And while Zillow's debacle marked the beginning of the end of the latest housing bubble, we would have thought that comparable peer roboflipping companies would have learned their lesson and either changed the parameters of the purchases and sales to generate greater profits into this housing recession(instead of merely volume) or quietly exited the business altogether. Well, we would have been dead wrong, because today we learned that yet another robo home-flipper has blown up.

According to Bloomberg, recent startup darling Opendoor, which it describes as "a pioneer of a data-driven spin on home-flipping known as iBuying", i.e., a robo-flipper which has been optimized not for profit but volume selling thousands of homes in a typical month, lost money on 42% of its transactions in August, according to research from YipitData. Opendoor's performance —as measured by the prices at which it bought and sold properties — was even worse in key markets such as Los Angeles, where the company lost money on 55% of sales, and Phoenix, where the share was 76%. It's almost as if those indicative prices you see on Zillow and OpenDoor are dead wrong.