Watch the conversation with broker and proptech expert Heather Harmon, who discusses her time at Opendoor — and what tech companies get wrong about real estate.
Editor’s note: The Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered podcast explores the people and forces that shape the real estate industry. Check out our top takeaways and watch the latest episode from NextHome CEO James Dwiggins and Keith Robinson, NextHome’s chief strategic officer.
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On the latest episode of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered, third-generation broker and entrepreneur Heather Harmon discusses the real estate technology landscape and offers her take on Opendoor and iBuyers.
Harmon has more insight than most: She grew up in the real estate biz, and her proptech experience dates all the way back to 1990, before “proptech” was even a thing.
Why are agents resistant to tech? Since her first foray into proptech, Harmon has founded four companies in that arena and works with other startups as an advisor and investor.
But she knows that all the tech in the world is meaningless if it doesn’t serve its customers — and too many companies don’t take the time to understand what agents actually need.
“One of the things that I see in proptech specifically is people come from out of the industry and they think, ‘Oh, I got this. I’m so much smarter than these people. All I need to do is build this.’ For the most part, venture capitalists don’t understand the nuances of our business. That’s one of my roles, to help them understand what they don’t see.”
Opendoor: Success story or cautionary tale? Harmon led Opendoor’s mortgage division after one of her companies was acquired by the iBuyer, giving her an insider’s view.
She thinks Opendoor, which has been “rescaling” after suffering steep losses in 2022 and 2023, has gotten a bad rap.
“They never came on the scene and said, this is the way everyone should do a transaction. They had a job to be done and that was to provide certainty. … And they’ve done that job. They don’t need to penetrate the entire market for them to have a successful business. They just need a small fraction of the transaction volume for that to be a viable business. And that’s their focus.”
Is the industry hitting a speed bump, or facing a fork in the road? “I hope it’s a fork in the road. I hope that we are transitioning into a different reality as professionals, and also in the way we deliver the consumer experience,” said Harmon.
She says the industry needs to think differently about technology too: “We can’t deploy technology to old processes. We have to evolve our actual process and then evolve the technology to that.”