Opendoor: Q1 2026 Earnings

**Matt Russell** (0:00)
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Portrait also customizes research report generation. And I used portrait to generate a primer and lay out bold bear cases ahead of today's episode to help frame the conversation. And third, there's intelligent thesis monitoring. And that's where portrait assesses thousands of data points across value chains each day, extracting the insights, driving the business. Again, all this work would typically take hours and hours and hours. It's at your fingertips now. Visit portraitresearch.com to start your free trial today. This is Matt Russell. And today I have Kaz Nejatian, CEO of Opendoor, fresh off the first quarter 2026 earnings release. And we get into what is driving the strong execution quarter to quarter year. We've seen the product rollouts, the sales velocity and the margin improvements that have Opendoor EBITDA positive as of April 1st, 2026 and on track to be adjusted net income positive by the end of the year. Kaz is a fascinating CEO to watch, to follow, to listen to, and he does not disappoint. So please enjoy our conversation.
I actually want to start a bigger picture here. If you go back to February 2025, you are still at Shopify, you're ready to sell all of your possessions, lever up and buy Opendoor, take it private. You end up becoming the CEO in a much more traditional way, I would say. But if you just look back on your thesis then, compared to where you are now, having run the business for some period of time, how much has changed since you've taken over and been inside the operation?

**Kaz Nejatian** (2:58)
Well, like two things. First, it was my wife that wanted to sell all of our possessions to take Opendoor, or at least she was one who encouraged me to think about it. But there are two things that have actually held in my mind. I tried to be thoughtful about this. The first is, the company is actually structurally in much better shape than I thought it would be. The underlying models of the company, the underlying databases, the underlying processes are just in much better shape than I expected they would be. I think the company had started this doom loop of going down and down and down. But it does feel a lot like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when it's a guy guarding the cup. There's a bunch of people here who were still guarding the cup, and that had kept it in a really decent shape. But actually the underlying model is just honestly just very good shape. We've invested a lot in it, but I'm actually very impressed. Second, I significantly underestimated the Attach opportunity. I have basically done this whole Attach services thing my whole career, and I did not expect our first crack at this to go so well.
Those are two upsides. Generally, I'm just been very impressed. The main downside, honestly, just to be very self-reflective, I was honestly shocked by how the company was basically being run by outside consultants for so long. It feels like the people who were making decisions for the company basically had almost no stake in the outcome of those decisions.
The OPEX was just honestly stupid. Not just stupid, but spent under wrong things.
I think that was actually offensive.

**Matt Russell** (4:49)
Based on the OPEX metrics today versus when you stepped in, you've done something about that. I think it's been reflected in terms of your actions.
I want to go back a little bit to your point on the attachment and even just higher level. When I first came across Opendoor, I had a very simple view that it was essentially a real estate asset manager based around tech. And that is overly simplified. But you clearly distinguished it as a software platform.