Some ideas for Opendoor with help from @DeepSkyAI cc: @rabois @ericjackson @ihat @shrisha $OPEN @APompliano 1. The Integrated Smart Home Selling a house is a means to an end. The real product is the home itself. Opendoor is uniquely positioned at the point of transaction to upgrade the American home. Every home Opendoor sells/holds on the balance sheet should be a "smart home" with integrated energy, connectivity, and security solutions. Opendoor could partner with or acquire companies in solar, battery storage, and high-speed internet. These services should be integrated during the renovation process. This creates new, high-margin, recurring revenue streams and makes an Opendoor-certified home fundamentally better than any other on the market. 2. The Home as a Factory: Vertical Integration of Renovations The biggest variable cost and operational drag is renovation. Supply chain issues, labour shortages, and inconsistent quality are unacceptable variables. Opendoor should treat every home renovation like a manufacturing process by building regional "Giga-Reno" facilities. These centres will standardise materials, use robotics for repetitive tasks, and manage a dedicated, salaried workforce. Vertically integrate the supply chain for common materials like paint, flooring, and appliances. This eliminates dependency on external contractors and ensures consistent, high-quality, "move-in-ready" homes - a key demand from 70% of buyers. The goal is to reduce renovation time and cost by over 50%, turning a major cost centre into a competitive advantage. 3. Eliminate the Toll Takers: Go Direct The current strategy of partnering with agents and MLS is a crutch/parasitic loss. Opendoor should not be a lead-gen tool for the old system. The goal is to obsolete the old way of buying/selling homes. Opendoor's pivot to an 'agent-centric' model like Key Connections is a strategic error. Opendoor must own the entire customer relationship and should not outsource the customer experience. Think about a company like Amazon. The buyer rarely interacts with a 3P seller. The whole experience (including logistics, customer service, disputes/refunds, etc) is handled by Amazon. Offer a "Buy It Now" button for every Opendoor home, creating a true e-commerce experience. All-day, on-demand home tours will be standard. By controlling the ecosystem, Opendoor could eliminate external commissions and capture the full value of the transaction. 4. Radical Transparency to Rebuild Trust The only way to recover is with radical, painful transparency. Publish the data. Show the world the average spread between the purchase price and resale price. Show the average repair costs. Be brutally honest. Simplify the fee structure to a single, all-inclusive service charge. 5. Solve the Capital Problem with Financial Engineering Transform Opendoor from a company that holds housing assets to a platform that securitizes them. Explore creating new financial instruments or shared ownership structures. Leverage blockchain technology to create a platform where accredited/institutional investors and eventually retail investors can buy fractional ownership in Opendoor's portfolio of homes. This would create a massive new source of capital, dramatically reducing balance sheet risk and borrowing costs. More profoundly, it would position Opendoor as the de facto stock exchange for residential real estate - a truly disruptive innovation that realises the original vision of fundamentally transforming this asset class. The moment Opendoor acquires a home, the asset should be tokenised and moved on-chain, making it available for market participants to acquire. 6. Instil an Engineering-First, AI Native Culture Opendoor's next/permanent CEO must be a world-class engineer or product leader, not a finance or real estate veteran. Reorganise the company around small, agile product and engineering teams. Reallocate capital to strategic technology and talent acquisition. Opendoor must assemble a team that provides an "unfair advantage" in conquering the core risks of the business. This means poaching the absolute best AI and data science talent from Google, Meta, and other tech giants by offering them a chance to solve a multi-trillion-dollar problem. Compensation should be heavily weighted toward stock to align incentives with long-term value creation. The goal is to move at the speed of an AI startup, not a real estate brokerage. 7. Launch "Opendoor Pro" - A Subscription Data & Analytics Service Create a high-margin, recurring revenue stream by productizing the data. Opendoor Pro would be a subscription service that offers access to anonymised, real-time market data, predictive analytics, and trend reports that are unavailable anywhere else. 8. Drive to Full Vertical Integration of Ancillary Services Opendoor must own and optimise the entire transaction stack. This means moving beyond partnerships and third-party solutions for title, escrow, home insurance, and mortgage. These services should be brought in-house, fully integrated into the platform, and re-engineered for technological efficiency. Each service becomes a profit centre and, more importantly, a way to reduce friction for the customer, making the Opendoor ecosystem stickier and more valuable.