The Uber of Home Management

September 10th, 2021

Imagine if managing your home were as easy as ordering an Uber.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly book any repair, service, or maintenance for things in your home without browsing through several pages or contacting multiple people? Let’s compare that ‘Uberesque’ nirvana to how we currently manage properties and see how convoluted it can get.

As an example, if you have a problem with your fuse box, or perhaps you want to install additional sockets in a new area (i.e. a garage converted to a home office), you might need to know a few things before you can even start looking for an electrician:

- The type, make, and model of the fusebox
- The technology used i.e. fuses or RCD switches
- The last time the fuse box was issued an electrical certificate
- Potential routing behind walls (wiring, plumbing, studs)
- Distance of new socket installations from the fusebox
- Etc...

If you don’t know this information or don't have it at hand, you will have to book a separate callout visit so the electrician can find out for themselves. This accounts for 1 in 3 trips to properties — just for sighting issues and not addressing them.

That is roughly a third of expenditure (time, costs, CO2 emissions) spent due to lack of information accessibility. And even if you did have that information, you’d still need to spend time finding and contacting the right-relevant vendors or providers to do the work.

Can you imagine having to manually identify and communicate your location to different taxi drivers, whose contact details you would have to find yourself until you found someone close to you who is also available to pick you up? Oh wait for a second, that’s how private hire worked before Uber.

A Proposed Way Forward

We suggest an app that can identify, store and communicate data and information about your property so you can easily access it should you need to share it with a vendor, provider, or repair person. This is how we envision it to work;

1. All the different objects, items, appliances, and documents of your home would be registered onto a digital homeowner app (ideally before handover) that you can then easily access and update wherever relevant.

2. The homeowner, or managing agent, could then use the app to help identify and log new things within the home without having to browse through multiple pages or contact manufacturers to find the details.

3. Should something go wrong with anything in your apartment/house, you simply locate it within the app and it will immediately show you the right-relevant vendors, providers, and/or repair persons near you — providing you with instant quotes, availability dates, and further info.

4. Once you select a vendor, provider, and/or repair person, you can use the app (much like a home manual) to share information about the particular thing in your home that needs attention and allow them to do the rest. Eliminating the need for an on-site visit just for sighting.

5. This is about reducing the friction of getting work done within the home. How often does something remain unaddressed simply because it is too inconvenient to attend to it? We believe managing your home should be as easy as ordering an Uber!

What do you think?

If you are a property expert, vendor, and/or repair person and wish to sell your service from the platform, get in touch to become an early adopter at [email protected]

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