Introducing a more personalized selling experience

The average person spends 2.5 hours a day on social media and the average employee receives more than 120 emails per day. Couple these facts with an always-on news cycle, and it’s no wonder people feel overwhelmed with information. It’s why over the past year a growing number of consumers are seeking more personalized experiences to help sift through the noise.

In fact, data shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t. Across industries, people are looking for products and services tailored to their individual wants and needs. Whether it’s shopping for a new pair of shoes, ordering coffee, planning a vacation or moving to a new home, one size definitely does not fit all.

Today, we’re excited to highlight some products, features and partnerships with many of the largest players in real estate to address the various needs sellers have. To give customers the most personalized selling experience possible, we offer a range of products at different price points with time and convenience trade-offs – here are four ways we’re leveraging research, AI, partnerships, and design to do just that. 

More personalized experiences

Spending more than 500 hours surveying, listening to, and talking with customers, we now provide a more tailored selling experience. Stemming from these conversations, we learned that no two home sales are the same – and more than half of sellers (55%) want to list their home to maximize proceeds, giving them more time and flexibility. To accommodate these homeowners, we launched List with Opendoor, a new listing service that comes with Offer Lock, which makes it possible for sellers to list their homes with the certainty of our cash offer in their pocket. Now available in 17 Opendoor markets*, nearly 30% of our sellers in these markets choose this option; since June, we’ve increased listing agreements by 50%.  

On the other hand, another 55% of Opendoor customers are not willing to do open houses to maximize their sales price — and nearly 35% of those customers are also unwilling to have any private showings for potential buyers. 

New York resident Jim M. is one of those customers. With a growing family, he needed to sell his home for more space. But with young children plus a newborn, the traditional repairing and staging requirements were daunting. 

“My wife was in postpartum recovery, so we were taking care of our new baby,” Jim said. “It would have taken a lot of blood, sweat, and sleepless nights to try and get the house ready to be put on the market. We were exhausted!” He was relieved to turn to Opendoor. “It was easier than the last car I purchased,” he said. “No unpleasant surprises, no disruptions to everyday life. It couldn’t have gone any smoother.” 

In the traditional selling process, homeowners must clean and then stage their house, and accommodate potential buyers by leaving it for many hours at a time. We direct these sellers, like Jim, to our cash offer product to bypass home showings and sell on their timeline. As a result, in 2023 alone, we’ve saved our customers from having to interrupt their lives to support more than 55,000 hours of showings and spending time managing $111 million worth of home repairs. We’ve also helped our customers avoid having to restart the selling process after more than 1,840 potential fall-throughs.

More AI, more convenience 

There’s a ton of complicated information to digest when selling a home, from pricing trends and neighborhood knowledge to general real estate rules and bidding strategies. Thanks to technology, it’s never been easier to call up information. Simply saying “Hey Siri” can get you an answer to just about anything – but how can you trust you’re getting the right answers? 

We’ve recently launched an SMS-based AI tool that pairs AI with our human expertise to provide buyers and sellers with fast, accessible and unbiased information to help them through their home selling journey. As an example, our research shows 62% of homeowners are most concerned about how to determine the value of their home; 60% wonder what price similar homes are selling for; and 50% are unsure about the steps to sell a home. 

To help answer these questions quickly, we created an AI-enabled text experience to support sellers with their needs. Buyers and sellers can simply text their real estate questions, and we’ll provide trusted information in a much more convenient and low-effort way. As a result, we’ve started to see increasing engagement with people learning more about the selling process and what works for them. We also introduced Text for Offer, where sellers can text a short code (67367) to receive a preliminary cash offer in seconds — greatly reducing the friction in getting an estimate for their home.

More sellers can choose Opendoor 

In 35 of Opendoor’s markets, we’ve increased our buy box — the criteria of homes we purchase — by nearly 10% across segments to include higher price points, older year-built homes, a wider range of ZIP codes and bigger acreage. Essentially, we can buy more types of homes to help a greater number of homeowners move on to their next chapter with ease. As a result, since 2019 we’ve increased our addressable market from $160 billion to more than $600 billion annually. 

To achieve this, over the past year, we focused on continually improving accuracy by reducing bias in our pricing systems to serve more home sellers. For example, we utilized the latest forecasting techniques by incorporating AI and computer vision into our predictions to better account for home condition and integrating more external datasets to determine our offers for a wider range of homes.

We also launched a new partnership with Zillow to serve even more sellers. Customers visiting Zillow can simultaneously request a cash offer from Opendoor and an estimate of what their home could sell for on the open market with a local Zillow Premier Agent partner. Since our partnership went live in February 2023, we’ve expanded coverage to 45 of Opendoor’s markets, reaching Zillow’s 200 million unique monthly visitors across the U.S. 

And there’s more to come. In early October, we announced a partnership with eXp Realty, the largest independent real estate company in the world. With this agreement, eXp agents can present their clients with a cash offer from Opendoor alongside the option to list on the market, helping further streamline the home selling process. Customers working with our partners and deciding to sell their home to Opendoor across real estate platforms like Zillow, agents like eXp, and homebuilders are up over 76% compared to the first quarter of this year. 

Simple design to match a simple experience

The Opendoor brand stands for simplicity and certainty: we provide a premium service that’s approachable and accessible to all sellers. Our recent design updates provide a new, unified look and feel for all of Opendoor's products. We paired this with a new design system to improve the customer experience, increase our engineering capabilities and help us support multiple products for a more personalized selling journey. After rolling out the new design to all of Opendoor’s markets in October, we’ve already seen an increase of more than 4% in visitors requesting an offer.

As we head into 2024, we’re energized about transforming the real estate experience for the millions of people who move every year. Our research reveals that people want more options, guidance to navigate those options and simple products that get the job done. With an expanded product suite for sellers, larger customer reach and fresh design, we’re delivering a more dynamic, more curated and more personalized experience than ever before. 

Let us help you make your next move. Visit Opendoor.com to get started. 

Brian Tolkin is Opendoor's Head of Product and Evie Alexander is Head of Design and Consumer Products.

*List with Opendoor is now available in the following markets: San Diego, CA; Riverside, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Charlotte, SC; Jacksonville, FL; Phoenix, AZ; Tucson, AZ; Albuquerque, NM; Las Vegas, NV; Salt Lake City, UT; Prescott, AZ; Orlando, FL; Tampa, FL; Raleigh, NC; Greensboro, NC; Miami, FL and Southwest Florida.