Opendoor makes its long-awaited public debut Monday, following the official consummation of its merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II last week. The company will trade publicly on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol OPEN.
Eric Wu | Photo credit: Opendoor
“Today, we celebrate the milestone of becoming a publicly traded company and this moment is more rewarding due to the challenges we overcame,” Opendoor CEO Eric Wu wrote in a blog post shared with Inman. “Like most startups, we’ve faced our fair share of hard problems, but we believed in the potential impact of what we were building and put in the hard work to tackle obstacle after obstacle.”
“While our path wasn’t a straight-line, I’m proud that we have and continue to remain focused on the customer, act from ownership, and build a community of friends and colleagues grounded in care and respect.”
Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), has been publicly traded since the summer, with the company’s stock debuting at around $10 per share. The company’s share price debuted on the market as OPEN at $30.37.
The debut was another major win for the SoftBank Vision Fund, which invested $400 million in Opendoor and owns approximately 73 million shares of Opendoor. With the stock trading at $30.37 when the day opened, that values SoftBank’s stake in the company at more than $2.2 billion.
Opendoor is one of the latest firms to use a SPAC as a vehicle to raise capital to become a publicly listed company, rather than going the direct listing route.
Former Zillow CEO and co-founder Spencer Rascoff also launched a SPAC and has been critical of the traditional public listing process.
Opendoor, like many other iBuyers, was forced to suspend the homebuying portion of its business earlier this year as the pandemic raged, but has since returned to the market with new safety protocols and initiatives — including a brokerage-like offering sure to rankle real estate agents.
The company posted $1.9 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2020, a slight decline from the $2.2 billion the company posted in 2019, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The decline was likely due to the COVID-19-influenced business adjustment.
The company also disclosed it posted a net loss of $118 million in the first six months of 2020, compared to a net loss of $157 million in the first six months of 2019. For the entire year of 2019, Opendoor sold nearly 19,000 homes and generated $4.7 billion in revenue.
