistic tone in the earnings report, saying that in 2024 her firm “took decisive actions to streamline operations and optimize our cost structure to better position the company to navigate the persistent housing market headwinds and drive toward our longer-term profitability target.”
“We enter 2025 as a leaner, more efficient business, focused on reaching sustained profitability in the coming years as we further monetize our seller funnel and build a company that can thrive despite real estate headwinds,” Wheeler added.
Thursday’s report also includes figures for all of 2024. Across the entire year, the company lost $392 million, up from $275 million in 2023. Revenue landed at $5.2 billion for the whole year, down from nearly $7 billion in 2023.
Opendoor bought 14,684 homes in 2024, an increase from the 11,246 homes it bought in 2023. The company also ended the year with 6,417 homes in its inventory. That’s an increase of nearly 1,100 homes compared to the end of 2023.
Of the homes in Opendoor’s inventory at the end of 2024, 46 percent had been on the market for 120 days or more. By comparison, only 18 percent of the company’s homes had been on the market for that long at the end of 2023.
Heading into Thursday’s earnings, Opendoor shares were trading in the mid $1 range. That was down for the day and the week, and roughly half of what shares were fetching a year ago.
Shares fell in after-hours trading Thursday following the publication of Opendoor’s Q4 earnings report.
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The company had a market cap of about $1 billion when markets closed Thursday afternoon.
Opendoor last reported earnings in November. At the time, the company revealed that it lost $78 million in the third quarter of 2024 — and that it was laying off 300 employees. However, despite a tough market, the company did see home sales rise 35 percent year over year in Q3, which boosted revenue 41 percent to $1.37 billion.
Though Opendoor may be entering 2025 as a “a leaner, more efficient business,” the company still faces challenges. Among other things, the iBuyer’s current share price is a tiny fraction of the more than $34 it was fetching back during the bull housing market of 2021.
At the same time, high mortgage rates have sapped consumer purchase demand while simultaneously slowing home price appreciation. Those trends have hit every real estate company over the past several years. But they’ve been particularly cruel to firms in the flipping business because those firms can no longer rely on rising home prices to help them turn a profit.
In response to these trends, many companies that dabbled in iBuying — companies including Zillow, Redfin and others — have since abandoned the practice. That has left Opendoor and smaller rival Offerpad as the last companies standing, though Offerpad reported earnings Monday and revealed that it was facing mounting losses.
During a call with analysts Thursday afternoon, CEO Carrie Wheeler repeatedly mentioned “headwinds” in the housing industry. Among other things, she discussed affordability challenges for buyers as well as sellers facing a “lock-in effect,” which means homeowners who won’t sell because their mortgage rates are lower than what they could get now.
Wheeler predicted that such conditions will persist, adding at another point during the call that the upcoming spring homeselling season is off to “a particularly slow start.”
Opendoor has responded to these conditions with a series of tactical moves, Wheeler said. They include tailoring the company’s marketing efforts to take advantage of seasonality and strengthening consumer reengagement strategies.
Update: This story was updated after publication with additional information from Opendoor’s earnings report and analyst call, as well as with additional background.
Email Jim Dalrymple II
