Zillow is trying to offload nearly $2.8 billion of homes to investors after buying them, hoping to sell them to investors and investors. Bloomberg. This follows another Bloomberg The real estate search site said it plans to grow its flipping business by telling investors it has to stop buying homes when it has too much inventory.
On Tuesday, Zillow said in its earnings report that it was completely downsizing and that it would lose more than half a billion dollars on the homes it owned. He announced that he would be laying off about a quarter of his employees, and said he underestimated how unpredictable the housing market was.
Some readers may be surprised that Zillow buys and sells homes instead of being a place for real estate agents to post listings—I was, too, when I first heard about it, but the company has been operating through Zillow for years. It offers a program. According to his site, the idea is that Zillow buys your home for cash, streamlining the process significantly. He then looks into any repairs or quick renovations and sells the house itself. It’s not the only one with a business model—competing real estate site Redfin has a similar program, and there are entire companies dedicated to Internet-based home buying, like OpenDoor.
In August Deputy The article details what he describes as an “arms race” between tech companies trying to buy up as much real estate as possible as housing prices explode across the country. According to the report, Zillow has made a big bet, telling investors it plans to buy thousands of homes by 2021 and turn its housing division into a billion-dollar business.
As the incredibly hot summer comes to an end, however, Zillow’s deals business appears to be slowing down as well — in October, the company told investors it would stop buying homes, citing construction, renovations and labor shortages. BloombergBut this is speculated to be driven by junk inventory, and Zillow reports that it appears to be selling a good number of homes at a loss rather than a profit.
Now, base Bloomberg, Zillow wants to offload about 7,000 of the homes it bought. Unfortunately, private house hunters don’t seem to be benefiting from Zillow’s woes – Bloomberg The company is reportedly trying to sell the houses to “institutional investors” (read: Wall Street-like firms) for $2.8 billion. For homebuyers turned down by the seemingly endless supply of cash buyers, it can feel like a slap in the face. However, the wild ride of the housing market does not seem to be caused entirely by investment banks.
Report from Vox In 2020, investors accounted for only 20 percent of the home buying market, citing research, while Zillow said it and its competitors accounted for about 1 percent of the housing market in Q2 2021. In some ways, these numbers are scary and reassuring — the fifth largest and most influential slice of the housing market, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a private equity firm (or Zillow) that’s holding you back from your dream home.
It’s hard to say what will come of this sale and how it will affect Zillow’s home flipping plans. However, that probably won’t stop the conspiracy theories that Zillow is deliberately raising prices, and if I’m any indication, it won’t make home hopefuls feel any better about their chances of scoring a place to live. Maybe it’s another data point for the argument that finance is now a meme and betting big doesn’t mean you’ll get what you hope for.
Update November 2, 7:15PM ET: More information about completing the Zillow Offers program.
