RedDoor is
joining
Opendoor
It’s been a fast-paced journey here at RedDoor and we are on our way to the next success. Our company has joined Opendoor, and our entire team and our products will continue to innovate the way you can finance home ownership. We’ve had an incredible experience so far executing on our vision to take the pain out of the pre-approval process, and we are excited to expand our impact faster, farther, and for everyone, through joining Opendoor. While we were building RedDoor, we never found the time to stop and tell our story, so as we make this transition, we are also taking a moment to share for anyone who is interested to learn more about how it all began….
How it all began...
It all began when Ali and Heather were introduced as colleagues, and decided to share a pot of tea and a long conversation about what was broken in the real estate industry. This dialogue continued, drawing from their diverse backgrounds in tech and startups, and they never stopped pushing the limits of what was possible to reimagine the way things should be, and from that first pot of tea, the alignment on the shared vision to fix what was broken never stopped. Over thousands of cups of tea, the vision expanded from napkins and sketches, to whiteboards and project planning, to a business plan and a pitch deck, and ultimately raising $5.3 million in venture capital. The first version of RedDoor launched six months later.
RedDoor also built the evolution of how loan officers do their
work with it's proprietary backend system that manages all
aspects of the engagement and approval process, maximizing
conversion and efficiency while delivering a high delight score.
Using our technology, RedDoor loan officers are already 4x more
productive than the industry average.
Technology's raised the bar on consumer facing experiences
whether we're buying books, milk, or running
shoes. Growing up, Heather spent summers in her
grandparent’s real estate office, and watched as
buyers came in toting the real estate section of the
newspaper with houses circled and then they sat down on
the red leather couches and looked through the enormous
black binders full of MLS listings to determine what homes
they wanted to see. Today, anyone can search online or
from their phone and find all of the homes for sale, and
even make and receive offers from their couch. What hasn't
changed much is how you get your financing, what options
you actually have access to, and how painfully difficult
the entire process is.
Over the years, we
talked to hundreds of borrowers about this process. Across
the board, no matter how many homes they have bought or
how many college degrees they have, people feel
overwhelmed with the process, and don't know if they are
ever seeing all of their options. As they are going
through the painful process of getting pre-approved and
try to complain about it, the answer they typically hear
from their real estate agent and loan officer goes
something like this, "This is just how it is; you have to
go along with it because there is no other way.”
We
always believed that there was a better way, and we knew
we could build a verified 60 second pre-approval process,
and deliver a magical experience instead of a painful one,
for everyone involved. And that’s just what we
did. (check out the evolution of our product and design)
Some might say the magic is our people, because our team is
made up of exceptional humans, not just in how talented they
are, but who they are at the core. Some might say it’s
our product, and we are certain there is no other mortgage
pre-approval experience like the one RedDoor delivers, because
we didn’t let anything (except compliance and
legislation 😉) limit the possibilities.
Ultimately,
we know it’s both. Our people and our product make the
magic happen, and this is what some of our 10,000+ users have
shared about their RedDoor experience…
RedDoor is continuing our mission to deliver one-click home
ownership...our 60 second pre-approval delivered inside the
world that Opendoor has been working on for the last 7 years
is perfectly aligned and the impact we plan to make
together for all home buyers and the professionals who
serve them will be a compelling story to be told.
Over
the next few months we will be busy working through the
details of bringing the RedDoor magic to the Opendoor
experience, and we plan to launch soon, so stay
tuned.
We are truly humbled by this entire experience. The
amplification of gratitude to see our vision come to
reality has brought us to emotional moments many times on
this journey of the last 3 years. We don’t take for
granted the people who chose to believe in us, invest in
us with their capital, their experience, and their talent.
We know what RedDoor has become in all ways is rare. We
may not be a unicorn...but together, we believed, and
maybe that’s all that matters.
We know
that we couldn’t have done it without you, all of
you.
To our amazing, brilliant and talented
team of real estate professionals, mortgage experts,
technologists and designers who believe it’s beyond
time for a new experience, we are inexplicably grateful
for the chance you took to come innovate with us. We know
you had a million other places you could have been - but
you chose to be at RedDoor, and together we made the magic
happen.
Many thanks to our friends and advisors who showed up for
us at all the right moments, to give us guidance and
support from their experience and expertise along the way.
Aaron Stein
(Simple Highway),
Alex Villacorta
(ResiShares),
George Grellas
(Grellas Shah),
Kevin Cloyd
(ECC Capital),
Oleg Kaganovich
(AKRU), and
Yuri Sagalov
(Wayfinder Ventures). And a special thank you to
Ken Jenny
(Trancen) who opened many doors for us, but passed on
before he was able to celebrate the Opendoor venture with
us.
We were fortunate to have a group of
incredible institutional and angel investors who were sold
on the pitch, and risked their capital to give us the
chance to build our vision. Many thanks to each of you, we
are grateful you chose us out of the 1000’s of
pitches you filter through…”acquired by Opendoor” is a
fantastic outcome for all of us!
Mohamed Kazaz,
Delly Tamer
(D&S Tamer Trust),
Alex Bangash
and
Trang Nguyen
(Trusted Insight Platform and NLI Strategic Venture
Investment Limited), Tarek Fahim (Endure Capital I LP),
Temi Omojola
and
Ayo Omojola
(Generational Capital, LLC III),
Jeff Siebert
and
Wayne Chang
(Bitwise Capital Fund I), Arthur Leung (N2 Consulting
and Tulum Terra, LLC), Louis Beryl (Four Cities Fund III, LLC),
Bill Boebel
(Boebel Ventures II, LLC),
Yousef Hammad
and
Dany Farha
(Falcon 1 Equity Ltd.), Ullas Naik (Streamlined Ventures II, L.P.), Pat Matthews (Active Capital I, L.P.), Khaled Hussein (Stipple Ventures), L.P, Jonathon Triest, Brett deMarrais and Blake
Robbins (Ludlow Ventures),
Latif Nathani,
Andrew Dietrich,
Aaron Frank,
JD Ross
and the JD Ross Angel Fund, and
Guy Gal.
And many thanks to our customers who
discovered and downloaded from almost every major city in
the United States, even though we were only licensed in
California. Stay tuned, we are coming soon to where you
are, as Opendoor grows its markets and pushes forward to
expand making the possibility of one tap home ownership
available to everyone.
$200M+
10k+
1500+
70+
We built our culture and every aspect of how we challenged the
consumer experience around the principle of
“do the right thing” - our team speaks this fluently,
and along the way we were presented with choices that put
doing the right thing to the test and we are proud to say we
never compromised even if it meant things were harder. And we
are thrilled that the culture of Opendoor is aligned with
ours, so there will be even more of us “doing the right thing”
together. Standby…RedDoor + Opendoor are about to make
an explosive disruption to the experience of buying,
financing, and owning a home.
Onward,
Heather and Ali
