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.), Stipple Capital, L.P, 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
