Hazardous Models and Risk Mitigation in Real Estate

Hazard / survival modeling is often under-applied given its broad use cases. For example, churn prediction is often posed as a classification problem (did churn or not), when the time component is often given short shrift (when, if ever did the churn happen?) We hope to argue that hazard modeling is a better fit for these types of problems; spread general awareness of survival modeling, metrics, and data censoring; and describe how Opendoor uses these models to estimate our holding times for homes and mitigate risk, detailing scalability and other technical challenges we had to overcome.