Launching List with Opendoor
We built a differentiated listing product to give Opendoor customers more certainty in their home sale.
Business problem
Opendoor needed to diversify its product offerings to adapt to a changing real estate market.
Timeline
MVP shipped in Q4 2022; scaled across 25 markets into 2024
Role
Senior content designer & UX writer
Company
opendoor.com ↗
Customer problem
Opendoor’s offers alone weren’t meeting customers’ financial needs; Opendoor’s core value proposition lost value.
Result
In 2023, 30% of all contracts were listing contracts, positively contributing to Opendoor’s overall bottom line by 10%
Product initiative
0 to 1, fundamentally reshaping the company’s business and customer acquisition strategy
Background
Opendoor buys homes from sellers for cash, then re-sells them. But the real estate market saw a once-in-40-year shift in 2022 and 2023 when interest rates climbed from 3% to 8%.
As a result, Opendoor’s cash offers were lower, and fewer sellers sold their homes to Opendoor.
We needed to build another scalable product to help customers get more money for their homes.
Approach
The Seller team pivoted its focus from optimizing the core product to building a new one called “List with Opendoor”.
This new product extended Opendoor’s cash offer from just one week to 60 days.
Customers would then partner with a local real estate agent, recommended by Opendoor and list their homes on the multiple listing service (MLS).
Customers could accept Opendoor’s cash offer, accept an offer from a market buyer, or back out completely, penalty-free.
Main responsibilities & highlights
🧠 Product ideation & development
Partnered with product design and product management to develop and ship the MVP
Authored internal memos and product vision documents to communicate how the product would evolve
👩🏻💻 Content design & UX writing
Wrote all of the in-product content
Updated the product onboarding flow and wrote everything in-product from scratch, from first view to partner agent hand-off
📝 Copywriting & content strategy
Wrote all of the product’s supporting content, like the web landing page, launch emails, and Help Center articles
Developed product marketing strategies that I shared with leadership
👩🏻🔬 User research
Facilitated qualitative interviews with customers to get their feedback on in-progress designs and exploratory feature ideas
Applied research learnings to inform content strategy
✨ Created marketing collateral for partner agents to use with clients
✨ Named the product’s differentiating feature, Offer Lock ↗
MVP desktop view of List with Opendoor
v1 desktop view of List with Opendoor
v2 desktop view of List with Opendoor
Rebranded List with Opendoor
Alex M., Senior Software Engineer at Opendoor
“Gracie was instrumental in helping us launch our 'List with Opendoor' product across 17 markets over the past two years. She facilitated discussions between engineering and design, empowering both groups to follow a clearly outlined build process. Gracie helped steer designs that were intuitive and simplified technical implementation.”