Opendoor CEO introduces new strategy after Q3 results

As he strives to right the ship at Opendoor and return the company to profitability, he told investors and analysts that he and his leadership team are “going to make a lot of changes” and that the “new Opendoor” will look nothing like the old one.

One of the first changes Nejatian has made at Opendoor is increasing the pace at which the iBuyer purchases homes.

“On my first day on the job on September 15, Opendoor had contracted to purchase 120 homes in the previous seven days. By the last week of October, that number had increased to 230 homes. In seven weeks, we have nearly doubled our purchasing speed,” Nejatian said.

According to Nejatian, the “old Opendoor” was slow and “broken” because it had “lost faith in the power of software to make selling, buying and owning a home easier.”

“It basically saw itself as an asset manager trying to predict the economy. The previous Opendoor also didn’t really believe in the power of AI to do anything, let alone make our jobs less difficult,” he said.

When Nejatian joined the company in September, he claims that “there were a dozen people whose only job was to copy information from PDFs and paste it into glorified spreadsheets.” Nejatian also claims the company wasted “millions of dollars” by paying a “well-known consulting firm” to make decisions he believes should have been made by executives. But most importantly, according to Nejatian, Opendoor “had become so risk-averse that it no longer really believed in buying and selling homes.”

This claim, according to Nejatian, is reinforced by the fact that Opendoor has purchased fewer homes in the third quarter of 2025 than since 2017, when the company first started. During the quarter, Opendoor purchased a total of 1,169 homes, down from 3,504 homes a year ago.

“Over the last few weeks, we have reversed course on all of these decisions,” Nejatian said. “We’re leaving manager mode. We’re now firmly in founder mode. We’re rebuilding this company.”

Core beliefs persist

Looking to the future, Nejatian said there are a number of core beliefs that the company holds. These include that it is a software company, that AI will enhance its operations, and that its leaders are there to make hard decisions and drive operational excellence. As Opendoor strives to return to profitability, Nejatian said the company is committed to only spending on channels that give it “a big return on investment” and that they are going to “stop spray-and-pray marketing.”

“We’re going to profit from flow, speed and tight spreads, not from betting on the direction of the economy. Our business plan is simple: buy and sell lots of homes quickly, be operationally excellent and increase our value to every homeowner by launching services like mortgage, insurance and warranty,” Nejatian said.

He and the Opendoor leadership team envision a future where a homebuyer can choose their home, financing, warranty and insurance all in one place. To hedge this bet, Opendoor launched Opendoor Checkout earlier this week. The new feature, which is currently only available in select markets, allows buyers to view an Opendoor home and place an offer to purchase it on Opendoor’s website without ever speaking to a person or agent.

“We deliver the buy now button for homes on the Internet,” Nejatian said. “Right now, homeowners have to deal with a lot of different companies, brokers, agents and a lot of different things to get what they need for a house. That doesn’t make any sense. We have the internet. We’re going to fix this.”

In addition to Checkout, since Nejatian took the helm at Opendoor, the company has launched several other new features and products, including automated title and escrow, a home exchange widget for builders, and buyer peace of mind, which he says certainly gives the buyer when purchasing a home through a home warranty and early move-in.

While Nejatian has big plans for Opendoor’s future, he acknowledged that the path forward would not be easy and that they would inevitably make mistakes. However, he assured investors and analysts that he and the leadership team would be held accountable.

“Every step of the way you will see that we care deeply about our mission and are transparent as we build,” he said. “I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m even more optimistic today than I was when I took this job. I think we’re going to make real change and make a real difference in the future of homeownership in this country.”