Merav Bloch of Opendoor Exclusives: First-Principles Thinking Is the Ultimate Solution to Complex Industry Problems

As a part of my series about strong women leaders of the Real Estate industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Merav Bloch.

Merav Bloch is the Vice President and the General Manager of Opendoor Exclusives, where she is building a first-of-its-kind online marketplace to connect buyers and sellers directly to transact without the hassles of the traditional real estate model. Her previous roles at Opendoor include Head of Operations Excellence, Head of Expansion, City Operations, and Strategy. Previously, she was the Head of Customer Engagement at Square.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to the Real Estate industry?

My career path has not been a straight line, resembling a “jungle gym rather than a ladder”, as Sheryl Sandberg put it. I grew up in Australia with aspirations of becoming a lawyer; I attended law school and started my career as an attorney in Sydney and then in Melbourne, Australia.

In 2012, my husband and I moved to San Francisco and I fell in love with the innovation economy. The city thrummed with the energy of audacious founders attempting things nobody had done before, and I found that pull irresistible. I took a role in early-stage venture investing, where I got a bird’s-eye view of the tech industry, met some remarkable founders, and led our seed-stage investment in Canva. My first operating role was at Block (then Square) when it was still a relatively small private company of ~200–300 people. I loved, and still love, the experience of building “zero to one” for the customer: deeply understanding their needs, moving fast, and creating brand new products that meet those needs.

I joined Opendoor in 2016 because of the boldness of its vision and the density of talent on the team. (Two of the company’s four founders had spent time at Square, so I had some first-hand knowledge of this).

I’ve been at Opendoor for almost seven years and still find myself energized by our boldness of vision and the talented team I get to work with. I’ve also realized there is a unique privilege in handling the largest transaction of our customers’ lives. After almost seven years of seeking to deeply understand our customers’ needs, I find myself positioned to do my best work, and with the platform to do it on Opendoor Exclusives. We’re building a completely new marketplace to make buying and selling homes as easy as buying airline tickets online.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or take away what you took out of that story?

I joined Opendoor initially to lead market expansion — the company was in two markets at the time, with the goal of eventually expanding nationwide (we are now in over 50 markets). When I joined, we were a few months away from kicking off our expansion efforts, and I was asked to step temporarily into the role of Head of Trust & Safety while we recruited a permanent leader for that team. I found myself in that role without an extensive background in Trust & Safety (or field operations more generally) and with no pattern recognition or experience to draw from.

You may have heard the statistic, originally from a Hewlett Packard internal report and quoted in Lean In and elsewhere, that men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the requirements, and women apply only if they meet 100% of them. This certainly described me at the time, and I would never have put up my hand for that role.

Despite the self-doubt I felt at the time, it ended up being an extremely productive period for the team, and we incubated and deployed early versions of many of the risk management systems Opendoor uses to this day to secure our homes. I learned from this experience the tremendous power of first-principles thinking: at some level, any business problem can be broken into its drivers, which can then be addressed by process, policy, or product. I try to remember this whenever I find myself faced with a new or seemingly insurmountable challenge: break it down into drivers, stack rank them in order of importance, and then go after them. Also, having the confidence to embrace new challenges.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

My team and I are building Opendoor Exclusives, a first-of-its-kind online homes marketplace. It’s been an aspiration for Opendoor since I first joined, and it’s been exciting to see it come to life and to meet real customers buying and selling on our platform.

In our marketplace, buyers can browse homes they can’t find anywhere else. For Opendoor-owned homes, they can simply click ‘buy-it-now’ and make it theirs; we create peace of mind with an Appraisal Price Match Guarantee and the ability to back out of contract anytime without penalty. Buyers are in control with a fully digital checkout experience that eliminates stressful haggling or bidding wars. We’re delivering an e-commerce-like experience that focuses on unique selection, a simple process, and peace of mind at every step.

For sellers, we are making the experience of selling just as seamless — we share their home with our network of buyers — both consumers and institutions — and gather them options to sell, including a cash offer from Opendoor. They accept the offer that’s best for them and move without the pressure of a traditional listing.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

One of our Operating Principles is to start and end with the customer. You see this in how we design our products, in our customer service, and even in how we run our meetings, which frequently start or end with a customer spotlight. It sets the expectation, deeply felt by our team, that we exist to serve a customer’s need, and we succeed when we serve that need better than anything else.

I recall an early customer who moved into a new home shortly before Thanksgiving, after navigating some particularly tough personal circumstances. The Opendoor team banded together to furnish the customer’s house so they could kick off their next chapter comfortably. It’s a small example of many where I’ve seen us go above and beyond for our customers.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My long-time manager at Square, Tanya Khakbaz, is the person I credit with turning me from a lawyer/VC into an operator. Tanya has a rare combination of EQ and IQ, and I drank in her example in the early years of my tech career. From Tanya I learned how to leverage data, both quantitative and qualitative, to make investment decisions, and to drive alignment behind those decisions. I also learned how to execute cross-functionally, pulling together disparate teams across an organization to drive an outcome.

At Opendoor, I’ve benefited enormously from the leadership and wisdom of Megan Meyer Toolson, another truly exceptional executive. From Megan I learned how to lead authentically, showing up with humor and deep caring, as well as business savvy. I also learned how to run a business, creating an operating cadence and feedback loops to ensure a team can deliver on its goals month after month, quarter after quarter.

I’m also grateful to Alyssa Cutright, Eric Sager, and Eric Wu, all of whom took bets on me at various stages of my career. I wouldn’t be where I am without them.

Ok. Thank you for all that. Let’s now jump to the main core of our interview. The Real Estate industry, like the Veterinarian, Nursing, and Public Relations fields, is a women-dominated industry. Yet despite this, less than 20 percent of senior positions in Real Estate companies are held by women. In your opinion or experience, what do you think is the cause of this imbalance?

Amazingly, we have the opposite ratio on Opendoor’s executive team — I recently had a blast moderating an International Women’s Day panel of Opendoor’s six women c-level leaders, including our CEO Carrie Wheeler, President Megan Meyer Toolson, CTO Raji Subramanian, and Chief Legal Officer Sydney Schaub.

This ratio is deeply unusual for our industry but shouldn’t be, given women make up over 60% of realtors, and single women are more likely to own homes than single men. The gender gap is less acute in residential vs. commercial real estate, perhaps for this reason.

When I think of industry-specific drivers of this leadership gap, a few things come to mind. First, the close relationship between real estate and the heavily male-dominated construction industry. Houses and buildings need to be built to be sold; even in a “used home” sale, inspections and repair negotiations warrant some comfort with home construction and common repairs.

As in the famous “draw a scientist” experiment, I suspect many people, if asked to draw a Real Estate Executive, are likely to draw someone male. We can all do our part to change this.

What 3 things can be done by a)individuals b)companies and/or c) society to support greater gender balance going forward?

First, I think there is a huge opportunity for parents and other caregivers to promote gender balance for our future leaders. In our home, this starts with role modeling: my husband and I are intentional about sharing the caring load, and on the flip side, sharing things we’re working on with our kids. I also try to be intentional about setting the same expectations for my two daughters as I do for my son.

Second, I’m personally a fan of pipeline goals to address the “draw a scientist” effect. If we accept that people default to imagining a man in many leadership roles, we need practical solutions to challenge that thinking. Pipeline goals are a way to nudge the kinds of questions I’d want a hiring manager or promotion panel to ask: are we thinking expansively enough about the type of person who could do this role? Is there anyone we’re overlooking?

Third, after having three kids during my time at Opendoor, I’m convinced that how we handle expectant parents, and parental leave benefits, has a key role to play in either promoting or undermining gender equality at work. I dream of a future where all expectant parents (men and women), in all sectors, have the same leave benefits, and actually take them.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women executives that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?

I think we need to work harder to build the credibility many men take for granted. This shows up in subtle ways, like attending a customer event and seeing people assume that a man on my team is the most senior person in the room. Particularly because I have an unusual (and not clearly gendered) name, a number of people throughout my career have assumed I’m a man before I meet them in person. I’m grateful to not have faced these challenges at Opendoor, a company with a majority female c-suite. It’s a great proof point that the future doesn’t necessarily need to look like the present.

Pregnancy is another big one: while I was fortunate to have three relatively straightforward pregnancies, they still impacted me at work, from carving out time for doctors’ appointments to limiting my ability to travel. Once I got back to work, I found myself having to pump on the road and ship milk back to San Francisco — all things my husband didn’t need to think about. In my case, it took considerable effort on both sides to ensure my pregnancies didn’t set me back at work. I’ve written in more detail here about some of the ways managers can help retain their high performers through pregnancy and beyond.

Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the Real Estate industry?

1. Digitization of the real estate industry: Residential real estate is a $2 trillion sector of the U.S. economy that’s gone untouched for decades; less than 1% of transactions happen online. I’m excited to be at a company like Opendoor that is modernizing it. And, most of the digital disruption in real estate is still ahead of us.
2. Accessibility in the home move: Buying a home is both a highly emotional and high-stakes financial decision. There are huge and exciting opportunities to address both the emotional and financial needs of customers: giving customers peace of mind in making the largest purchase of their lives and also making it easier for them to get into homes.
3. Transparency into consumers’ largest asset: Opendoor gives Americans much more liquidity in their largest asset — the family home. Making it easier for people to move, coupled with the rise of remote work, has potentially massive ripple effects for cities, families, and the labor force. I think we’re at the very beginning of seeing how this story unfolds.

Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?

1. Lack of supply: The homeownership rate for millennials is significantly lower than Gen X and especially Baby Boomers. It’s no secret that it’s harder for young people to get into a home and build equity than it was for their parents and grandparents. And, the US housing market is short 6.5 million homes. A meaningful part of the answer here has to be new supply, including density in urban centers.
2. Bias in the traditional process: The traditional listing process, which is still the way a majority of homes are bought and sold, unfortunately, creates opportunities for discrimination, from bidding wars that reward cash or certain forms of financing, to “love letters” sent to a seller describing the buyer’s situation and reasons to move. Turning home buying and selling into more of an e-commerce transaction — like we’re doing with Opendoor Exclusives — is the opportunity to create a more level playing field. A “click to purchase” transaction is by its nature democratic.
3. Slow speed of innovation: We are in the midst of a generational shift towards fully digital experiences across all industries — from banking and retail to healthcare and transportation. And still, there’s a large, unmet need for a seamless process in real estate. There are ~5M transactions per year, yet less than 1% of home transactions are online. At Opendoor, we’ve created a fully digital end-to-end real estate experience — removing the layers, the barriers, the confusion, and the antiquated methods that have tainted the industry for decades. More transparent technology will equate to greater efficiency and reduced costs for consumers, which in turn has the potential to compound into more liquidity in the housing market.

What advice would you give to other leaders to help their team to thrive?

Something I like to tell first-time managers is that at least 50% of being a good manager is genuinely caring about your team. Lead with kindness and deep caring. If in doubt, think from first principles about how your decisions will impact each person on your team, and apply the golden rule (“how would I want to be treated?”).

I’m also a big fan of Opendoor’s Operating Principle, “Celebrate Moments”. Celebrate moments big and small, and focus on the wins — because if your team believes they’re winning, they more likely are.

Ok, here is the main question of our interview. You are a “Real Estate Insider’’. If you had to advise someone about 5 non intuitive things one should know to succeed in the Real Estate industry, what would you say? Can you please give a story or an example for each?

1. Get into the field. Real estate is the ultimate “online-offline” business: “bricks & mortar” is not a distribution channel, but the very heart of the business. Regardless of where you play in the industry, I think it’s hard to be successful sitting in an office building or behind a Zoom screen. My team and I have met customers in their homes, shadowed them as they’ve done home tours, and spoken directly to buyers and sellers in more than 25 cities, to try to wrap our arms around their needs, wants, and fears. As an aside, you definitely want me on your trivia team if the topic is “random facts about US cities”.
2. Be curious. Curiosity is a recipe for success in any industry, and I think real estate in particular. Real estate changes through different market cycles, impacted both by first-order effects (like interest rates) and second-order effects (like buyer and seller sentiment). It has always served me well to be deeply curious about how the macroeconomy is evolving, and how customers are feeling about it. The two don’t always match up, and it’s frequently fascinating to see sentiment running ahead or behind reality.
3. Have empathy. Buying or selling a home is highly emotional, as well as a huge financial transaction. Sellers are typically parting with their largest asset, which is also somewhere they’ve accumulated years of memories. Buyers are typically spending all of their savings, and deciding where to raise their families. Succeeding in real estate takes deep customer empathy, as well as the typical skills demanded of business leaders across strategy, analytics, operations, marketing, etc. One of the highlights of my job is seeing photos customers send us of their families outside their new homes — in many cases a dream many years in the making.
4. Embrace change. Real estate is in the very early stages of digital transformation. Current and especially future real estate leaders will need to dream big and be adaptable to change. The industry is still highly broken, manual, and complex. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build a team culture that expects change, rather than fears it, and sees it for what it is, which is fundamentally an untapped opportunity.
5. Establish trust. For customers, completing a real estate transaction demands enormous trust — on both sides of the sale. The traditional process is riddled with uncertainty: sellers may wonder if the buyer will back out, and buyers may wonder if the home they’re buying is a lemon. To gain consumers’ trust, it’s important to be transparent, be communicative, and consistently deliver on your word. At Opendoor, this is something we invest in heavily. When sellers choose Opendoor, they have transparency in their offer, certainty on the closing timeline, and an open line of communication with our team seven days a week. And we do the same for buyers who work with us. We give them confidence in their home purchase and peace of mind about the price.

Because of your position, you are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Dreaming here — can we all agree on a day a week or month where we all turn off our smartphones?

How can our readers follow you online?

Visit Opendoor.com and check out our blog. You can also find me on Linkedin.

Thank you for your time, and your excellent insights!

About The Interviewer: Jason Hartman is the Founder and CEO of Empowered Investor. Jason has been involved in several thousand real estate transactions and has owned income properties in 11 states and 17 cities. Empowered Investor helps people achieve The American Dream of financial freedom by purchasing income property in prudent markets nationwide. Jason’s Complete Solution for Real Estate Investors™ is a comprehensive system providing real estate investors with education, research, resources and technology to deal with all areas of their income property investment needs. Through Jason’s podcasts, educational events, referrals, mentoring and software to track your investments, investors can easily locate, finance and purchase properties in these exceptional markets with confidence and peace of mind.

Starting with very little, Jason, while still in college at the age of 19, embarked on a career in real estate. While brokering properties for clients, he was investing in his own portfolio along the way. Through creativity, persistence and hard work, he earned a number of prestigious industry awards and became a young multi-millionaire. Jason purchased a California real estate brokerage firm that was later acquired by Coldwell Banker. He combined his dedication and business talents to become a successful entrepreneur, public speaker, author, and media personality. Over the years he developed his Complete Solution for Real Estate Investors™ where his innovative firm educates and assists investors in acquiring prudent investments nationwide for their portfolio. Jason’s sought after educational events, speaking engagements, and his popular “Creating Wealth Podcast” inspire and empower hundreds of thousands of people in 189 countries worldwide.

While running his successful real estate and media businesses, Jason also believes that giving back to the community plays an important role in building strong personal relationships. He established The Jason Hartman Foundation in 2005 to provide financial literacy education to young adults providing the all-important real world skills not taught in school which are the key to the financial stability and success of future generations. We’re in a global monetary crisis caused by decades of misguided policies and the cycle of financial dependence has to be broken, literacy and self-reliance are a good start. Visit JasonHartman.com for free materials and resources.