These reports outlined how the different companies performed during the first three months of this year, and for the most part they were upbeat.
Maybe it was the number of times the word “headwinds” came up during calls with investors.
Zillow, for example, managed to reverse its catastrophic losses from one quarter earlier and actually turn a profit of $16 million.
Keller Williams — which is not a public company and doesn’t release numbers on revenue and profitability — revealed that its agents did $108.4 billion in agent sales volume in the first quarter of 2022, a 10.5 percent year-over-year increase.
And that was apparently good enough for investors, because Redfin’s shares jumped nearly 10 percent the day after the earnings report came out.
Last fall, Zillow — then the second largest iBuyer after Opendoor — announced that it was getting out of the cash offer business.
Despite all of this good news, it was hard not to notice what seemed like warning signs in all of these earnings reports.
Other companies alluded to the concept, and in the end the word “headwinds” appears in a large majority of earnings stories Inman published over the last week.
— parent to Realtor.com and itself a subsidiary of News Corp — saw its revenue increase during the first three months of the year.
Though some companies including Redfin and eXp saw their share prices jump by meaningful percentages, others such as Offerpad and Realogy saw much more modest gains following their reports.
Part of what’s going on may just be that the market generally has been hammered lately.