[Slashdot] - Zillow, Other Tech Firms Are In an 'Arms Race' To Buy Up American Homes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Zillow is doing a $450 million bond deal to get the money it needs. Opendoor went public via a Chamath Palihapitiya-backed SPAC deal to scale as quickly as it can. Even Rocket Homes is getting into the action. The race is on among tech firms to gobble up U.S. housing stock and dominate the increasingly competitive high-tech house-flipping market, otherwise known as the fast-growing "iBuyer" industry. "There's almost an arms race to get the most inventory possible," said Daren Blomquist, vice president of market economics at Auction.com, who described the state of the iBuyer market as "almost frenzied." "It's less about making money off that inventory, at least initially, and more about who can get the most inventory the fastest." High-tech middlemen like Opendoor and Zillow Offers, Zillow's home-buying platform, first inserted themselves into the housing scene a few years ago, armed with cheap money and hoping to profit off the bedrock of American middle-class wealth. iBuyers target mid-level homes that are in decent condition, offer to buy the house with cash, and make the selling and moving process quick and convenient. They then make a few repairs and quickly put it back on the market, ideally at a higher rate. In exchange, they charge the homeseller a fee that varies according to a variety of factors. While small relative to the $36 trillion residential real estate market, the nascent industry is growing rapidly with unforeseeable consequences as firms compete to establish themselves as the predominant brand. An analysis published this week by Mike DelPrete, a scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the iBuyer market, found that iBuyers have recently shifted "to a free-for-all, acquire at any cost strategy." At present, both Opendoor and Zillow's homes division are losing money in the process.

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