I believe they are trying to fundamentally change the market.

For a fee (I guess it's 1-6% on top of the typical 4-6% commission?), Opendoor removes the pricing (list price), appraisal and financing risk and let's the seller unlock the value of the house in a fraction of the time. On top of that, and unlike the current process, if I'm understanding correctly, they also make it explicit to the seller why their house is worth what it is. And I can't belabor that point enough: the reason the residential real estate market is so opaque is because of the uncertainty/inaccuracy around pricing. Realtors do their best to determine value, but there is a specific reason properties sell in 2 days (priced low) or 6 months (priced high) and it's strictly because of erroneous pricing (btw, this isn't true in SF, for instance, where agents intentionally price low to get bidding wars, but that is not the norm nationwide). We've reached this point where the data is largely available so that the historical method of picking a few "comps," licking your finger and seeing which way the wind's blowing will soon be a thing of the past and that's the crux of what OD is doing. If that means they're not fundamentally changing the market, I'd ask you to look into how property gets priced today by the two parties responsible for making sure the deal gets done (the broker/agent and the appraiser).

As for how the seller perceives things, if I tell a seller your home is worth X, and here's all the data supporting that--actually quantifying why your friend John's house down the block sold for 5% above what we're offering you--the seller is informed and can decide if they're willing to assume those risks I mentioned above to get a higher price than OD is offering. Assuming I have a house at the average US home price ($190k or so?), if you tell me that I can take OD's $186k "no risk" offer or wait it out and hopefully get the full 190k given all those risks mentioned above, I suspect many people would just take the 186 and move on. And either JD's in his own little reality distortion field (probably somewhat true) or he and their investors are actually seeing this work with the unit economics to back it up.

One last note in this horribly long comment: there is so much opportunity for economies of scale here with the pricing of items like marketing costs, inspections, repairs, appraisal costs--heck, even financing rates--that I suspect and probably hope in vain that over time OD will accept even lower fees. In some fantasy land I can imagine OD getting confident enough in their pricing that transactions end up costing the seller 2% (total, completely wiping away the need for a real estate commission on the sell side and once they merge/acquire Openlistings they'll drive down the buy-side commission rate as well). And of course if this ends up working at scale for OD every deep-pocketed institution will create divisions that do this as well, which will just mean that OD is the first of many new-age residential real estate broker (call them a market maker or REIT if you like that label better, but everyone will sell in this more liquid, transparent way in the future... how long will that take? Well, if there's another housing bubble right now, all bets are off, but otherwise this could happen relatively quickly).