Doesn't adds up!
To begin with the company have misleading information making you believe that the initial offer they give you is a cash offer (to be fair they claim that they have all the information available online but I am guessing that unless you read all the footnotes you will also think that this is a cash offer). After I decided to go a long with the process and setup the appointment they shared with me that the offer they provided online is before all their fees which include 5% commission plus all the closing costs. So in essence the offer range they initially give you is similar to a traditional listing price. If you put your house on the market you list it for X but you might get X+ or X-, which is why Zillow, Redfin and other online outlets will also give you a range. Sounds great yes, where is the catch then? The catch is that their offer comes at whopping 20% markdown on your house market value. In addition the final offer that they gave me was even under the lower point of their initial range by around 5%. Well you might think now that my house might be a dump and doesn't worth more than that...
Well, a day earlier I have met with two real estate agents (the emphasis on REAL :)) and they gave me around 20% higher listing estimate which was also on-par with Redfin and other online estimates. So I have asked the Opendoor representative what's the logic of selling with them then? Her answer was "convenience". Well, I personally fail to see the logic unless you are falling to one of the following categories:
1. It's a fire-sell
2. You need the cash asap, that's assuming that their process actually provide this benefit of ultra fast closing which I don't know.
3. You have too much money and too little patience so throwing a lot of money out the window wouldn't make too much difference for you.
Here is the complete data for my sell so you can judge for yourself:
Initial opendoor online offer - $431,000 which came with a range of $415,000 - $457,000 for the low point and high point (that's the one that I thought is equal to a cash offer)
Final opendoor offer: $411,500 - 5% service fee (their commission which is on-par with a traditional broker commission but they don't have to do anything as their is no listing process) - estimated closing of 0.8% - estimated repair cost of around 4k which equal a total of $384,000 in cash proceeds.
In contrast these are the traditional numbers:
Redfin estimate - $494,500
Broker 1 estimate - $499,000
Broker 2 estimate - $509,000
To be conservative I will go with the lower estimate to calculate the estimated proceeds from the sell for the traditional selling process:
$494,500 - 6% broker commission - 3% closing cost = $459,885
Comparing the two tracks the traditional track will yield 18%, or $78,885 more cash in hand vs what opendoor offers you. Like any other sale it can end up selling for an higher price or a lower price which will yield an estimated range of 50k - 100k more cash in hand.
There you have it! I will let you decide if leaving so much money on the table worth the so called "convenience" that they offer.
2 years ago
Opendoor has a
4.4
average rating
from
3,417
reviews