Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Opendoor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 2, 2023

Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Opendoor Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Kimberly Niehaus, Investor Relations Officer. Please go ahead.

Kimberly Niehaus: Thank you and good afternoon. Details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our earnings release and shareholder letter, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.opendoor.com. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations section of the company’s corporate website. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking, including but not limited to, statements regarding Opendoor’s financial condition, anticipated financial performance, business strategy and plans, market opportunity expansion, and management objectives for future operations.

These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Opendoor’s most recent annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, as updated by our periodic reports filed after that 10-K. Any forward-looking statements made on this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on management’s reasonable current expectations and assumptions as of today, and Opendoor assumes no obligation to update or revise them whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.

The following discussion contains references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The company believes these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors as supplemental operational measurements to evaluate the company’s financial performance. For a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see our website at investor.opendoor.com. I will now turn the call over to Carrie Wheeler, Chief Executive Officer of Opendoor.

Carrie Wheeler: Good afternoon. Also on the call with me today is Christy Schwartz, Interim Chief Financial Officer, and Dod Fraser, President of Capital and Open Exchange. As the market leading platform that is leveraging technology to transform and simplify the way people buy and sell their home, Opendoor has the opportunity to build a generational company and disrupt a massive market. Over the past year, our team has been hard at work scaling our customer acquisition channels and improving our pricing systems and cost structure. We believe we’ve laid the foundation to reaccelerate revenue next year as we build for a future of sustained profitable growth. In the third quarter, Opendoor purchased 3,136 homes. This was an increase of 17% quarter-over-quarter, despite the fact that average new listings were down 8% within our buybox in our markets, demonstrating our ability to gain share despite lower market transaction volumes.

Throughout 2023, we made cost structure and pricing accuracy improvements and passed those through despite reductions, which in turn enabled us to increase acquisitions quarter-over-quarter. These spreads improvements, combined with our growing partnership channels and plans to increase advertising spend in the first half of 2024, should allow us to accelerate home acquisitions next year. Our third quarter results demonstrate continued execution in what remains an uncertain US housing market. Mortgage rates hit a 22-year high of 8% in October, up over 100 basis points since reported Q2 results in August. Market clearance rates, while still at historically healthy levels, have declined more than expected with higher rates further depressing buyer demand.

While these market moves do have implications for our business, we continue to operate within our risk management framework and focus on controlling what we can control. Based on current conditions and signals we’re observing, our plans to increase acquisition volumes next year have not changed. We continue to closely monitor leading indicators so that we can respond to shifts in the market. Acquisitions from our partnership channels increased 33% sequentially in Q3 and are up over 76% compared to Q1. We continue to make progress on expanding our partnership channels across online real estate platforms, agents, and home builders. Our exclusive partnership with Zillow continues to scale and is live in 45 markets as of this week. With more opportunities for customer re-engagement in this channel and our previously launched markets continuing to mature, we saw meaningful transaction growth in the quarter.

In early October, we announced a partnership with eXp Realty, the largest independent real estate company in the world. This agreement enables eXp’s agents to request a cash offer on qualifying properties on behalf of the clients directly within their eXp dashboard. Ultimately, we believe Opendoor enables agents to better serve their clients and improve productivity. By leveraging AI and other technologies, we continue to drive operational excellence across our platform, including pricing, inventory management, and home operations. In terms of pricing, our proprietary home data asset that we’ve built over the last decade, coupled with deep human expertise, is enabling Opendoor to build proprietary real estate specific AI models. For example, we use AI to extract home conditions from customer provided inputs such as chat conversations, images, and videos.

These inputs are used by our centralized pricing team and improve our pricing accuracy with the objective of durably reducing spreads. For inventory management, we continue to develop technology and improve processes to centralize operations and conduct quality control remotely. We get real-time home-specific signals from our proprietary home security system and customer and agent feedback from each home visit which enhances our ability to quickly and cost-effectively respond to issues. We’ve leveraged AI to automatically categorize feedback and extract data points. Maintenance quality has improved significantly, with 99% of work meeting our quality standards of our statements of work. Additionally, agent feedback has indicated that listed home quality improved by over 10% throughout the year.

Finally, we continue to enhance our transactions and operations platforms in Q3. We piloted automated operator work assignments successfully to more effectively load balance work across operators and are expanding it to all operator groups over the next two quarters. We also recently revised our end-to-end CRM. Changes to the platform have enabled us to respond to customers faster, capture more useful structured data, and ensure that each step of the transaction is completed on time. Switching gears for a minute, I wanted to make a comment on potential disruption in the real estate industry regarding the buyer broker commission. Just this week, a jury ruled against NAR and other brokerages in one of several lawsuits that are challenging the practice of listing agents and therefore home sellers being required to pay the buyer broker’s commission.

To be very clear, Opendoor’s core business does not derive revenue from the buyer broker commission. On the contrary, the buyer broker commission is a cost that we pay when we resell our homes. The BBC currently represents approximately 2.5 points of our overall cost structure, which is meaningful. If the buyer broker commission were reduced or went away, those costs to us would be reduced. At Opendoor, we built our entire platform with a focus on giving customers transparency and choice as to how they sell their home. As such, we believe we’re well positioned to improve the experience of sellers and buyers as changes in the real estate ecosystem materialize. Before I turn the call to Christy, I’d like to thank the Opendoor team for their continued hard work to reshape the real estate industry and fix a broken process.

We believe we built the foundation for a future of profitable growth as we exit the year with an improved cost structure, strong balance sheet, and scaled customer acquisition channels. And we remain steadfast in our mission to power life’s progress one move at a time. Christy will now review guidance and the financial results. Thank you.

Christy Schwartz: Thank you, Carrie. Our third quarter results reflect increased acquisition volume, the growing mix of our new book of inventory, and our continued focus on cost discipline. We remain focused on delivering healthy, risk-adjusted contribution margins and preserving capital through disciplined cost management. We delivered $980 million of revenue in the third quarter, slightly exceeding the midpoint of our expected guidance range. We have continued to sell-through our longest held homes with less than 150 old book homes not in resale contract at quarter-end. On the acquisition front, we purchased 3,136 homes in the third quarter, a 17% sequential increase, despite a decline in market new listings within our buybox.

We returned to positive contribution margin in the third quarter, generating positive 4.4% versus negative 4.6% in Q2 2023. These results were ahead of our implied guidance range of 3.2% to 4%. The outperformance reflects both the strong performance of our new book of homes as well as slightly higher mix of new book versus old book resales than expected. Our new book of homes generated gross margins of 12% and contribution margin of 9.2% in the third quarter. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $49 million in the third quarter, inclusive of our previously recorded inventory valuation adjustments of negative $29 million. This beat the high end of our guidance range and is an improvement from an adjusted EBITDA loss of 168 million in the second quarter of 2023.

Adjusted operating expenses, which we defined as the delta between contribution profit and adjusted EBITDA, were $92 million in Q3, up from $78 million in Q2, 2023, and down from $189 million in Q3, 2022. The sequential increase reflects the fact that we began rebuilding inventory in the third quarter, while the decline versus the prior year period reflects our improved cost structure. Adjusted operating expenses outperformed our prior guidance of $100 million due primarily to the timing of certain expenses that we now expect to incur in 4Q ‘23. We expect adjusted operating expenses to be approximately $120 million in the fourth quarter, which reflects both the shift in some expenses from 3Q to 4Q, as well as our expectation to continue rebuilding inventory while continuing to prioritize cost discipline.

Turning to our balance sheet, we ended the third quarter with $1 billion in total shareholders equity, which is a decrease of $66 million from the second quarter of 2023. We ended the third quarter with $1.5 billion in total capital, which includes $1.2 billion in unrestricted cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and $182 million of equity invested in homes and related assets, net of inventory valuation adjustments. At quarter-end, we had $8.4 billion in non-recourse asset-backed borrowing capacity, composed of $3.9 billion of senior revolving credit facilities and $4.5 billion of senior and mezzanine term debt facilities, of which total committed borrowing capacity was $3 billion. As Carrie mentioned, mortgage rates reached 8% in October, their highest level in over 20 years, and up over 100 basis points since we reported second quarter results in August.

This increase in rates softened buyer demand, amplifying the typical seasonal decline in market clearance rates. The impact of this is reflected in our outlook for the balance of the year. First, as market clearance rates have slowed, our pace of resales is likewise reduced, impacting projected fourth quarter revenue. Second, we reduced home-level list prices in order to meet our clearance objectives, which flows through to lower revenue and contribution margins. And third, as a result of slower resale clearance rates, some sales from the old book shifted out of the third quarter. We expect the impact of those tail homes will be a drag on the overall fourth quarter contribution margin given their margin profile. Responding to seasonality and market changes is a normal part of our portfolio management process, including balancing the pace of inventory inflows and outflows.

With that in mind, we expect fourth quarter revenue to be between $800 million and $850 million; contribution profit between $15 million and $25 million, which implies a contribution margin of 1.9% to 2.9%; adjusted EBITDA loss between $105 million to $95 million; and adjusted operating expenses of approximately $120 million. In line with the expectations outlined back in May, we continue to expect fourth quarter home purchases to be about $3,000 and roughly flat quarter-over-quarter. With less than 150 old book homes not under contract at the quarter-end, we expect to return to more normalized inventory turns of 3.0 to 3.5 times per year. There are other factors that may cause inventory turns to vary quarter to quarter, most notably seasonality, but we believe it’s helpful to keep in mind as you model our inventory acquisition and resale pace throughout the year.

We continue to manage our business to return to positive adjusted net income, our best proxy for operating cash flow, and believe we have the cost structure and balance sheet in place to do so. I’d now like to turn the call over to the operator to open up the line for Q&A.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Nick Jones with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

Nick Jones: Great, thanks for taking the questions. I guess I saw the comments on the NAR lawsuit and kind of recent judgment on Missouri. If commissions were to come down and I realize maybe it lowers your cost a little bit, but does that then change the value proposition and the spread dynamic in your go-to market and how you can expect your homes to convert, I guess, if we kind of see this out longer term?

Carrie Wheeler: Hey, Nick, it’s Carrie. I mean, short answer is no, it doesn’t mean. We’re here to serve someone looking to sell their home with simplicity and certainty, and that’s the fee we charge today. And as I said earlier in my comments, and the buyer broker commission for us is a cost that we pay out as we resell our homes. And if that comes down, I mean — at worst it’s a neutral in terms of overall margin to us over time.

Nick Jones: Great. And then as we think about, I guess, 2024, how much of an overhang will affordability continue to be? I mean, do we really need to see transaction volumes kind of normalize to semi-historic levels for things to kind of improve and growth to kind of reaccelerate and margins to come through? Is it kind of a longer-term view or do you think the expansion of the buybox that you talked to and those in the shareholder letters enough to kind of continue to grow and navigate the current environment?

Dod Fraser: Yeah, I mean, I think we feel really comfortable with our ability to grow and navigate. I think as we’ve talked about in past calls, I think it’s important to distinguish between price stability and volumes from a — we really care most about price stability because that allows us to reduce our spreads. From a volumes perspective, as we mentioned in the letter, our addressable market today is $600 billion and so we just need a small fraction of that addressable market to scale back to profitable cash flow breakeven.

Carrie Wheeler: Hey Nick, it’s Carrie. The only one I want to add on to Dodd’s good answer is that we have been showing throughout the course of the year that we’re gaining share. And we’re gaining share against a declining market. And I think that’s evidence of the value prop and what we’re putting into the market for customers and our focus is continuing to do so.

Nick Jones: Great. Thanks, Carrie. Thanks, Dod.

Carrie Wheeler: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ygal Arounian with Citigroup. Your line is now open.

Ygal Arounian: Hey, good afternoon, guys. I just want to focus on prices and spreads for a little bit. I’m sure you’re not surprised about that. So, on the reference call right now, they just talked about seeing some signals of home prices softening and in their view that’s a good thing. I know that obviously has an impact on how you think about the world. And so I may have missed some of the comments, Carrie, but just your thoughts on spreads right now as we get through end of this year and into next year and what you’re factoring in and thinking about in terms of home prices as we kind of work through what’s been a more of a challenging environment than last time we spoke?