Opendoor Technologies bought 4,865 homes in the third quarter of 2026, more than four times the 1,169 it bought a year earlier. Selling them has been harder. The iBuyer’s net loss widened to $218 million from $90 million, gross margin roughly halved, and the company told investors on Nov. 5 that it is behind on its goal of reaching positive adjusted net income, according to its third-quarter earnings release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30 rose 12% from a year earlier to $1.022 billion, and 16% from the second quarter’s $883 million. Opendoor sold 2,728 homes, up from 2,568.
Buying faster than it sells
The gap between purchases and sales shows on the balance sheet. Opendoor held 7,596 homes worth $2.568 billion at the end of September, against 3,139 homes worth $1.053 billion a year earlier. It also had 1,780 homes under contract to buy, up from 526.
The company said its signed acquisitions came to about 0.56% of the U.S. market it can address, compared with 0.13% a year earlier. Its homes are also moving faster than they were: 18% of listed homes had been on the market more than 120 days, down from 51% a year earlier, though up from 9% in the second quarter. Opendoor put the figure for the overall market at 30%.
Margins went the other way. Gross profit fell to $38 million, or 3.7% of revenue, from $66 million, or 7.2%. The net loss of $218 million compared with $90 million in the third quarter of 2025. Losses on the company’s own adjusted measures moved less. The adjusted EBITDA loss was $31 million, against $33 million a year earlier, and the adjusted net loss was $66 million, against $61 million. Contribution profit, Opendoor’s measure of what each home earns after direct costs, rose to $34 million, or $12,000 per home sold, from $20 million.
“Opendoor 2.0,” one year in
Chief Executive Kaz Nejatian marked the first anniversary of his overhaul of the company. “It’s been one year since we embarked on Opendoor 2.0 and I’m more confident in this company today than I was a year ago,” he said in the release. “We’re seeing dramatically higher true seller conversion at comparable spreads than we have in years.”
The release credits a set of operating changes. Over the trailing 12 months, marketing expense per acquired home fell 57% to $2,800, and operations expense per acquired home fell 36% to $4,000. A product called Cash Now, More Later, which the company said “requires less capital upfront per home,” made up more of third-quarter purchases than all Opendoor products combined did a year earlier. The release also points to automation and AI as ways to run operations more efficiently. Mortgage originations, part of its effort to make its homes easier for buyers to finance, grew more than 400% from the second quarter.
Nejatian said resale is the next target: “We’re betting on ourselves to deliver the same change in resale.”
A weaker fourth quarter ahead
The guidance for the final quarter of 2026 is more cautious. Opendoor said it expects revenue to grow at least 40% from a year earlier, but: “We expect Contribution Profit dollars to decline sequentially as we continue selling into a difficult market.” It projected an adjusted EBITDA loss of $70 million to $85 million, more than double the third quarter’s $31 million.
On its profitability target, the release says: “We are driving to Adjusted Net Income positive by the end of 2026, measured on a twelve-month go-forward basis,” followed by “We are currently behind but we intend to catch up.”
Opendoor ended September with $910 million in cash and equivalents plus $98 million in restricted cash. Asset-backed debt, which funds its inventory, was $2.016 billion current and $348 million long-term. In the first nine months of the year it issued $650 million of convertible notes, spent $161 million on share repurchases and retirements, and reduced shares outstanding to 929.2 million from 957.2 million at the end of 2025.
Why the inventory matters
Opendoor’s model, buying homes directly from sellers and reselling them, depends on reselling inventory before prices or carrying costs eat into the spread. Zillow left the business in 2021 and is still dealing with that exit, as its third-quarter loss tied to a Zillow Offers settlement showed. Large single-family owners have also been selling homes rather than adding them; Invitation Homes is funding a buyback by selling rental houses.
On our reading, Opendoor is going the other way at an awkward time. It more than doubled its inventory from a year earlier just as its own guidance describes a “difficult market” for resale. The fourth-quarter outlook suggests the company expects that inventory to cost it margin before the efficiency gains Nejatian describes can pay off. More proptech coverage is on our technology and AI page.
