Opendoor Layoffs: 250 Jobs Move from India to the US

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The San Francisco real estate startup Opendoor cut its 250 jobs in India and closed its local offices to move all the work back to the US.

Opendoor’s Layoffs Explained: Moving Back to US

Opendoor is a real estate technology company that lets homeowners sell their homes directly to Opendoor for cash, skipping the traditional process of listing, showing, and negotiating with buyers. The company buys the home, makes repairs if needed, and resells it. 

It's a good idea on paper, but a tough business in practice. Home prices and interest rates move constantly, and Opendoor has to buy homes at the right price to make money when it resells them.  So, it all depends on what’s happening in the US

That’s why Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian decided to completely shut down their operations in the US.

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Around 250 people lost their jobs, and the offices that were open for just 2 years are now gone. Jobs are relocated back to the US under their Opendoor 2.0 strategy.

CEO specifically thanks the India team and says they would recommend them to other employers.

The core reason given for the layoffs is that Opendoor's customers are located in the United States, so the company believes operational work should be done closer to those customers. 

In the past, the India team handled many manual processes across different systems. However, over time, Opendoor has simplified and combined those systems into a more unified platform. 

At the same time, it has built smaller teams in the United States that are described as AI native, meaning they use AI as a key part of their daily work. Because of these changes, the company says it no longer needs a large operations workforce in India.

Overall, the plan is to make Opendoor a smaller company by headcount but a larger company by impact. 

For affected employees, Opendoor says it will provide severance pay and other transition resources. But good severance doesn't change the reality for 250 people who now have to find new work. 

Is This About AI or Business Struggles?

Opendoor has been cutting headcount broadly for years, and the India exit may say as much about its own struggles as it does about the future of AI and offshore work. 

Opendoor employed 1,042 people globally at the end of last year, compared with 1,470 a year earlier. Its non-U.S. workforce alone dropped from 342 employees at the end of 2024 to 184 by the end of 2025, well before this week's announcement.

So Opendoor was already shrinking. The India shutdown is the final chapter of a much longer story of downsizing.

Why Does This Matter to India?

India isn't just a country where some companies have offices. It is the backbone of a massive global services industry.

These are dedicated offshore units that multinationals set up to handle everything from IT and finance to research and development.

For decades, the idea was that skilled labor in India costs less than in the U.S. or Europe, so companies could scale up operations cheaply by building teams there. AI is starting to challenge that equation by eliminating entire categories of work.

While 250 jobs is a relatively small number in India's massive workforce, the symbolism of the move is much bigger than the actual layoffs.

What makes this case important is that Opendoor openly linked its restructuring to AI-enabled operations and simpler workflows. The company said it no longer needed a large operations team because systems had been unified and smaller AI-assisted teams could do more work. 

This raises questions about whether other companies might eventually follow a similar path.

People online supporting this decision also argued that having teams located in the same country as customers can improve communication, collaboration, and service quality. 

The Bottom Line

Opendoor's India exit is the kind of event that looks small in isolation and large in context. Hundreds of jobs in one mid-sized tech company is not, by itself, a seismic event. But the reasoning behind it is a preview of a structural shift that could affect millions of workers across India.

They may be one of the first companies to announce this kind of restructuring so openly. It is unlikely to be the last.