There are a few points you covered in your comment but the housing meltdown wasn't the result of purely a few large consolidated players. It was the fact that t

There are a few points you covered in your comment but the housing meltdown wasn't the result of purely a few large consolidated players. It was the fact that the debt should never have been issued in the first. A person making $40k/yr is given a mortgage for $400k - that's upside down economics. So loose debt created a lot of buyers, which then pushed prices up, with little regulation and oversight this created a large push in the housing prices to increase and the cycle lasted about as long as it took for the first massive wave of defaults. That would have been just a normal reset, the problem was then how much debt everyone was carrying and that all of it was leveraged with not enough collateral to back it up. If it was purely 1:1 debt to housing, instead of being wrapped up in CDOs that then had additional leverage placed on them several times over with various instruments we wouldn't have ended up in such horrid shape. Now that's not to say there isn't risk with Opendoor, there is and everyone including the founder acknowledges that risk, but comparing Opendoor to the housing crash is a bit far fetched. As long as they stay away from leveraged debt and they model things well they can stay a float in a down turn especially since as an organization it looks like they are trying to run a very lean ship by automating as much as possible. Then when you consider the average transaction price as well as their cut, they don't have to move millions of homes in a calendar year to make serious revenue which means the real question is how long can they carry that debt and how is it serviced in the case of a downturn. A lot of that also has to do with the markets chosen. That would be my question. Sure the average buying/price selling price kind of dictates certain markets are out like prime-NYC and SF and secondary markets are in, but it seems that those bear the brunt of the downturn a bit more sharply than NYC. NYC felt it at the high end, that's properties that were $5MM+, more like $10MM+, but in the low end there wasn't much of a dip. More like a bit of stall in housing price growth, and that was more related to the tightening of mortgages rather than the actual price dropping drastically because NYC still has very high demand. Especially in properties that are well below $1MM. So there is something to be said about repeating this model in similar markets, but I think moving into a market that is dissimilar, while it won't be scalable, I think can provide some protection in a downturn.