Zillow Learns An Expensive Lesson
Zillow has officially announced that it is shutting down it’s iBuyer model, Zillow Offers, and laying off 25% of its staff.
Original source: Business Insider.
Zillow's troubles stem from a multitude of reasons, including but not limited to supply chain issues, a lack of labor, and not having local market real estate professionals (realtors, mortgage brokers) with local market expertise.
Each housing market is unique. If you are thinking about buying and/or selling a home, please consult with a local realtor and mortgage expert. For more information about Zillow’s investment mistakes and how it affects the housing market, check out this article from Business Insider.
Zillow just stopped flipping homes after scooping up thousands of properties over 3 years. Here's what happened.
If you've been paying attention to real-estate news lately, you may be asking yourself some version of this question: What the heck is happening at Zillow?
It's been a rough few weeks for the $21 billion real-estate giant. On October 18, the company announced that its instant-buying (iBuying) division, Zillow Offers, would cease buying up homes for the rest of the year.
After two tumultuous weeks — during which an Insider analysis found that of the nearly 1,000 homes Zillow recently listed for sale in its five biggest markets, 64% were being marketed for less than the company paid for them — that pause turned into the complete shuttering of Zillow Offers.
The winding down of Zillow Offers was announced after the market close on Tuesday, when Zillow's share price dropped about 12% to about $85.
If you're wondering why the company started buying homes, what might have gone wrong, how Wall Street is reacting, or what this all means for regular buyers and sellers, you've come to the right place. Below, you'll find all of our Zillow coverage in one place.
First, we are scouring Zillow's third-quarter earnings and listening to executives field questions from analysts on November 2.
OK, so what happened with Zillow?
This story really starts in 2018, when Zillow got into the then nascent iBuying business. iBuying refers to the process in which deep-pocketed tech-enabled companies buy up homes, complete light renovations, and then sell them for a gain.
Zillow bet big on this strategy. Though it has yet to turn a profit through home flipping, Zillow Offers raked in $1.47 billion in revenue in the first half of 2021.
Zillow's announcement of its homebuying pause initially sent its stock sliding. It recovered but then stumbled again after analysts cast doubt on the Zillow Offers division's bottom line. On November 2, after the market close, Zillow announced it would shutter Zillow Offers and lay off 25% of its staff.
The decision highlighted the challenges the company faced with iBuying.
Our analysis of Zillow Offers listings in the company's five biggest markets showed that Zillow could be headed toward millions of dollars in losses from its iBuying operations:
In Phoenix, 93% of Zillow-owned listings were priced below what the company paid. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, Zillow was listing two-thirds of homes for less than it paid. Zillow also appears poised to take losses on the majority of its listings in Houston and Dallas. Wall Street analysts and property-technology experts have predicted more pain will be evident in Zillow's third-quarter earnings, released on November 2.
Why does it matter?
For sellers, Zillow has offered a convenient — and sometimes lucrative — chance to sell a home quickly. Real-estate agents across the country have reported cases of Zillow paying well above the expected market value of a home, which means big paydays for some sellers.
We first zeroed in on five Zillow Offers listings across the country to get a sense of what it looked like when Zillow overpaid for a property.
Insider also recently spoke with a couple real-estate professors about where Zillow might have made mistakes and what its iBuying halt could mean for both buyers and sellers.
Has Zillow been intentionally manipulating the housing market? One viral TikTok creator seems to think so. The real-estate professors weighed in on that, too.
Even though Zillow is pumping the brakes, the pool of iBuyers snatching up properties and reselling them across the US is still teeming with competition. Get to know the major players by reading this story.
What's next?
Before Zillow shut down its iBuying arm, it was looking to offload 7,000 homes to an unnamed buyer — or buyers — for $2.8 billion, Bloomberg reported.
If Zillow does sell the homes to investors, that could exacerbate a lack of supply in the market.
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