A month after announcing it would be shutting down its Zillow Offers iBuying program, Zillow Group has already decided the fate of more than half the homes it intends to unload before the program draws to a complete close, the company announced Thursday.
Zillow also announced that the company would buy back up to $750 million of its own Class A common stock, Class C capital stock or a combination of both.
Zillow announced a pause in buying new homes in mid-October. The company has previously said it had 9,790 homes in its inventory at the end of September and it was under contract to buy another 8,172 homes, bringing the total number of homes the company would need to dispose of to about 18,000.
On Thursday, the company said it had “made significant progress in winding down Zillow Offers inventory and has sold, is under contract to sell or has reached agreement on disposition terms” for more than half of those 18,000 or so homes.
“We are pleased with the progress of our wind-down efforts and recognize that no longer operating Zillow Offers will allow us to have a more capital-efficient balance sheet and business moving forward,” said Zillow Group co-founder and CEO Rich Barton in a statement.
“With that, we see today as an opportune time to announce a share repurchase program and reduce the cash balance we built up to support Zillow Offers.”
In mid-November, news outlets reported that the Seattle-based listing giant had struck an agreement to sell 2,000 of its homes to New York City investment firm Pretium Partners, which has a portfolio of 70,000 single-family home rentals across 20 markets. On Thursday, a Zillow spokesperson told Inman that none of the other 7,000-plus homes dealt with so far were sold to institutional investors but rather “sold traditionally,” except for 400 whose contracts Zillow canceled earlier this week.
In a subsequent statement on Friday, Zillow clarified that some of the homes “sold traditionally” were sold to…