The Ledger
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Data science Venn diagrams underplay the importance of software engineering and business
“I think that's the minimum bar to be a sufficient data scientist. A, B it totally underplays the importance of software engineering, and C, that's actually just a small part of what it means to be a data scientist. I think it totally neglects things like busin…”
Opendoor offers home buyers a 30-day satisfaction return guarantee
“With us, we even have something called a thirty-day satisfaction guarantee. So you can actually return the home to us if you don't like it.”
Crowdsourcing is a completely underappreciated technique in data science
“But I'm really hoping that just in 17, as a site know, is going to be the comeback year for crowdsourcing, because we need it. And it's totally underappreciated as a technique.”
Real estate valuation is a wide data problem, not a high-n problem
“And this is not the traditional big data problem. In the traditional big data problem, You have basically a lot of data, right, so a lot of n. Really in this problem we have very wide data.”
Real estate financial hedging instruments lack sufficient liquidity for practical transactions
“There are not that many available out there, and they're not liquid enough where they're attractive from a, you know, to actually transact on.”
U.S. homes outside major urban centers consistently sell 3% below list price
“When you list a home in the, anywhere else in the country, you actually close for three percent less than you list for, right?”
Opendoor eliminates friction by purchasing homes directly from sellers for cash
“We'll actually make an offer for your house and buy it from you so that you don't have to endure three months of stress and headache.”
The average US home takes three months to sell, with 14% failing
“The average home takes over three months to sell, and there's a one in seven chance to deal with fall through”
US residential real estate generates $100 billion in annual transaction fees
“Every year, 1.4 trillion dollars of assets change hands, generating a hundred billion dollars in fees.”
Opendoor uses deep learning and crowdsourcing to extract data from home photos
“And so practically speaking, what we do is a combination of deep learning, so we have a couple boxes, and Amazon has running CARES and is kind of turning all these photos into structured data, and also a lot of crowdsourcing.”
Human emotion causes residential real estate transactions to cluster around round numbers
“People like to close in round numbers. So you see these striations, and it's because people like to close for 200 K or 201 K, when in fact, you know, that's just totally just human emotions at play.”
Opendoor flexes its seller transaction fee based on the home's risk profile
“Now, the offer that a seller gets has two numbers in them. One is the fair market value. So this is what we think your home would sell for on the market. And the other one is a fee. And that fee actually flexes depending on the risk of the home.”