Earnings Call Transcript - OPEN Q4 2021

Operator, Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Opendoor Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. This call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Elise Wang, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please proceed.

Elise Wang, VP of Investor Relations

Thank you, and good afternoon. Full details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our earnings release and shareholder letter, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.opendoor.com. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations section of the company's corporate website. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Opendoor's financial condition, anticipated financial performance, business strategy and plans, market opportunity and expansion and management objectives for future operations. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Opendoor's most recent annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, to be filed with the SEC and Opendoor's other periodic SEC filings. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on management's current expectations and assumptions as of today, and Opendoor assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. The following discussion contains references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. The company believes these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors and supplemental operational measurements to evaluate the company's financial performance. For a reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see our website at investor.opendoor.com. I will now turn the call over to Eric Wu, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Opendoor.

Eric Wu, CEO

Good afternoon. Joining me on the call are Carrie Wheeler, our Chief Financial Officer, and Andrew Low Ah Kee, our President. Our customers are central to everything we do, so let's begin by hearing from one of them about the impact Opendoor has had on their lives. We are honored to assist families like the Thomases, who have trusted us with both their home sale and purchase for a seamless transition. 2021 showcased our direction as we moved away from a fragmented offline process focused on lead generation and agents toward a digital experience where consumers can buy, sell, and move using just their mobile devices. Over the past year, we generated $8 billion in revenue, reflecting over 200% growth from the previous year. We achieved $525 million in contribution profit, an increase of nearly 380% year-over-year, and recorded $58 million in positive adjusted EBITDA, up $156 million from last year. These impressive results have accelerated our financial targets significantly, surpassing even our ambitious expectations across key metrics. This substantial growth stems from our focused execution and investment in consumer experience, growth strategies, technology, pricing, and operations. We centered our efforts on enhancing the seller experience and differentiating the buyer experience. For sellers, we aimed to automate and simplify the selling process, launching virtual assessments that allow for home inspections to be done online, and self-service assessments for sellers to conduct their own inspections. For buyers, we introduced Opendoor Backed Offers, which enable buyers to make offers backed by cash, boosting their chances of securing their dream home and providing them with advantages that were once exclusive to the affluent. With the launch of Opendoor Complete, we streamlined the two separate processes of selling an existing home and buying a new one into a single, cohesive experience. This process gives customers greater control over their moving timelines while eliminating the burdens of double mortgages and moving costs. Additionally, we acquired the RedDoor, Pro.com, and Skylight teams to enhance our home personalization and digital mortgage initiatives going forward. As a result of these efforts, we achieved a very high conversion rate of over 35% of real sellers, along with a seller NPS exceeding 80 in 2021. In terms of consumer growth, this year saw an impressive rise in our customer base, expanding our market coverage by adding 23 new markets, which is a significant increase from 21, highlighting the scalability and strength of our systems and services. We deepened partnerships with over 70 homebuilders and online platforms like Realtor.com, offering more effective solutions to sellers. We also re-engaged homeowners who had registered in past years but were not ready to move, resulting in nearly 30% of our acquisitions. Our increased awareness led to over 0.5 million new homeowners requesting offers from Opendoor in 2021, which will aid our re-engagement efforts and growth moving into 2022 and beyond. Our core technology, pricing, and operations platforms made significant advancements last year. We enhanced our home operations system, Opendoor Scout, and virtualized various labor processes, allowing us to conduct three times more home assessments and repairs without increasing staffing. This led to faster turnaround times and over 170 basis points in cost improvements. We continued investments in pricing, as our pricing system provides a key competitive advantage. We analyzed hundreds of data points for each assessed home and incorporated millions of new data points, including image data and demand signals, resulting in a meaningful reduction in pricing variance and expansion of our buybox by over 50%. Looking ahead to 2022, we plan to make significant strides toward our vision of a fully digital experience while growing our audience, revenue, and contribution profit. Based on positive customer feedback, we will expand and develop Opendoor Complete and Buy with Opendoor as part of our product suite. We intend to broaden our market reach across the U.S., including major markets like the newly launched SF Bay Area. We will continue to invest in achieving the lowest-cost platform, enhancing automation and scalability, leading to reduced costs for consumers and improved contribution margins. Our differentiated pricing engine will remain a priority, as we aim to acquire the necessary data and insights to price homes effectively at scale. Lastly, we will integrate home financing and personalization more extensively into a seamless e-commerce-like checkout flow for home purchases. Given the strength of our team, our focused execution, market leadership, and ongoing innovations, we anticipate 2022 will be a landmark year for Opendoor. I want to express my gratitude to our Opendoor teammates for their dedication to serving and delighting our customers during significant life transitions. I will now hand it over to Carrie to discuss our financial performance and expectations for Q1 and the upcoming year.

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Thanks, Eric. 2021 was a record year for Opendoor, and we're entering 2022 with strong momentum. Q1 revenue is expected to be between $4.1 billion and $4.3 billion, up 460% year-on-year at the midpoint. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $30 million to $40 million, up $37 million year-over-year at the midpoint. Let me first touch base on some of the key financial highlights for 2021, including our strong finish in the fourth quarter, and then I'll address our outlook. As always, you'll find all the details in the shareholder letter that we published today. Once again, we meaningfully exceeded our revenue guidance. We delivered a record $3.8 billion in sales in the fourth quarter, up 1,435% versus the prior year. This outperformance was driven by our resale and operating capabilities, enabling us to lean into strong market demand. We ended the year with $8 billion in total revenue, 211% higher than 2020. Most importantly, we finished the year at a pace more than 2 years ahead of the plan that we came to market with when we went public at the end of 2020. Our contribution margin was 4% in the fourth quarter, which was in line with our internal expectations. As a reminder, our margin trajectory was consistent with what we guided throughout 2021, driven by temporary factors in the first part of the year related to a highly favorable inventory mix and conservative underwriting decisions relative to our HPA forecasting. We exceeded our expectations for the year with contribution margins of 6.5% relative to the guardrails we indicated for 4% to 6% annually. Adjusted EBITDA was $0.4 million in the fourth quarter, and we ended 2021 with positive $58 million versus negative $98 million in 2020. We ended the year with 17,009 homes in inventory, representing $6.1 billion in value, which was up 1,208% versus last year. We purchased a total of 9,639 homes in Q4, in line with what we indicated back in Q3 when we moderated our acquisition pace to ensure we could deliver a seamless customer experience and manage our system-wide operations capacity. Acquisitions were balanced by 9,794 homes sold in the quarter. That volume was over 11 times the volume of Q4 2020. This is a reflection of our system's capabilities that allowed us to increase capacity to repair and list homes during the quarter, enabling us to manage our backlog of homes despite the trade labor shortages impacting the housing industry. As a result, we entered Q1 from a position of strength. Our repair timelines for new acquisitions are back to historical norms. We've built in greater operational capacity and flexibility, and our inventory is healthy. I call out that we're providing a new inventory metric to offer more insight into the overall health of our portfolio. We maintain a highly disciplined approach to inventory management, including how we manage the duration of our holding periods. As part of that, we track the number of days that our home was listed on the market. As of year-end, only 8% of our listed homes have been on the market for more than 120 days, which is well within the range that we manage to. Moreover, this metric indicates that our inventory is far healthier than the market, which had 24% of homes listed for more than 120 days when filtered for our buybox. Turning now to our guidance. As I mentioned earlier, we expect first quarter revenue to be between $4.1 billion and $4.3 billion, which represents 460% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. We entered Q1 with a strong inventory balance, which will enable us to meet the elevated demand we're seeing in the housing market, resulting in a high rate of sell-through for our homes. Therefore, we expect to pull in some revenue that would have ordinarily landed in Q2 into the first quarter. While it's difficult to predict with precision exactly when transactions close, we expect to generate approximately $8 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, representing over 300% growth year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $30 million and $40 million, which represents a 0.8% margin at the midpoint of the expected range. Adjusted OpEx, which we define as the delta between contribution margin and adjusted EBITDA, is forecasted to be up approximately $20 million versus Q4, as we continue to invest across our pricing capabilities, platform scaling, adjacent services and marketing. Contribution margins are expected to be up sequentially in Q1, consistent with our guidance. Before I open the call for questions, I want to echo Eric and thank all of our teammates, our customers and our shareholders for your support at Opendoor in what was an incredible year of progress and growth. We are energized and focused on delivering on our vision to provide an end-to-end home buying and selling experience that is simple, fast and certain. And with that, I'll now open up the call for questions. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Your first question comes from the line of Stephen Ju from Credit Suisse.

Stephen Ju, Analyst

So Eric and Carrie, access to capital was pretty crucial to your ability to purchase old inventory. So would you talk about whether there's been any sort of change in stance from your bankers in terms of the existing credit lines and as you prepare for additional growth in the future, access to additional credit lines? And also, is there anything we should be thinking about in terms of potential changes to your inventory holding period, which I believe historically was around 90 to 100 days?

Eric Wu, CEO

Thanks, Stephen. I'll let Carrie take this.

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Stephen, with respect to our financing, we're well capitalized with what we have in hand today to support our growth plan for 2022. We have financing for over $10 billion of inventory. If you think about how our terms work across the course of the year, that would be north of $30 billion of home acquisition firepower. We have not seen a change in our ability to attract financing from our lenders since the exit of other people in our category. In fact, we've actually added to our overall facility since the fall. With respect to your question about hold periods, we did see an increase in holding periods in Q4. When you think about how we hold inventory, there's sort of two segments: the moment we acquire until we list, and then when we list until we sell. What we saw elongate in Q4 is what we call that pre-list period, and that was a function of working through some of the homes we acquired in Q3 as we worked through that backlog in Q4. We exited the year with that repair timeline back to where we want to be in terms of historical standards.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst

Two questions. First, revenue came in better, I think, than many of us were looking for, but I think gross profit was more in line. And so just maybe just help us understand some of the dynamics on the gross profit line this quarter? And then just any comment on attached products and maybe an updated timeline? Would you expect to be with attached and ancillary revenue, maybe as a percent of the mix by the end of the year?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Jason, I'll take that first part and then hand it over. With respect to how we ended up Q4, first of all, we feel really good about how we ended the year. Delivery revenue well beyond expectations to be $650 million and landed contribution margin and EBITDA in line with our guidance. What you saw in the gross margin line and the contribution margin and then down to the EBITDA line is that we made the decision to intentionally clear more inventory to free up that systems capacity we talked about coming out of Q3, having a lot of homes on hand, wanting to make sure that we did not degrade the customer experience, and then we met our overall financial targets for the quarter, which we did. And then we're set up very well to walk into Q1 with a healthy book of inventory and our systems capacity back in line where we want to be. I'll hand it over to Andrew now to talk about Part 2.

Andrew Low Ah Kee, President

Sure. Jason, on adjacent services, our title business continued to perform exceptionally well. We've grown it to become one of the largest title agencies in the country. On buyer and mortgage, those offerings are growing quickly, but they're still small compared to our core business, which is now a run rate of over $15 billion. Taking a step back, our approach to delivering on our long-term goals for services is to focus first on the consumer experience, then to scale it to all markets and then to maximize margins. We're on the first step, which is building the best experience in the market and seamlessly integrating it with the rest of Opendoor. We're seeing some positive signals. Our buyer NPS is currently 60, and we're increasing awareness in a few targeted markets. Additionally, in the fourth quarter, as you know, we acquired RedDoor. We believe it is a best-in-class mortgage experience, and we expect it to launch later in the first half. We believe this approach of focusing on customer experience where we scale is the right one to deliver on our long-term goal of increasing contribution margin from 4% to 6% to the high single digits.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Ng from Goldman Sachs.

Michael Ng, Analyst

Just two, if I could. First, based on the strong Q1 guidance for EBITDA and the commentary around adjusted OpEx, it sounds like there's an implied improvement in gross margin sequentially. I was just wondering if you could talk a little more about that and what's driving that implied gross margin improvement? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Michael, yes, you're exactly right. With respect to what we guided to for Q1 relative to EBITDA and then the OpEx guide we gave, we are seeing sequential improvement in contribution margins in Q1. We look to manage, as you know, that 4% to 6% guardrail on an annual basis, but we'll be well within that for the first quarter.

Michael Ng, Analyst

Great. And then I was just wondering if you could talk a little more about the $8 billion revenue outlook for the first half. I guess what does that imply for purchases in the first quarter? Is that moderating? And how does the current macroeconomic outlook affect that, if at all?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Yes, I'm happy to address that. So what we're seeing right now is a very healthy, robust housing market and what's implied within our Q1 guide is that we will continue. We're seeing incredible demand for our homes and a strong sell-through rate. We want to give people a little bit of context about the potential shape for the first half of the year. So excellent revenue in another quarter, a really good record revenue in Q1. We may pull a little bit of revenue from Q2 into Q1, and that's really what we're trying to indicate with the $8 billion guide. Year-over-year, still fantastic growth, up over 200% year-over-year for both quarters. So that's what we're trying to indicate with the first half guide.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Edward Yruma from KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Edward Yruma, Analyst

I guess first, impressive that I think you said that 30% of transactions are driven by repeat. I just want to understand the stick a little bit more, I guess, that's pretty surprising given the relative use of the business. And kind of where do you think that reengaged number could go to over time? And then as a follow-up, just wanted to understand, I know Opendoor Complete will be a big focus in the medium term. I guess what level of investment is still required within that business? Or do you feel like it's kind of all set?

Eric Wu, CEO

Thanks, Ed. I'll take the first part, and I'll pass to Andrew for the second part. One of the things that we've been surprised by is our ability to reengage previously registered homeowners. Historically, we haven't had that large of a pool. As we've grown the offering for people that are interested in understanding what their home is worth and what they can unlock with Opendoor, we've been able to reengage that pool of customers through the years and then convert them into sellers. We see that pattern pulling forward into the future, where our current pool of customers who haven't sold with us and have not sold in the market will be potential sellers for us to tap into in quarters and years to come. I'll have Andrew speak to Opendoor Complete.

Andrew Low Ah Kee, President

Sure. And just taking a step back, we just launched Opendoor Complete in November. We launched Complete with the belief that we could help the two-thirds of our sellers who are also buying with their journey. Opendoor Complete brings together selling and buying into that one seamless experience. We're excited by the early signals. It's still early days, and we're focused right now on raising awareness amongst sellers in a few target markets. And the incremental investment associated with that is pretty small.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle from Bank of America.

Curtis Nagle, Analyst

Just wanted to go back to the commentary on gross margin and make sure I understand what drove the 7.3% rate. What was that due to clearing homes? Or just, yes, what drove, I guess, the sequential decline in the quarter relative to Q3? And I'm not sure I understood what the implication was for Q1; I think you talked to contribution margin. But do we expect that to go up in the first quarter?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Yes, I'm happy to take that, Curtis. So if we step back, when you think about the margin trajectory for 2021 and kind of what drove the trajectory, we've been very explicit that we had two large but temporary factors that were driving excess margin in the first half of the year. One was we came into the year with essentially no inventory, having kind of sold the inventory during COVID and rebuilding that back up. That was really good for margins, and we knew it would dissipate over the course of the 1.5 years, or kind of back to normal given a $6 billion inventory balance. The second part of that was the fact that as we came around our market, we came into the first part of the year, we deliberately made some conservative underwriting decisions relative to what was at the time a very high HPA, and that flowed into resales and realized margins. Again, that was relatively excessive relative to our 4% to 6% guardrail. It wasn't that we missed on gross margin; it was that we disclosed the trajectory we called for all year long. So that's Q4. Q1, what we're seeing is back to sequential contribution margin increases quarter-on-quarter, and that will flow through to also the gross margin.

Curtis Nagle, Analyst

Can you provide more specific information on the gross margin? Should it return to 8% or 9%, up from 7%? Any thoughts on that?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

We're not providing specific guidance on gross margin, but you can calculate it based on my EBITDA and add back accordingly. We feel confident about how the quarter is going to unfold. Ultimately, we are guiding towards an annual baseline contribution of 4% to 6%.

Curtis Nagle, Analyst

Okay. Fair enough. And then just as a follow-up, the commentary in terms of the interplay between Q1 and Q2, right? So maybe I guess, I always use the words a little pull forward. How many of that do you think could be related to people accelerating purchases ahead of rates and price appreciation still going up, I guess, on a declining second derivative, but still going up? So yes, how much do you think that could be a factor?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

What we're seeing is incredible demand for homes. There may be a little bit of what you said, which is people are looking to purchase in advance of the specter of rising mortgage rates. Ultimately, I think we're designed to respond to whatever environment we're working in, whether rates are going up or they're going down or they're neutral. This is more about just the shape of how the quarters are coming into and any commentary necessary about our ability to acquire homes or sell-through.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ygal Arounian from Wedbush.

Ygal Arounian, Analyst

First, I want to ask about the overall market, particularly regarding inventory. Specifically, I'm interested in how the limited inventory, not just Opendoor's, is affecting your business on the selling side, including the impact on prices. Additionally, how do you view acquisitions in a market with limited inventory? If inventory remains at record lows throughout the year, how will that influence your pricing strategy and the number of acquisitions? Presumably, selling homes would be easier in a tighter inventory environment. I'm curious about how these dynamics might play out for your company. I also have a follow-up question.

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Sure. I'll try to hit all of that, and you'll correct me where I miss something, Ygal, along the way. The first part of your question is how are we responding to the current housing environment and what are we seeing in terms of just overall macro for housing. Our outlook for housing for 2022 remains really robust. I mean rate increases notwithstanding. What we're seeing is all-time lows for supply. Inventory is as low as it has ever been for this time of the year, going back to like 1980 when Lennar started tracking it. And at the same time, we're seeing continued strong demand for homes. We're seeing that in the Q1 guidance numbers we just talked about; we're seeing in our clearance rates. So our forecast for the balance of the year is that and will continue to be very strong. That's on the resale side for us, as you think about what market we're selling into. The second part of your question was on the acquisition side. What I can say is we are not having issues with acquiring homes, and we actually don't see it as an issue going forward. The reason being consumers are coming to Opendoor because of what we offer, which is a superior alternative to the traditional listing process that's simple, certain and fast. At a time when it's really hard to buy your home, being able to do what we just talked about in Opendoor Complete, being able to marry both sides of this transaction, buy your home and sell your home at the same time and be that assurance on both sides of the transaction has been a really powerful thing for consumers. We think that's fueling our business too.

Eric Wu, CEO

The last thing I'd add to that is we see the growth with sellers and the number of customers coming to Opendoor for our solutions as an indication of the strength of our product market fit. The alternatives are to list and sell, and that clearly is not a challenge, but people are still choosing Opendoor because of what we're providing in market.

Ygal Arounian, Analyst

Got it. Okay. That's really helpful there. And then I wanted to touch on pricing. You guys called out a couple of times in the call and in the investor letter, your breakthroughs and your pricing processes and improvements there. Just maybe a quick two-parter there. Has the exit of Zillow helped you on your pricing at all? And then on the improvements, could we think about that as potentially over time giving you the ability to drive better profitability than what you've talked about?

Eric Wu, CEO

Yes, it's a good question. We know that market leadership will be very beneficial to the business in the short term and long term. In terms of competitors coming in and out of the market, it hasn't modified our plan. And again, we've built a pricing advantage over the course of eight years through both better modeling and collecting local data throughout this period. Our pricing continues to improve, and it will compound over time as we process more homes, analyze more homes and resell more homes. And that's not a function of whether there's competition or not.

Ygal Arounian, Analyst

Okay. And potentially more better margins than we've talked about as you improve there? Or is that kind of built into the way you've talked about it?

Eric Wu, CEO

We view it as it gives us optionality. It enables us to either capture the improvements as contribution margin or we can improve our pricing with consumers, which fuels additional growth. We view both the pricing improvements as well as operational gains with scale economies as optionality to either drive more contribution margin or drive more growth.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Tomasello from KBW.

Ryan Tomasello, Analyst

In terms of your buybox expansion, where do you think the 60% can go, say, over the next year and longer term? And then as a follow-up to that, in the shareholder letter, you highlighted your intent to expand capabilities beyond single-family, and I was hoping you could elaborate on what opportunities that opens up for Opendoor and the unique considerations that there would be in terms of customer acquisition there and underwriting that different product?

Andrew Low Ah Kee, President

So Ryan, Andrew here. Sixty percent couldn't be more. I would start by saying 60% is already higher than many thought we might ever be able to cover; it's decidedly not niche. In principle, we should be able to cover the entire market. In practical terms, the effort to cover the range of tail scenarios that might exist out there aren't likely to be worth it. But certainly, we believe there's room to continue to grow. And then in terms of expanding the coverage more broadly, condos, townhomes, and other types of properties again, we believe our investments in our pricing capability and the sophistication we've got there will enable us to continue to grow and expand our market coverage.

Ryan Tomasello, Analyst

And then maybe you can elaborate on the benefits of the various partnerships you have for customer acquisition, particularly with homebuilders. Is that driving a material portion of your volume today? And are there additional partnerships you could explore for larger customer acquisition funnels, perhaps with financial institutions or maybe even brokerages that could fit into the model?

Eric Wu, CEO

Yes. It's Eric. We view some of these parts as extremely beneficial to both partners and consumers. An example of homebuilders, which does drive substantial volume for the business, is a win-win-win. The homebuilder gets certainty of execution. The consumer oftentimes is looking to buy a new build, contingent on selling the current home. We're able to help the homebuilder continue with the build and finish the home for the consumer with certainty they will be funded, and the consumer is able to make an offer on that new build without a contingency. Conversely, we are able to acquire inventory, which then fuels our flywheel. We really love the win-win-win situation with homebuilders. We do view many other partners we have in the pipeline and that are also live as a win-win-win situation. In terms of where we can go from here, I believe that every single homeowner in the U.S. wants to start their journey with an Opendoor offer. They want to understand how much their home is worth and the equity they have in their home, and how to move seamlessly. So wherever the customer is, we will be looking to explore partnerships there. Again, in our march to expand to every single homeowner in the U.S.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Ages from Berenberg.

Justin Ages, Analyst

I'm just hoping you can expand upon the investments that you're making and the proprietary tool that you called out, seeing as you mentioned that they were improving your ability to get houses back on the market?

Andrew Low Ah Kee, President

Sure. Our investments in our technology and operations platform is core to our ability to grow and scale and serve every customer across the country, as Eric just called out. You're seeing us invest in capabilities like virtualization, centralization, and externalization to actually let us grow and ramp capacity more quickly. What do those words actually mean? Virtualization means the ability to do something by video, which means the consumer may actually be able to do it themselves and self-serve via video. Centralization, on the other hand, lets us take work out of the field and bring it to central teams, which lets us more agilely manage capacity across our now footprint of 45 different markets. Externalization lets us use both our own teammates in talent as well as third parties to flex capacity to accommodate demand when we see surges. Those are just some examples of the investments we're making in our platform that we believe we're able to uniquely make, given our market leadership and scale.

Justin Ages, Analyst

No, that's helpful. I appreciate the color. And then just one more, if I could, on competition. You mentioned that the exit of Zillow hasn't seen really impacts of that. But in terms of other competitors in the markets where you overlap, are you finding that there's a lot of bidding for the same house given the buybox is relatively the same? Or are the markets still deep enough where you're not really bumping shoulders just yet?

Eric Wu, CEO

I'm not sure I'd look at it that way. Again, this is Eric. Competition has not impeded our growth, and we do define our competition as the 99% of transactions that are offline. The other thing I would lean on is that we have developed some robust and deep capabilities in pricing and operations that enable us to be very competitive in markets we're in and be the market leader and grow much faster with a far better cost structure. The point I want to make is that our targets are aimed at the 99% of transactions that are offline, and no one is working as hard as us to build a digital, integrated, and seamless consumer experience. We remain focused on that.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McKeveny from Zelman & Associates.

Ryan McKeveny, Analyst

Congrats on the progress and results this year. So high level one here. So my sense is there's a couple, what I'll call high-level overlays of uncertainty that investors are thinking through. And these would be, one, the impact of rising rates on the business, maybe not in terms of the availability of financing, as you talked about. What about in terms of inventory financing costs? And maybe also in relation to just affordability, the potential impact to sales and pricing? And then the second area is just inventory impairment risk. So can you talk a little about how you're managing the interest rate risk to the business? And maybe even late 2018 is a decent example where rates rose, and housing slowed. So curious how the business fared at that time? And then if you could talk about the process of just managing the inventory risk. And on that second point, I'm sorry, I know this is long, is there a normal level of impairments as a percent of inventory that we should think is relatively normal, considering some homes will always be at kind of the tail end of things? Any thoughts on those would be great.

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Ryan, I'll do my best to remember all that, but you'll keep me honest as I go through it. The first part of that interest rates and the impact to us headline is that we do expect rate increases, but we expect the impact to our P&L to be quite manageable. We're modeling an increase in our unit costs at approximately 20 to 30 basis points over the course of the year, and that's a relatively small impact to our overall cost structure on a per home basis. Moreover, we embed those costs in our offers, and so we'll look to pass it on to the consumer. There are assumptions that go into that guidance, including how to clear inventory turns over the course of the year. That's layering the current LIBOR curve and has some expectation for how our facilities come in over time, fixed versus floating. But overall, headline for us is we expect interest rate increases to be manageable. That was part one of your question. Part two was around, I believe, just the overall housing market in the sector for leasing rates or…

Ryan McKeveny, Analyst

Yes. Second question or maybe the fourth question here, in terms of the market coverage, so you had significant expansion in ‘21, you expect more expansion in ‘22. Can you maybe just talk about the benefits of that geographic diversification? And as we think about the concentration of the portfolio, where are the concentrations the greatest? Are they at desired levels? And maybe how does the new market expansion potentially add some geographic diversification?

Carrie Wheeler, CFO

Yes. I mean, I think that falls within the risk management bucket, as you said. One of the beauties is that the continued expansion in terms of scale and a number of markets is the benefits of diversification relative to overall risk management. We really do manage the portfolio on an aggregate basis across all our markets. We see the benefits of diversification by geography, by home types, and by what may be going on in an individual market when we can weave it across 45 and counting.

Operator, Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Eric Wu, Chief Executive Officer.

Eric Wu, CEO

Thanks. In closing, I just want to say that we're extremely proud of the results we delivered in 2021 across all our key metrics. I want to personally thank our teammates who put in the hard work to build our products and delight our customers. For our shareholders, we are heads down innovating for consumers and building the best business, and we are well on our way to fulfilling our mission. Thank you for joining.

Operator, Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and have a wonderful day. You may all disconnect.