Homeowning made easier
WHEN Liesel Mitchell was preparing to put her house on the market, it got her thinking.
Looking around the property, there was a list of jobs that had to be done to get it ‘‘up to scratch’’ for sale.
Those jobs had been there for some time but had never got around to being sorted, despite the best of intentions.
She decided a ‘‘landlord for homeowners’’ to take care of those jobs was needed, to help make home ownership easier.
Ms Mitchell’s sister suggested she talk to her friend Angela Howell, a successful businesswoman who had sold her multilingual marketing agency in the UK and moved back to New Zealand to ‘‘retire’’.
She was teaching management at the University of Otago and Ms Mitchell thought she might be a kind of mentor.
So she set up a meeting with Ms Howell, who immediately thought the idea had value and was keen to get involved.
Ms Howell described home ownership as the last bastion of nontechnology, with people still managing their homes ‘‘in heads and in shoe boxes’’.
So she quit her job in May and the pair have been working fulltime on HAPS — Home and Property Standards — since then, based in the shared workspace Petridish in Stafford St.
It was about using the power of technology to manage homes. HAPS was a service history and secure information storage for homes and property that enabled users to store and access their home and property information with any of their devices from secure cloud infrastructure.
An app managed ‘‘every aspect of your home’’: finances, utilities management, insurance and maintenance schedules.
It meant there was an online service history of ‘‘everything’’ which had the additional bonus of helping when it came to selling a property, as it assisted buyers with transparency.