Opendoor Continues C-Suite Shakeup With CFO Replacement
Christy Schwartz, the iBuyer’s longtime chief accounting officer, was named interim CFO. She’ll replace Selim Freiha, who served as CFO for less than a year.
Call it a C-sweep.
Opendoor continued its ongoing corporate renaissance and C-suite shakeup on Friday, when the nation’s largest remaining iBuyer announced that it had replaced its Chief Financial Officer on an interim basis.
Christy Schwartz | LinkedIn
Christy Schwartz, who has previously served as the company’s Chief Accounting Officer and interim CFO, has replaced Selim Freiha. Schwartz will once again serve in an interim capacity, the company said.
The replacement is the latest shift by Opendoor, which has become among the most closely-watched publicly traded companies in recent months.
After a surge in interest from retail investors, who rallied behind the company’s struggling stock, Opendoor shook up its board of directors and its leadership. CEO Carrie Wheeler resigned under pressure from some of the company’s founders and prominent retail investors who called for widespread, but vaguely defined, changes.
The company also replaced its former Chief Marketing Officer, David Corns, earlier this month.
Last week, Opendoor named Kaz Nejatian, former Chief Operating Officer of online shopping platform Shopify, as Wheeler’s replacement.
Nejatian quickly announced that Opendoor would operate “everywhere” in the contiguous U.S. within weeks, a dramatic increase from the roughly 50 markets the company currently serves.
He also said that Opendoor would shift from a remote-first to an in-person company, and that its office locations would be announced soon.
Among other changes, Opendoor cofounders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu joined the company’s board of directors. Rabois had been among the most vocal critics of Opendoor in recent months, including taking direct aim at Wheeler’s performance as CEO.
Wu was the company’s previous longtime CEO before he stepped down from the role in December 2022. He later moved on entirely from the company before he returned to the board last week.
Rabois has also been a proponent of Opendoor competing with real estate agents in what could be a shift away from the company’s recent approach of working as a source of leads for agents. “Kill agent partnership,” he wrote on the social media platform X, “aim to win instead of appeasement.”
He has also suggested that the company should replace most of its staff and lean into artificial intelligence.
The corporate shakeup comes after most companies who were in the business of buying and trying to resell homes at a large scale and at a profit moved on from the business. Opendoor has remained the largest remaining player in the space, though it, too, has worked to shift away from the capital-intensive work of buying, managing, renovating and reselling houses as its primary business model.
The company posted net losses in 17 of the 19 quarters since it went public and burned through nearly $3 billion before investor pressure sparked the C-suite shakeup.
This summer, Opendoor faced a threat that its stock would be removed from the Nasdaq index if the company was unable to nudge its stock price above $1. After interest from retail investors and the Opendoor C-suite shakeup, the company’s shares were trading at just under $10 today.
