After its ride on the meme stock rollercoaster and the resignation of its CEO, Opendoor has indicated it is ready to start a new chapter, one that will ideally bring it back to profitability, but activist retail investors are asking that they get a say in the firm’s next moves.
Opendoor’s eventful summer began in late June, when its stock hit an all-time low of $0.51 per share. This caught the attention of investor and hedge fund owner Eric Jackson. Back in 2022, Jackson said he identified Opendoor and used car sales platform Carvana as two technology stocks with the ability to come back from the technology stock downturn. Between 2022 and 2025, Carvana’s stock rebounded from an all-time low of roughly $4 per share to nearly $400 per share. During the same time frame, Opendoor’s stock price simply declined.
This, combined with interest from other retail investors, prompted Jackson to make a post on social media platform X on July 14, in which he outlined his thesis for the possible resurgence of Opendoor. In the X thread he argued that the iBuyer was “giving early Carvana vibes,” and that factors like its lack of major domestic competitors, its anticipated EBITDA profit in Q2 and a potential Federal Reserve rate cut in September made it a compelling investment, although not one for the faint of heart.
“One of the things that helped Carvana was flipping over to EBITDA profitability, and then with the expected rate cut and Opendoor’s seller traffic, I just felt like Opendoor would have this tailwind behind it,” Jackson said. “We are now so used to Uber being the way we do taxis and Airbnb being how we book travel accommodation, to me it felt obvious that real estate is a huge market that is ready to be disintermediated and yet nobody had really done it yet, but Opendoor has the potential to do it.”
Your move, Opendoor
For its part, Opendoor has made it clear it has three main focuses as it looks to right the ship: Cash Plus, Key Connections and leveraging AI.
Launched in late July 2025, Cash Plus provides sellers access to “a significant portion” of their home’s value in as little as 14 days. Sellers can also gain additional money after the home is sold. However, the program is only available to sellers working with Key Agents.
Real estate analyst and attorney Rob Hahn feels that Cash Plus will allow Opendoor to pay less than market value for a property, helping it cut costs. Hahn notes, however, that once Opendoor purchases the home, the consumer is no longer the home seller, so they have no control over the eventual list price, which means that the consumer is assuming an immense amount of risk, as Opendoor could potentially sell the property for far less than the homeowner was hoping for, meaning that they net less money than anticipated.
In addition to Cash Plus, Opendoor announced Key Connections, an expanded version of its agent partnership program in late June, roughly around the same time its stock price hit rock bottom. Instead of having an Opendoor employee reach out to a seller who has indicated interest in working with Opendoor, the program pairs sellers with an agent who can provide options to homeowners beyond merely accepting the company’s flagship cash offer.
During the firm’s Q2 2025 earnings call in early August, then CEO Carrie Wheeler said the program puts “the power of Opendoor into their hands so they can bring our products straight to the seller.”
Although Opendoor appears to be lauding this as a major strategy pivot, Hahn notes on his NotoriousROB blog that the iBuyer has been selling home seller leads to agents since at least 2015. Additionally, Hahn highlighted the Agent Access program, which launched in 2021, that rewarded agents depending on the number of seller leads they sent to Opendoor each year. This was expanded in 2023, when Opendoor began paying agents who sent a seller to the platform even if they did not represent the seller in the transaction.
Hahn sees this pivot as Opendoor moving away from its original aim of eventually creating a platform for homesellers and buyers to interact directly with one another.
“So much for the original vision and mission of Opendoor, eh? Selling a home is slow, fragmented, and unpredictable… but agents are the glue in the process!” Hahn wrote, referencing a statement Opendoor made in a post about Key Connections. “In effect, then, Opendoor is exiting iBuying. Opendoor is transforming into a lead generation website and its customers going forward are not sellers or buyers, but real estate agents who pay them a referral fee.”
Investors don’t want agents in the middle
Jackson, who hopes to see Opendoor become the Uber or Airbnb of homebuying and selling with sellers and buyers interacting directly with one another through the platform, has mixed feelings on the company bringing agents into the middle of a transaction.
“I mean it makes sense that right now they are looking for revenue any way they can,” Jackson said. “They have to become this trusted brand, like an Uber, and become this interface between the two sides, which allows them to take on very little financial risk, but in the medium or long term I think that means they will disintermediate the agents.”
Although Jackson realizes that the majority of homebuyers today use a real estate agent to purchase a home, he says that younger shareholders who are hoping to someday purchase a home want to see agents removed from the homebuying transaction, as they feel they are driving up costs, making them willing to bet on the potential rebound of Opendoor.
Additionally, Jackson said he hears from retail investors all over the world who want to see meaningful change to how real estate is transacted, as they feel “local greedy real estate cartels” are driving up costs and making housing unaffordable.
AI will improve efficiency with fewer employees
While Jackson is not a fan of Opendoor bringing agents into the center of the transaction, he is a big supporter of the company’s exploration into leveraging AI.
“I think there is a huge opportunity for them to leverage AI in what they do. They are horribly oversized today with like 1,400 employees, but they could dramatically lower that if they leaned into AI,” he said.
In an article by “Opendoor Engineering” published earlier this month, the company said that it wants to leverage AI to deliver products personalized to their buyers and sellers at scale, and it believes that AI usage will allow it to “reinvent real estate through our platform centered around our Key Agent partners.”
While the article mentions a few AI tools the company has, including RiskAI, which it claims is able to “pinpoint complex unstructured factors and incorporate them into detailed competitive market analyses,” it remains unclear as to what other AI use cases Opendoor is exploring.
A long road ahead
In addition to AI integrations, Jackson and other retail investors are also calling for major changes to Opendoor’s board of directors.
“I’m trying to get Keith Rabois, the venture capitalist who wrote the original business plan for Opendoor, to come back on the board and be part of the group that selects the next CEO,” he said.
Although Jackson acknowledges that it may be a long road ahead, he believes that Opendoor is capable of seeing its stock jump 100x to $82 a share.
“They need to really push into building up this pool of buyers and sellers more proactively, so they can be this interface matching brand in between the parties, but finding the right person to serve as the next CEO is key because they are going to have to drive all of this,” Jackson said. “If you get the wrong person, it dooms you to five years of dithering, but in some cases can lead to almost total erasure of the company.”
Foolhardy optimism?
But while retail investors like Jackson are keen on Opendoor’s stock and optimistic about a potential resurgence, analysts like Julian Lin, are not so sure.
In an op-ed published on Seeking Alpha, Lin, the leader of investing group Best of Breeds Growth Stocks, wrote that he believes the recent stock rally is driven by meme hype and not market fundamentals and compares the situation to rapid rise and fall of GameStop stock in January 2021. Due to this, Lin says that investing in Opendoor is “highly speculative” right now and that he is “unconvinced” by the iBuying model.
While Lin acknowledges that Opendoor returned to adjusted EBITDA profitability in Q2 2025, he notes that the company only did so after “aggressive cost cutting.”
“It is possible that OPEN can change up its business model and become one in which they simply charge a small fee to help facilitate each real estate transaction. However, such a move would be a significant shift from the current model, and I do not see any reason why this particular company would be able to claim such a valuable positioning, especially when more established housing names like Zillow Group, Inc. might come to mind,” he wrote.
“Perhaps investors are hoping that OPEN can earn a fee for providing an offer, for example, such that sellers can then market the offer to get a higher price (this would be the value-add for home sellers). In this case, I do not see the barriers to entry as any well-capitalized firm in theory should be able to compete.”
Opendoor did not return requests for comments on questions about criticisms of its stock and programs, and how it plans to handle the pressure and requests from the activist retail investor movement.
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