New York — Eric Wu made his first foray into real estate as a student at the University of Arizona, using scholarship money to make a down payment on a rental property. Now, he has taken his company public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
“The job for us is to help the customer move, and selling a home is one component,” Wu said. If the company can “build trust with the customer, they’ll want us to handle all the things involved in moving, and that opens up a wide range of services that we can monetise”. The company’s core business is to buy homes over the internet, make light repairs and put them back on the market. It expects to sell more than 37,000 homes in 2023, according to a filing, more than all but the two biggest US home builders sold in 2019.