YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Wu

lines on the record: 83
first: 2019-10-11
most recent: 2019-10-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, it's just the coordination. A lot of the times when you're thinking about it, I don't know if you have the experience, but when there's four to five different parties coordinating on a close, there are still A”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you just started offering that. What is that Margaret? Because, you know, SoFi's gotten into that, obviously. They've been trying to make it easier too on lots of loans and things like that. So you just felt it was to remove the janky part of it.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we built a mortgage bank from the ground up, so a correspondent bank and enables us to control experience out there.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Switch phones to talk to a mortgage broker, and then that coordination is not tight. And you can't really build integration from a technology standpoint to make the transaction more seamless.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's kind of like honestly, it's a janky experience, if you're like Tapano to speaking with us, and then you have to talk to him.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not necessarily need. It's that we just believe it's a better experience for consumers. And then if you do integrate, then you lower costs.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was one of the things that is not well known about the company is that we have 11,000 subcontractors on our platform servicing homes. And we build technology and apps for them. I mean, you think about it as like Lyft's driver app or Uber's driver app. People can come on and actually claim tasks. Paint homes and install carpet and so on and so forth. And then we actually build a marketplace on top of the homes. And so with our app, you can shop any home owned by Open Door, but we make it self-service so you can visit the house anytime you'd like. You get a personal open house. So you don't need to find a realtor and kind of negotiate with them. So it's on your schedule. And we want to enable you to make an offer, which is the app, get qualified for financing, and then personalize the home and close.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think one of the couple nuances, which is like there's this notion of ownership bias. If you live in the house for a long time, you have a tendency to overvalue painted the walls a certain color and you think that's beautiful. The other thing is people do look at list price on the market as value. But that isn't close price. And so the model that we build obviously is based on what cars is a really good”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's just untrue. So, we build a model based on data that's backtested. And so the mean error is zero. And we deliver that to customers. And there's one little nuance, which is when we do renovate, when we do repair homes, we do expect to charge a premium for that, which is we're putting work into the system. And so if you think about it in the auto space, there's kind of the retail price and the as-is price or the private party price. And I think in real estate, there's this notion of as-is versus like after repair value. And so there's a little bit of a spread there, but the model itself is back tested. We present you all information.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's hard to price. Yeah. And so we can do it. But because of the variance in the model, we have to charge a steeper discount. So the spread has to be a little higher than we're comfortable charging. We don't want to be known as someone that charges a very high fee. And so that's one piece. And we cover 60% of the market with our price points.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's today we are charging a slight premium to realtors, and we think about it as paying for certainty and convenience. Certainty meaning.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So we do an inspection in person and we figure out okay are there any issues with the home? In some cases there are not are not. In some cases there are and we give you the inspection report for free and you can decide whether you want to accept the offer or not. And then if we do in fact move forward with the transaction, we charge you transaction fee. It's a service charge. We think about it as delivering certainty and convenience for a fee. And it's roughly 1% more than you would pay your realtor.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot of homes have deferred maintenance. So these are homes that have been lived in for a number of years and not everyone maintaining the home to retail conditions. I do.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the selling is you pick a number for the house based on data. Like, this is what this house will sell for. This is what the house is worth. This is what you're going to get. And then you back out costs that you have someone go there to see what needs to be renovated, what needs to be fixed, whatever that happens to be.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's two components. We have to be licensed to sell homes on MLS, which is we do some of that A lot of that. And the second piece is we need the data to build the algorithm.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the pricing model works better in Phoenix. The homes are more homogenous. Less seasonality. So there's not kind of, we call it a deep freeze. It's like there's no real estate activity in the winter. But Phoenix is actually wholesale year-round. So that's a lot of logic. The median sales price is $275, which is Real close to the median in the US, and the homes are more homogeneous. But the reality is, I had done a bunch of real estate in Arizona. And so I had a good feel of the market, had operations already kind of set up there, and it was easy to get licensed in Phoenix.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll tell you the real story, but I'll tell you some of the logic. So, like, you know, Phoenix is representative of the vast majority of housing, which is too many houses.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking for co founders and some of their early founding members. And then the first task was to build a pricing model that you can rely on, which is not an easy task.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so I remember we said, okay, it seems like there's something here after I built the first version of the website and talked to consumers and wanted a full go. And obviously the business is multifaceted. It's quite complicated. There's lots of different components. So we knew we needed capital. And I sat in a room with Keith and said, okay, let's raise some money. And he said, Well, Coastla will lead the first round. And he was a GP at Coastl at the time. And he asked me how much money I wanted. And this is before kind of the mega seed rounds that exist today. We didn't have a deck. We just kind of, you know, we just had an idea. So I said, let's raise 10 million. And Coastal said, okay, let's do the round. So that was kind of the first round. We spent the next year kind of building the team.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that selling house takes too long, it's too complicated, it's too stressful. And again, they're using the down payment as the equity in their home as the down payment in the next house. So how do you make it really, really simple and convenient, but also deliver on certainty”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the problem in SF is buying. It's a supply constrained market. It's really hard to purchase. And so the pain points people have when you talk to people here is that buying a house is really painful, but selling is pretty easy. If you talk to people in every other market outside of SF in New York, it's the opposite.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was clear that if you can pay a reasonable price and remove all of the time and hassle from the transaction, people would say yes. And so if you talk to consumers saying, okay, what are you worried about? It's about lining up the transactions, about dealing with all the stress. And if you can actually remove all of that, and selling home is a massive life disruption. And one thing that's more nuanced is that. People are using their equity in their home as a down payment into the next house. And so lining up to transactions is like logistically impossible. So people will list their house, they'll move into parents' basement, or they'll borrow money to buy the next house. And so it's just this really windy nightmarish process.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. Also, a place to meet VCs and talk through really what the original idea that I had, which is like, how do you make buying a home one click and using financing as a tool, which is in SF in particular, it's really hard to buy a home if you don't pay cash. Again, the transaction is quite complicated. So we kind of identified around okay, how do you actually make the transaction less than five minutes? His approach was more around homeowners selling. And I wanted to do home buying in OneTap. Anyway, so I built a website in late 2013. It was called Open Door Realty at the time.com. And the tagline was sell your home online in five minutes or less. And bought some AdWords and kind of. Talk to a bunch of homeowners across the nation.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it feels like a 2005 type of. Product still. And what was confusing to me actually was that the experience itself was you look for a home with the app. And it's similar across a lot of the websites. And you just bounce to a realtor. And so the experience kind of goes look yourself when you want to visit houses. Your lead kind of goes to a realtor.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so one of the things that Julia had this thesis that if you can combine both the housing data with location data, then you can build a better experience for consumers. So I spent two years at Trulia integrating some of the location data and working on the product talking to customers and really trying to dig in to figure out, okay, what are the pain points when people are buying and selling a home? I left Trulia in 2013 really with the intention to start what at the time an overused kind of analogy, which is the Amazon for real estate. But I had realized that search was mostly solved And so you can go to Redfin, you go to Trulia, you can go to Zillow to look at information online. And there's certain differences in search filters and that. But I think consumers are pretty satisfied.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ended up meeting with them at Sports Club LA, which is kind of a weird place to meet. It pitched him on the idea. Within three minutes he was pitching me on his idea, which is kind of like a different thing for an investor to do. But at the time, he thought about it is how can you use the data that we were aggregating and build a better pricing model? Trade real estate against. And it looked more like priceline for real estate than OpenDoor Dust today But it was a pretty bold idea at the time, and I had already kind of been in flight of building this company centered around how do we provide insights to consumers as they're moving between cities. Right. And continue in that path. And so Keith ended up”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That happens Yeah, so I graduate college and I kind of knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and a founder and work in real estate tech specifically. So fast forward to 2009, I started a company called Movity, and we aggregated location data. Crime was our largest database, but we wanted to provide insights to consumers on how cities transformed and where to live and how that influenced real estate pricing. Went through YC and during the fundraising process. And it was not as big as it is today back then. I think we had 20 companies in my batch. But during the fundraising process, everyone was like, you need to talk to a guy named Keith Faboy. I was like, why? Yeah, because you love real estate”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's talk first about your founding, then we'll talk about how that happens because it is interesting to see if it's actually possible for people to move that quickly. But so you started the company, you were buying and selling houses, you worked in a bunch of different places. Talk about that.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think as Open Door continues to expand and evolve in scale, I think we'll also automate a lot of the process of buying and selling real estate. And I think the role of an agent will also have to evolve”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I do think that in 2005, that was the first step. So that people can access it, whether you're a realtor or not. I think that's actually changed the role of a realtor over time. I think realtors will have to evolve to be advisors. They'll have to provide expertise and not just information and help you through the process, which is still, I believe, today. Too complicated, too many steps too winding too expensive.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you started to move it to this next level, talk about sort of the power structure of real estate agents, because I think they're all independent for the most part. But there's certain trends away from gatekeepers like that.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just making information more transparent. And I think the next chapter was people are trying to build efficiency into the system. So how do you build tooling for agents? How do you make their small business more efficient? And I think we're taking the third step, which is how do we build the consumer experience that is direct? How do we make it simpler, more efficient, and more delightful so people feel comfortable transacting themselves?”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Housing and real estate is going through four distinct changes. The first was taking offline content and moving online and Zillow, Redfin, Trulya. This is putting pictures of houses, the history.”
2019-10-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: OpenDoor CEO Eric Wu / Evite CEO Victor Cho · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT