Dae Lee: Okay. Great. I guess, and I have a follow-up. It sounds like you guys are underwriting with more of a risk-off buyers in the homes that you’re acquiring. So with that, if that’s true, like what do you guys need to see to, I guess, operate the business with volume in mind as well?
Brian Bair: Sorry, the last part, Dae — the last part cut off, what we have to see on the what side? Sorry, I couldn’t hear the last.
Dae Lee: I guess, what you guys need to see to drive or operate the business for volume growth as well. It sounds like you guys are operating more for a process focus in mind right now. So what do we need to see for you guys to go after more volume?
Brian Bair: Yes. So a lot of — everything we do is assumption-based, right, of what the market is doing, each — very market-specific product line specific just in general. And I’ve mentioned before in different calls, that’s — to ramp up, that’s — to ramp up volume is one of the easiest metrics we can ramp up. I would think more than anything else is the volatility in the mortgage rates. I mean, for example, in the fourth quarter, we saw rates hit almost — well, they hit over eight and then we saw they’ve been down to like the high 6s in November and December. And so more consistency in the mortgage rates would definitely — what’s interesting is, just when we talk about the macro world, you have sellers that they’re obviously locked into their current mortgage and equity of the lock-in there.
The lock-in effect. But then you have buyers on the affordability side. And so both of them desperately want something to happen. You can just see it. And as interest rates drop down below 7, you can see sellers willing to sell and then — and you can see buyers that now want to buy. And so that right now is so sensitive. So we’re watching that really closely. Just affordability overall will tie into that. So everything is very interest rate-driven right now and just getting more consistency there. And again, it doesn’t need to go back down to where they were by any means. But it’s just more consistency, so you can see the affordability and sellers willing to sell there, too.
Dae Lee: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you for your question. The next question is from the line of Ryan Tomasello with Stifel. Your line is now open.
Ryan Tomasello: Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. It would be helpful if you can just give us a quick overview of the revenue model, maybe a reminder, a refresher of the revenue model behind some of the more meaningful asset-light service offerings and the economics from a gross margin perspective. I would assume things like renovation, that seemed to be a more material driver. And then in addition to that, these various agent partnership programs, just the volume and expense efficiencies, how you measure those relative to funneling volume for more traditional sources? Any added perks around that? It looks like there’s a membership fee involved, if that can be meaningful. Just in general, trying to understand the economics and revenue model behind the noncash offer products.
Brian Bair: Yes. Sure. I’ll go high level and let James get into some of the details there. But yes, from a high level, one thing that we want to accomplish is get our products and services out to more people as fast as — the faster we can and to scale it as fast, and especially some of the asset-light services. So we’ve always been focused on giving the customer or the consumer a choice. They come to us to get a cash offer or they could potentially list their home and — whatever works best for them at that moment. And so be able to scale using agents to help us scale those programs, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, that’s been scaling fairly quickly. And as we see even in this market and the landscape that even scale even faster is giving agents the ability to plug into a lot of our services.
And that includes our renovation services, so they can basically use our renovation teams to upgrade or upscale a home that they need, but also some of the others are sold in our 60 program that the ability to have the cash offer, been able to list a house on the open market with knowing that they have the insurance of the cash offer in the backdrop. So the agents are, like I said, we’re scaling that fairly quickly. And from when we launched it, we’re getting really good feedback, and it’s scaling very, very fast in some of the zones, the things that we’re doing. But again, we want to find a solution for everybody, and that consumes the — no matter — we want to meet the customer where they’re at, whether they want to use an agent directly, we want to be there for them.
But I’ll let James talk a little bit about the economics side.
