Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday this week that President Donald Trump is doing an “excellent” job of lowering housing costs and increasing supply.
Nejatian spoke to Breitbart News Saturday as the Trump administration has taken sweeping actions to lower housing costs and increase affordability for Americans across the board. Opendoor is an online company that makes cash offers on homes through an online process and relists them for sale, easing the home selling process.
In early January, Trump moved to having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that service loans, buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds to lower mortgage rates and bring down monthly payments.
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Nejatian praised the move, saying the decision to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds “did immediately impact mortgage rates and immediately impacted the number of Americans who could buy homes.”
He continued, “I’m very convinced that there are tens of thousands of Americans this year that can buy homes because of that. who otherwise who would not have been able to buy it.”
The president this past week signed an executive order that bars Wall Street firms from purchasing single-family homes. Companies such as BlackStone, American Homes 4 Rent, and Progress Residential have bought up thousands of single-family homes and then rented the homes back to Americans.
Reports have suggested that institutional buyers across 22 counties in popular metro areas such as Dallas, Texas; Houston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Phoenix, Arizona; Jacksonville, Florida; and Memphis, Tennessee, own between five and ten percent of the housing stocks.
The Opendoor CEO praised Trump’s moves to improve housing affordability, contending that the home buying and home selling experience is stacked against the average American. He said that Trump is doing an “excellent job” and said that “it is deeply unfair” that the current capital system disadvantages the average American from buying or selling a home.
He explained, “Kids that grow up in houses that their parents own have better life outcomes. So, our job at Opendoor is to make it more common for people to own homes and easier to build their own homes. Because a typical home buying and home selling experience is stacked against average people.”
“It’s very expensive to sell your own home and very uncertain,” he added, noting that some potential sellers often have to wait nine months to sell their house and one out of five potential sales falls through. He noted that sellers often have to pay a lot of money in fees, which Opendoor aims to fix by reducing the “friction in home buying.”
Nejatian lamented that the average age of a homebuyer is 40 years old, saying that it has startling implications for those that want to achieve the American Dream.
He cited the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s call to have Americans get married and start having families earlier.
The Opendoor CEO explained, “One of the deep messages he had [Kirk], which deeply resonated with me was that Americans need to get married sooner and have kids earlier. There’s good academic data on this; there’s research that shows, of the lower birthrate, 11 percent is caused by increasing housing prices and fewer people owning homes.”
Nejatian said that when people own their home, it helps uplift the community, citing that crime is lower in areas where people own homes.
Nejatian also noted that Opendoor recently announced that they will offer a $4,000 discount for veterans seeking to buy a home.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
