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Opendoor has had an extremely rough ride in the stock market over the last year, with its share price falling nearly 90 percent.
In late December, the company’s share price even fell below $1, a threshold companies have to stay above or risk getting booted from the market.
But this week, the company scored a rare market victory: Financial services and analytics firm BTIG set a new price target for the company’s shares at $6.
For context, as of mid-Thursday afternoon shares in Opendoor were trading in the $1.50 range. The last time they were trading for $6 was all the way back in June 2022. However, according to stock market news publication Pulse 2.0, BTIG set the new higher price target thanks to what it thinks will be “above guidance fourth-quarter results.”
In other words, BTIG thinks Opendoor will have performed better in the final months of 2022 than the company forecasted.
Despite the higher price target, BTIG still reportedly thinks Opendoor will report a negative gross margin and EBITA loss.
BTIG previously rated Opendoor stock a “buy” in March 2022. At the time, shares were trading in the $8 range but BTIG envisioned them rising to $15. The market downturn largely happened after that episode, and in August BTIG set a new target price of $9. The latest price target is lower still, but nevertheless represents an increase from what shares are currently fetching.
Though there’s no set date yet, Opendoor typically releases its fourth-quarter financial results in late February, meaning there’s probably about a month before observers get to see if BTIG was right or not.
Opendoor’s last earnings report shocked industry members due to nearly $1 billion in losses. The majority of those losses were due to the falling value of homes Opendoor had in inventory, rather than simple cash burn, but the news nevertheless prompted a debate about what the future of iBuying might look like, and if there is a future at all.
Contributing to that debate was Redfin’s decision, announced days after Opendoor’s earnings report, to get out of iBuying altogether. Offerpad, the second largest dedicated iBuyer after Opendoor, has also struggled in the stock market and is currently facing the threat of being kicked out of the New York Stock Exchange for its low share price.
BTIG’s price target, then, offers a counterpoint to more dire headlines that have popped up in recent months. And while Opendoor’s stock has a long way to go to hit that price target, it has been moving up recently; as of Thursday shares were up about 5 percent over the last month and 37 percent over the last five days.
For its part, Opendoor has been working to pivot amid the ongoing market downturn. That pivot includes the debut of a marketplace called Opendoor Exclusives which allows both the company and interested consumers to post their homes and sell them directly to buyers. The marketplace potentially makes Opendoor a middleman in transactions rather than a homebuyer, which requires far less cash.
The company is also actively building partnerships, including, for example, a new one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that caters to military families.
It remains to be seen what the iBuying sector will look like in six months or a year, and that’s largely because it’s also unclear what the housing market generally will look like in that time frame. However, despite high mortgage rates, recent data suggests consumer sentiment is improving — which can only be a good thing for companies in the real estate business.
