Introduction

We started Homey due to the recurrent pain that home buyers go through when buying a home in the UK.

Unlike buying other consumer items, home buying is a multi-party transaction with sellers, estate agents, mortgage brokers, lenders, buyer’s solicitors, seller’s solicitors, surveyors, insurers, and search companies.

Software was originally built for each stakeholder individually and was never designed to be collaborative — i.e. estate agents, mortgage brokers, and solicitors all have separate software, despite a huge overlap in the data and processes.

This leads to a painful customer journey since there is no information continuity between parties. The customer has to repeat and relay information between these different stakeholders, making their buying/ selling experience awful.

Homey allows all parties to work in one place in the home buying/ selling process. This reduces complexity, increases speed and increases revenue for parties in this process.

How will this happen?

The first stage to achieving this is to choose a specific and narrow process between parties and a customer that was committed to using our solution. This will give us the opportunity to build a solution that is immediately used and revenue generation, but also the opportunity to learn deeply about the subtle ways in which our clients are working to build further solutions from there.

Following success with an initial client, we would use the credibility we have gained from this to attract additional clients, each time learning deeply about their business. This will allow us to advance the platform by adding increasing functionality week-on-week to enable parties in the property industry to complete more of their processes within the platform.

From here we can use the revenue that we generate, to continue to develop features. These features will bring more revenue and allow us to onboard more customers. Each customer we attract to the platform will bring their clients/ customers/ partners to the platform, and through this network effect, we will establish ourselves within the industry.

How did Homey come about?

Say (CEO/Founder) decided to set up Homey after going through circa 25 property transactions, and realising the home-buying process was fundamentally broken. Technology has entered the process, but since solutions were focused in isolation for the different stakeholders that were part of the process, the tech itself now made the process convoluted with repetition of steps for the consumer.

2016-2021 was spent interviewing circa 500 stakeholders, and meeting with the different software providers in the space to understand the software landscape and motivations of the different parties. The summation from this resulted in a roadmap of features on how to roll out a platform to increasingly get stakeholders to adopt the platform and then bring consumers onto the platform.