Opendoor’s Mixed Q1 comes with a confident turnaround pitch
Opendoor’s first-quarter results were mixed, but CEO Kaz Nejatian makes no apologies. Here’s what the company’s internal metrics say about whether the turnaround is real.
Opendoor Technologies reported this on Thursday First quarter revenue of $720 million, higher than analyst consensus of $664.5 million, but down 38 percent year over year. Earnings per share came in at a loss of $0.18, worse than the expected loss of $0.10. Shares rose about 1 percent in after-hours trading.
CEO Kaz Nejatian, who took over last September, said the company has structurally transitioned from making directional bets on house prices to a velocity-based model. New products include Opendoor Mortgage, now based in Colorado, and Cash pluswhich represents over a third of takeover contracts.
‘Market makers win by being right about the times’
During the livestream earnings callNejatian has highlighted the first quarter as proof that the structural overhaul he has implemented is working, even if the numbers don’t yet reflect this.
The gist of his argument: Opendoor previously functioned as a prop trading desk, making targeted bets on house price growth for months. When those bets went wrong, spreads widened, the quality of acquisitions deteriorated and the company went into a spiral. The new model, he said, is based on speed rather than prediction.
“Market makers don’t win by being right about the direction,” Nejatian said on the call. “They win by being right about the time.”
According to him, the shift is most evident in cohort data.
Opendoor now tracks margin stability for each acquisition cohort. Under the old model, margins would drop significantly as the company worked through inventory. Nejatian said the four most recent cohorts — from October through January — have shown essentially flat margin curves, a pattern he called “a step change in function.”
The CFO’s three-digit rebuttal
CFO Christie Exner pointed to three numbers that she believes tell the real story.
The resale contribution margin improved every month since September and ended the first quarter at 4.4 percent, an increase of 3.4 percentage points quarter on quarter. The number of homes on the market for more than 120 days has fallen from 51 percent to 10 percent over the past three quarters. And the number of acquisition deals signed in the first quarter exceeded 5,000, the company’s strongest quarter since the second quarter of 2022.
“The last time acquisition contracts exceeded 5,000 in a quarter, our fixed OpEx was double what it is today,” Exner said. “Those are the AI investments and operator empowerment that we talk about every quarter.”
Nejatian lists his failure circumstances
Exner expected second-quarter revenue to grow about 25 percent quarter-over-quarter and said the company expects to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven in the second quarter, plus or minus a few million.
More importantly, management said Opendoor is already adjusted EBITDA profitable on a twelve-month go-forward basis as of April 1, and reiterated its goal of achieving adjusted net income profitability by year-end, also measured on a twelve-month go-forward basis.
Nejatian was blunt about what would indicate the plan isn’t working: cohort curves returning to the old bleeding pattern, contract volumes remaining below the low end of the company’s guidance ranges, and outdated inventories creeping back up. “If all three of these things happen,” he said, “then we’re not doing what we said we were going to do.”
Now more than an iBuyer
Much of the call focused on how AI runs through Opendoor’s operations.
Executives described an AI audit tool that reconciles the scope of inspections with actual repair decisions to improve operator compliance and cost discipline; field managers using AI-enabled scoping to reduce pre-listing renovation spend by 10 to 20 percent in pilot markets; and a title taking process that lasted from up to five hours to 15 minutes.
The company also highlighted its Cash Plus product, which now represents more than a third of acquisition deals, compared to zero a year ago.
They also mentioned the launch of Opendoor Mortgage in Colorado, where Nejatian said early interest rates exceeded expectations and interest rates are about 87 basis points below the market average.
On real estate tokenization – which the audience asked about in a two-word question – Nejatian went long, calling on-chain settlement “the inevitable end of the category” for title and mortgage. He stopped short of announcing products, but said the company’s recent acquisition of Doma’s escrow division was “clearly the step in the right direction.”
Nejatian does not wait for the macro to improve
With mortgage rates still high, analysts wondered whether profitability targets were realistic. But it was in his closing remarks that Nejatian was most direct: the tough market is not a headwind that can be explained away – that’s what matters.
Drawing on Warren Buffett’s famous quote about finding out who swims without shorts when the tide falls, Nejatian said the housing market recession was exactly what he signed up for. “I didn’t take this job because I was hoping macro would turn around and save us,” he said. “I chose hard mode.”
Whether Opendoor’s turnaround is sustained as acquisition volumes increase will be the key question in the second half of 2026.
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