Welcome to the seventh episode of the Data Door Front Pouch Podcast. We have a packed show today. Fuck, it's not a picture. Okay, let's start again. I put a more video. Yeah. Maybe it sells better when you call it a packed show. All right.
Welcome to the seventh episode of the Data Door Front Pouch Podcast. We have an exciting show today. We will talk about the topic of the weekend. The Silicon Valley Bank going under and what that means for open door. What is the relationship between Silicon Valley Bank and Open Door right now? We will talk about this with certainty.
欢迎来到Data Door Front Pouch Podcast的第七集。今天的节目非常精彩。我们将会谈论本周末的话题:硅谷银行破产对Open Door的影响。现在硅谷银行与Open Door之间的关系是什么?我们将会谈论这个问题并予以解答。
Something we heard about in the areas called. We talked a little bit about it in our life's discussion. They may own on Twitter Spaces last week. We're going to dive into that a bit more. And then lastly, we have a listener question on how great pending margins look like a forebender. So these are our free main topics today.
Let's jump into this situation with SVD. It's right now it's an evolving situation for us. It's a someday evening in the US time. The situation right now is that another bank signature bank failed and this had stepped in and guaranteed full data positives for both signature bank and Silicon Valley Bank for everybody to get their money out on Monday, which is really positive after the weekend went and how it's screaming there was an on Twitter. And more importantly, for this podcast is like what was or is the relationship with Open Door and how could this affect them? Tyler, do you have any information on that?
让我们用SVD深入了解这种情况。目前对我们来说,这是一个不断发展中的局势。现在美国时间是星期天晚上。目前的情况是另一家银行Signature Bank倒闭了,而此时SVD走出来,保证了对Signature Bank和Silicon Valley Bank的所有客户都能在周一取出他们的资金的全面数据的积极监管,这是周末过去后的真正积极进展,同时也解决了Twitter上的一些不安情绪。对于我们这个播客来说,更重要的是:Open Door与这个银行有什么关系,这会对他们产生什么影响?Tyler,你有关于这方面的信息吗?
Yeah, so I commented about this on Twitter this past week when I heard about it. I heard from one of my sources quite trust that Open Door has less than 1% of their capital in Silicon Valley Bank and none of their critical business accounts are run out of Silicon Valley Bank, which was encouraging to hear. I mean, it's a move point now because it sounds like no one's going to be missing their money anyways. But I will say there is a historic relationship between Silicon Valley Bank and Open Door and a lot of the founders of Open Door have recognized the idea that without Silicon Valley Bank support early on, there probably wouldn't be an Open Door. And I think that's probably the case for a lot of disruptive and private technology companies in Silicon Valley over the past few decades who partnered with Silicon Valley Bank. So I think overall, and maybe this is a separate topic. I mean, when you look into the cause of all of this, it really does appear to be mismanaged funds. But I will say it's a huge blow for the startup community and it's unfortunate to see because Silicon Valley was very important for founders.
Yeah. There's probably some other better podcast to cover like what XC went wrong here. It probably wouldn't have just affected Silicon Valley Bank, but as we've seen with the signature bank and probably some other banks that are in this in no situation where they have a very long duration but low interest instruments that wouldn't be worth the same as they were when rates were lower. So if everybody is going to get for their money and the bank would probably not be able to cover the amounts of time in time, I guess that's what happened here. The spicy thing is because in Silicon Valley, a lot about herd mentality. Everybody is running into the same sectors. If it's crypto or AI, everybody wants to fund the same things. Obviously if the big VC companies tell their companies to pull out money out of the Silicon Valley Bank, everybody else was also running after the money. I think in the end what happened on Fridays, that 25% of deposits, like over 40 billion dollars, got fired out and that kind of resulted in whatever shock we saw after that.
And the risk is that this could happen to other banks. So that's why they've had stepped in and said, hey, all the deposits, not just the insured part, we will cover them. And direct decision. I think just a double tap on that.
And like you said, this isn't really the podcast to go into exactly what happened, but I think we can simplify this a little bit. I think there's two things that you look for for security in a bank when you have a massive deposit.
And the other thing is how much liquidity does that bank have? And the liquidity profile, how much cash do they actually have available in the event that there is a bank run so they could cover all deposits? So that ratio is really important.
And I think a lot of the really powerful banks in the United States, like the JP Morgan, the Wells Fargo, Bank of America, those types of companies, they have massive liquidity profiles because of the 2008 financial crisis.
But for Silicon Valley bank, you look at what happened in the past couple of years. You think open door, mis timed mortgage rates and interest rates, right? Silicon Valley bank was even worse, right?
They bought 80 billion of mortgage-backed securities when interest rates were near zero, trying to get a 1.5% yield and then the Fed raised interest rate 75 basis points four times and then again, 50, etc.
And you're in a situation where those 80 billion dollars of assets are only gaining one and a half percent when your consumer bank get like so-fi or whatever is giving you 4%, people start wanting more yield on their funds.
And I think because Silicon Valley bank didn't have very much of their assets insured by the federal government, number one, but two, really just didn't have a liquidity compared to their deposits. They were in a situation where a bank run made it very easy for them to go under.
Yeah, it will be interesting what the consequences of this are in the next two months. I mean, people are speculating from maybe rate hikes will slow down or stop, which is obviously great for mortgage rates probably, but who knows what else will break in this environment?
Yeah, what is important to know is you mentioned as far as we know, open door only had very small amount of money in Silicon Valley bank. Obviously, public companies don't disclose who they're lending or banking partners are.
This is not part of any rules. I don't think anybody discloses that. So we don't know for sure if any of their lending facilities are there or not, but there's a really great podcast that dot Fraser did on the focus, the operator.
I think the podcast is from Damien, who is at Sounders Fund is very, very great podcast. It gives you a history of open doors capital stack from like founding to post IPO. I think the podcast is from 2021. I definitely recommend listening to that.
If you are really interested in how the sausage is maize on the capital stack of open door and thought specifically said that like Silicon Valley bank was not the right partner to scale and really get to the to the right cost structure. Right.
And I think that's the other point that's important to double tap here is Silicon Valley bank would be a great partner for risky, unproven business model, right? Like a startup. Because of that increased risk, their interest rates, right? How much they're expected to earn on those assets is a lot higher than you might get at a different bank.
And that's that's okay. Perhaps, you know, for software companies that are more early stage, mid stage, and open door early stage, but for company like open door, which is looking for 10% gross profit margins maximum capital efficiency is really, really important.
And you want the lowest cost structure for your for your debt, for your access to financing and Silicon Valley bank is absolutely not that person, right? Like they're just, it's just a different business model.
And so I think really important up front for open door, but it wouldn't make sense for open door to have any significance or large proportion of funding with Silicon Valley bank at this stage of their life cycle.
Yeah. And it's really important to state like that because, you know, that's speculation on Twitter where because of some headlines, people expected the open door is like 100% funded by Silicon Valley bank, but that's just how it works.
It would make sense with what's been going on in the past year if that was the end, but it's just not true. So yeah.
如果这是结局,和过去一年发生的事情相符的话,这似乎很有道理,但事实并非如此。因此,是的。
All right, I'm glad we covered this likely what we should expect by next week or maybe we shouldn't anymore because of the announcement from the Fed, but like on Friday, a lot of public companies filed an 8K, a announcement of doing a material impact to their business.
So it's a real good announcement that they had like $500 million in in Silicon Valley bank. We hope that we will see something from this from open door as well because even 1% if it's if you're thinking about a quarterly basis, if that 1% would be gone, it would be kind of material. I think they would have until Wednesday to file this there in a few days, but at this point, we might not even see that fighting anymore because there is not a truly impact. So we might never know how much money they actually had in Silicon Valley bank, but like it's unlikely that it's a big amount.
I don't want open door leadership, right? Like the C suite to tweet like Elon Musk, but it would be nice every once in a while to just get a few comment. You know what I mean? You imagine if Kerry just logged on to her Twitter with, you know, she's like never on Twitter, but if she just logged on and she was like, hey, we don't have any capital in Silicon Valley bank or we had X percentage and just the sigh of relief from the investment community. Wouldn't that be a great use of social media? You know what I mean? From like crisis management perspective and investor relations, I just feel like some of these things, it would just be really nice if it was just solves, you know, with five seconds of work in a bathroom break.
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, there is obviously something to it that you don't want to be on Twitter, especially when you're open door because basically 90% what you get is hate and your customers are not there. There's nothing that really is great. There's an end at you business to be on Twitter every day as Kerry we love, but in these cases, you know, just like FYI, something like that would have been helpful. As long as it's not everyone relax, everything is fine. Don't worry. I feel like those are the code words for like get your money out right now, right? We've learned that from Silicon Valley bank CEO and obviously Sam Bankman freed. They both did the exact same thing. And then the next day the company went under wild. Yeah, I guess in hindsight, it was a good to just wait a few more days and then in primary sales it tells maybe as well, but some more communication would be helpful. Yeah, well, I mean, at least we're around to kind of report the things, I guess, that leaves space for us maybe maybe that's what it is, it's just like, I don't know, Sebastian Tyler will take care of it sometime. We'll take care of investor relations.
All right. Talking about taking care of people, open door announced a really interesting new product on last year in the case it's called list with certainty. List with certainty is it's currently a small experimental trial that looks really promising. I think that's what we heard from the earnings call. It's another option for sellers that come to open door to sell their home for more basic needs. It's an option for sellers to list on the MLS deal. And that's a product that opened their head before like last year it was always kind of a hidden option that can come here and they take advantage of the funnel. If you really want to sell an MLS, you can use open door in the part of the agent.
What's interesting here is that open door will give you a backup offer. So you list on MLS, maybe your home is there now for six weeks, but you really need to move in two months. So you can see if you get any additional autism MLS and then if you don't still take open doors, slightly discounted offer. It's kind of, it sounds very similar to sell different credit marketplace data building just without the marketplace part, right Tyler? Yeah, I mean, I think we talked a little bit about this before the show, but I think one of the things that you mentioned is it's very similar to like the Redfin product or the Zillow product, right, with the premier agent or the Redfin agent.
But the big difference here is that it has a certainty kicker, which is what you were touching on, right? It's like, list your home with this agent, get better, more eyeballs, more traffic, etc. But with open door, you also have an offer in your back pocket, which we've talked about this for the marketplace, right?
Like this product can't be built anywhere else because nobody else is buying homes like open door. And so I think that's a big value ad here is that one that open door can, is the only one that can build this product and it has a greater value proposition than even Zillow and Redfin.
And so, two, and this is another thing that we were talking about before the show and perhaps even more important is you don't need to build a marketplace for lists with certainty to have value, right, to be scalable. And that's what different she hates list with certainty with the third party marketplace, right?
The third party marketplace is going to be a tough thing to build. And we've already seen that because they walked back projections for what percentage of transactions this would be materially right, one of 30% to like 5% over the space of a few months, expected percent of transactions at the end of 2023.
And the reason is because it's really hard to build a marketplace because you have to aggregate supply to create the demand, you have to create network effects. And so I think the third party marketplace has never been built before and it's going to take a lot more work probably than they assumed upfront.
And so that's kind of on one side. But the list with certainty, I mean, you can add that into any of open doors current markets and really begin to see significant scale, especially since they're talking about 20 to 25% conversion for the list with certainty product in their one market.
Yeah, so in their early experiments, it showed that 20 to 25% conversion rate of new sellers that means they're looking at sellers that actually ended up selling their home one and more or less some other means versus 10%, which is the current conversion rate on the first party offers.
So it's a way for them to monetize their, your funnel of seller leads, right? And they don't necessarily have to give them to like another platform, they don't have to send them to Zillow or to Redfin. They can do this in house. They have partner agents with a pretty solid economic incentive.
If we look at what the seller would pay, they would still pay a 5% fee, which is lower than 6% you would pay with a regular realtor and that fees then share with the partner agent.
So likely if the economics are anything that they were in the past with list with all list with open or product, it's probably like 1.5% that goes to open or and then there's a part that goes to the by agent and there is goes to the part agent.
It's a pretty great capital-wide product and on the fallback offer, obviously that fallback offer is this kind of the drawback, right? You cannot give the same offer that you would have given if it was listed on MLS because obviously if the home lists once and then gets removed from the market, it's actually that the next buyer is looking at the history of the home and says, hey, that was listed never sold.
It's not worth what it was, it was initially listed which gives a head to the value of the home. So there's a discount that a deeper discount for open door when buying this home as well, just an upside-down set for the seller definitely.
And talking about the downside of the sellers for the seller, I think where I'm looking at the concern too, there's going to be a lot of options for sellers, right?
而谈到卖方的劣势,我认为就我所关注的方面而言,卖方将会有很多选择,对吧?
Let's say in the year from now and in a half from now, they have their first party offer, they have their first party marketplace and there's a list of open door, three decisions, and that is a decision that the seller has to make between free choices.
Obviously, they will pack to that kind of an interesting into a flow through the whole person that makes sense for the seller. You see your first party offer, if you're not happy with it, you have the options to list in the third party marketplace for a week with one showing.
And then if you're still not happy with any of the offers, you can list those on the MLS list with the backstop offer, but it's a lot less certainly than what we had a year ago where you go to open door, you get an amazing offer that is at market rate because we had crazy home press adriciation and there's no reason to not say yes to that.
It's I almost wonder if there's some sort of goal to list homes concurrently, like lists on the MLS in addition to being listed on the marketplace. I don't know what the regulatory stance is on that, but from a consumer perspective, if open door was just like, hey, we're in charge of selling your home, give us the information, we're going to list the MLS, we're going to list on our exclusives marketplace.
You can choose, but we'll get, we'll simulate all these offers for you and explain them. You know what I mean? I feel like as a consumer that that would be most valuable to me as opposed to, you know, we study residential real estate, right?
But if let's say that we don't and we're just trying to sell our home, like you said, if I, if I have to go through this funnel and just be like, I don't know, like I have three options and they, they all require a lot of fine prints. That could be a little bit confusing, but if it's just like, hey, either take this cash offer or we will sell your home, that seems like an easier funnel for me to walk through, easier for me to convert and probably faster from a sales perspective for open doors well because if they're listening on the MLS and trying to get offers plus assimilating offers on exclusives, right?
Those two things are happening at the same time, which whatever, whichever one is faster wins, you know, in that idea. But I don't know, we haven't gotten any, any commentary around that.
这两个事情同时发生,快速的那一个获胜。但是我不知道,我们还没有听到任何关于这个的评论。
Ideally, I would go to open door and tell them by when I need to have my home sold. If it's in two weeks, I'm, I'm going to get the cash, so the, the first party offer, they tell me, hey, we can listen to the exclusives for a week with one showing to get you more of us. But the end of the week I can select the author that I want and I'm done. If I have eight weeks to sell a home, they should just take care of that.
And in the seven weeks, show me all the offers I have and I just choose whatever price or whatever buyer I like the most. Yeah. If you can really simplify it down, like as a seller, I don't care where the home goes, right? I just want it to make a maximum price for. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of what I think we're both getting at is selling a home and we've talked about this in the past.
Selling a home is just about finance. It's just how do I maximize two things, right? Convenience and how much money I'm making. That's all that matters for selling a home, buying a home very different, very nuanced, very personal, right? Less about money. I mean, money is still important, but on the axis of importance, it's, it's much lower.
And so if we can simplify that process and just maximize convenience and seller equity, then I think that there's, there's a great chance for high conversion. That said, one of the things that we haven't talked about before for lists with certainty plus their first party businesses, here's the current situation for Open Door in this down market where they've got these massive spreads, right?
Open Door is currently converting one out of 10 real sellers to buy their home because they're offering such low, such low prices for these homes, so they have a conservative buffer on their gross margins that only one in 10 real sellers are converting. But in this one market where they're testing out list with certainty, they're getting conversion of about 20 to 25%.
And now these two figures compared to Open Door's historical 30 to 35% conversion of their first party business when they were placing offers at or slightly above homes values when HPA was going on this.
And so I think what I'm most excited about for list with certainty and the third party's third party marketplace is finding a way to turn these unconverting real sellers into converting Open Door customers, whether that's through their first party funnel, their list with certainty or the third party marketplace.
And so if there's a version of Open Door in the future where they don't need to have such wide spreads, maybe we get back to them. I don't think we ever should get back to 30, 35% because they're probably offering too much for homes for their cost structure for first party. But let's say we're back at like 25%, 20 to 25% for the first party business.
And then if you're able to get 10 to 20% for list with certainty, 10 to 20% for the third party marketplace, suddenly even with the exact same amount of sales marketing, advertising, et cetera, they have a much more monetizable funnel because all of those consumers that used to be lost because they said, I don't want to sell my home to Open Door or at that price or whatever it was. Now they have different options for products that they can go through.
And I think that's a very real possibility if Open Door is able to get these products right. Yeah. it's kind of a forcing function of the market way in right now. And maybe that's a good thing. I'm pretty impressed how Open Door is evolving their product. They're not just sitting on their heads waiting to things to go back. Great was last year. No, they're coming up with experiments. They probably tried a bunch of more things that we never hear about.
But this list with certainty thing is kind of clicked with a lot of their sellers. And that's what they will double down on together with the marketplace. And they will get stronger out of this wherever the housing market goes. And hopefully by the end of the beginning of next year, things look a lot better. And they have another piece that just monitors is a lot better than the business before.
Yeah. Pretty exciting. We will hopefully see more about that next earnings call sometimes in May.
是的,相当令人兴奋。希望我们在五月的财报电话会议上能听到更多关于它的消息。
And talking about the next earnings call. How is the pen? We have a listener question from the discord from I Shark. And he's asking, how the pending margins currently look like? Are we better? Are we improving or is this sentiment going to the other direction right now? Yeah.
So pending gross margins are definitely improving. And they have basically throughout the entirety of early 2023, in since October, really, pending margins have continued to improve from negative to now. They are well into positive territory. Still lower than we'd like for the company and still definitely sub four to six percent contribution profit margin targets, but moving in the right direction.
And I think to add a little color to that, because we're not going to share actual numbers for pending gross margin, I think that's really valuable data. And so we we reserve that kind of thing for the data door subscribers, but just sort of adding a little color to what margins might look like for the remainder of the year.
One of the things that I think I'm most excited about as someone who's constructive on open door long term is when you look at the percentage of home sales that open doors currently seeing better still the Q2 offer cohort. By that I mean homes that opened their bot between the months of April and August 2022. In Q4, it was 90 percent in Q1 at 60 percent. And in Q2, it's looking like it's going to be 40 to 55 percent somewhere around there. But beyond Q2, that percentage is going to be sub 20 percent, I think, of all sales, possibly even lower than that.
And the reason that that's important is because the gross margins on these homes that were purchased and sold after the Q2 offer cohort are spectacular. Right. I mean, pretty much 10 plus percent for every monthly cohort after September that we've seen so far. And I think that really has implications for open doors, bottom line, as we move into the second half of the year. I think Q1 and Q2 are still going to be under tremendous pressure because not the majority for Q2 at least, but the majority of the homes in Q1 are still going to be Q2 offer cohort homes. In Q2, it's going to be close to half. And so I think there's still going to see a lot of pressure, a lot of margins dragged. But after those quarters, it's really just going to be these homes sold with these massive fat spreads. And so I think open doors going to surprise the upside on margins as we move into the second half.
That said, if we have some existential shock to the housing market, like mortgage rates go up another 3 percent or something like that, I mean, open doors probably hosed in that situation. But assuming that there's some semblance of stability in the macro, the second half of 2023 should be really excellent gross margins for open door.
Yeah, we have seen that was another listener question is if we have seen any impact from the rising interest rates because we have seen interest rates go from sub 6 percent or 2 to over 7 percent in the last 45 weeks. If we look at the pending data, especially just for seasonality, I don't think we've seen any impact on on on pending sales for open door, right? I think it's here.
Let me let me pull it up. I think the one the one caveat to that would be volumes, right? I do think that volumes are going to peak in the spring. I think those are going to be the highest for at least a year probably. But if you look back at like 2022, for example, volumes peaked at the exact same time. So to your point, there's a seasonal element to that.
I think I think that there's two things probably influencing that for right now. One, maybe some mortgage hesitation, some buyer hesitation, and the fact that there's not a lot of inventory available. But also I think the second thing really driving a deceleration in pending volumes is that open door just has doesn't have any new homes, right? They're just not buying enough homes. They're selling more homes and they're buying. And I think because they don't have a lot of fresh inventory, the homes that they're currently trying to sell or increasingly are going to be trying to sell are the, you know, the drugs of the barrel, the last home sold with the Q2 Africa, which I think you're going to be really difficult to sell. And that's going to add inertia to their pending pipeline.
And obviously it's really hard to tell where merchants are going, especially with what happened at the end of last week. It's like, the most likely outcome right now is the mortgage rates are going to go down from here. But who knows?
So what 2023 doesn't, it's really not disappointing in the amount of excitement that it's face threats. Just the rollercoaster, so it'll start to beginning.
So yeah, that probably explains the really widespread because like, whatever happens, Optimus is trying to get fruitless as unscrupulous possible. So, yeah, I think that was actually a question on the Twitter spaces too, is if there was another downturn, what would happen to open door?
And I think reflecting on that, they really are pretty conservatively positioned in terms of the margins of the new cohorts at this point. I mean, even if things dropped the amount that they did in the summer of 2022, I mean, the cushion that they have is, is at least two to three times what it was at that time. And they're buying so few homes that the impact would be much, much, much smaller.
I think it would be still a huge risk to the solvency of open doors business, but they're positioned much more conservatively, much more poised for something like that to happen.
我认为这对开放门业务的偿债能力仍然存在巨大的风险,但他们的定位要保守得多,对这种情况更加从容应对。
All right, that's some really good closing thoughts here from Tyler. It's it for today's episode. Make sure to subscribe and like this video. It really helps us out. You should also join our discord at datador.io slash community. And let us know if you have any other topics for us to discuss in future episodes, any questions.
And obviously sign up for datador Adams to see the numbers, the sales numbers almost in real-time. And here, what we have to say in specific. All right, thanks, Tyler. Yeah, thanks, man.