Opendoor CEO says it will offer 4.99% mortgages — even as its profit per home thins
The iBuying company is back in the mortgage business it left four years ago.
Opendoor Technologies wants to sell its buyers a cheaper mortgage... at a time when it’s already been making less money on every house it sells.
On Tuesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian posted on X that the online home-flipping company is offering 4.99% mortgages to buyers who purchase homes through its platform. Though he added the rate isn’t “forever or to everyone,” that’s still almost a full percentage point lower than the 5.98% average 30-year mortgage rate.
The company recently relaunched a mortgage lending platform, a business it exited in 2022 as soaring interest rates squeezed its balance sheet. While still in its early stage, Nejatian said he’s “very, very bullish” on the offering in the company’s latest earnings call.
So, how are lower rates possible? They aren’t “new math,” Nejatian wrote on X, arguing that they come from stripping out middlemen costs (typically paid to brokers, salespeople, and operations) and automating much of the process.
The new strategy could actually prove as much a lifeline for Opendoor itself as for homebuyers, given that its core business — buying homes instantly from sellers and flipping them for a profit — has been under pressure for years.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the iBuying company generated about $3,500 of contribution profit per home, or what’s left after buying, renovating, holding, and selling it. That’s roughly a quarter of the $13,500 it earned a year earlier, and a fraction of what it made during the housing boom around the pandemic. Meanwhile, full-year revenue fell 18% to $4.4 billion, while its net loss more than tripled to $1.3 billion.
The results still topped Wall Street expectations as Opendoor delivered faster inventory turns. Yet investors seemed skeptical that a below-market-rate mortgage can fix already thinning margins, with shares down more than 7% at one point in early trading Tuesday after the post.
One of last year’s meme stock darlings, Opendoor’s shares have soared more than 330% over the past year — though they’ve since given back some of those gains since leadership changes in September, and are now down 16% year to date.
