Home as a Service approaches extend home delivery beyond an individual transaction — creating ongoing touchpoints, revenue opportunities, value and expanded potential for customers for life. During this event, we explored homegrown solutions and 3rd party service partnerships through expert snapshots and Q+A, as well as two separate working groups, where we mapped out the Why, What, How, and Impact (both Risks + Opportunities for Innovation) for each approach.
Mark Drennon of Oakwood Homes’ Shazam Home Services division dug deeply into the thought behind their homegrown solution for warranty, maintenance and handyman services, while Ben Johnson of Spruce, a provider of lifestyle services (housekeeping, chores + pet care) and Jorey Ramer of Super, a firm rethinking home warranty as an everything’s covered, tier-based subscription offering, shared their approaches to partnering with builders and developers to provide Home as a Service as a 3rd party.
Many thanks to our panelists for getting the ball rolling!
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE DISCUSSION
During our second session in the event, we broke into two working groups to create detailed roadmaps for how to think about launching either your own, homegrown HAAS solution or partnering with a 3rd party to deliver greater value to your dwellers. We looked at things from two sides — the builder or developer’s and the dwellers. Our speakers’ approaches created a starting point, with additional insights from other smart people and companies attending the event.
As you can imagine, some of What people are offering is the same, but Why and How they got there and risks + opportunities for innovation can vary greatly between an internal HAAS offering and one delivered with an outside firm. Full versions of both maps are available for registered attendees and Alliance members in good standing. Here are some of the highlights from what we heard. Check below for more details on getting the full story.
What are some of the business drivers behind Home as a Service?
- There’s a $300B complete home care market and a $100B warranty market
- Some want to reduce the negatives – examples include ensuring home performance pans out as intended (reducing risk from operator error), reducing risk in general (both hard costs + impact on reputation)
- Others want to increase the positives – examples include being more proactive and responsive to nipping issues in the bud, gaining customer + product insights, and creating customers for life
What are people offering? How do the financial models work for the provider + the dweller?
- Services mentioned include home inspections, warranty, maintenance, housekeeping, pet care, smart home management + handyman offerings
- Financial models also ranged from free trials to subscriptions and from buying blocks of hours to à la carte fixed price offerings
How do things play out in terms of operations, the engagement and delivery process, and the customer experience?
Insights varied widely in this area with the hometeam vs. the visiting team.
- For the provider – You really need to know whether it’s in your best interest to manage the service yourself. Arguments can be made – and were – on both sides of the equation. Some examples are no capital investment + vendor management on the 3rd party side vs. complete control + maintaining ownership of your relationship with the dweller on the homegrown side, among other things. Looking at your Why’s and Risks + Opportunities for Innovation will give you a clue as to which direction to go.
- For the customer – It’s much more straight forward. Examples include faster service (sometimes in minutes or hours virtually, and days versus weeks or months in person), predictable + reasonable costs and help at all levels – in some cases, no job is too small.
What are the risks + opportunities for innovation that could have a real impact on your business?
This came down to two types of things.
- Things to overcome / prepare for – Examples include the fact that the hands on nature and scale of service requires trust from your customer that you may or may not already have (mentioned on the homegrown side), bringing in a 3rd party can create confusion in who owns the relationship (mentioned as a potential threat to builders on the third party side and a “who’s on first” question from customers in the Oakwood/Shazam model), and the fact that data collection + info sharing can present new challenges (and opportunities) no matter whether the solution is yours or someone else’s
- Things to aspire to / shoot for – Examples include launching multifamily pilots to perfect your approach before single family, leveraging proven customer experience models of the auto industry, tailoring services by customer segment, and combining with smart home as a service conversations – just to name a few.
Member only RESOURCES
- This was a paid event and was free to Alliance members in good standing. All registrants received a follow up email from Betsy Scott (betsy@housinginnovation.org) on April 22, 2021, with a link to the full set of resources, including the maps, the final attendee profile book and a link to the expert snapshots and Q+A video archive.
- You can access these member-only resources, in the events section, here.