Pocket Punchlist: Our Thesis

Pocket Punchlist comes from a deeply personal experience - buying your first home. The experience is often described as a critical milestone in your life, yet we couldn't help feel like we were completely out of our wheelhouse. Despite lawyers, agents and more around us, we felt like all the advice and possible outcomes were highly dependent on a multitude of choices outside our control.

What we needed was proper buyers education: not about finances, lending and markets, but about how our home functioned and what to look out for. What's a sign of a bad flat roof? How much maintenance does an old boiler really need? In other words, the practical impacts this building would have on our everyday life going forward. Our roof ended up having consistent issues due to bad installation.

So we set out to investigate how others dealt with this situation. After 40 beta customers, we discovered there was a critical need to change the culture around home buying from a pure investment and lifestyle conversation, to a new build quality and maintenance conversation.

It all boils down to three problems:

Problem #1 - How am I supposed to know this stuff?

There's a general lack of homebuyers education out there. We are somehow meant to know how a building works but have never been taught. In most other big purchases you get a sense of what you are buying - but with properties, there is an incredible amount of information asymmetry. As one tester put it: “its all common sense that I don't have”. We have plenty of content and tools to help us find mortgages, analyze our finances and help find properties, but none to help us pick the right one.

Problem #2 - Availability of Expertise

Going back to roof issues - finding experts to even take a look was a struggle. Most roofers have too much business, don’t respond, or respond “next week”. We waited 2 months for a roofer to be able to make time to even look at the roof. There's a "gap of anxiety" between having a problem and finding someone with expertise to review it. The days of waiting can cause stress and even more potential damage.

Problem #3 - Our advisors are insufficient

Don’t get us wrong, there are many amazing advisors and partners in the buying process: realtors, inspectors, lenders, parents (see the "dad joins my building walkthrough trend on TikTok). But anyone with first hand buying experience can tell you that the quality and honesty of their information/opinions is highly variable. There are amazing realtors, and one's that just want to make a sale. First time homeowners are especially at risk - what do you really do with an inspection report if you’ve never seen one before? Many of our beta testers mentioned their inspector lacking basic communication skills and reports being so badly formatted they could barely get through 15+ pages of notes.

✨ There has to be another way.. ✨

Pocket Punchlist is our answer to the problems we, and many others, face when buying a home. We exist to provide a new path for home buyers to analyze their property, gain knowledge and start the right conversations. Don't just tour it, analyze it. We define the experience by two outcomes:

1. The buyer gains knowledge about their building features and functionality,

2. The buyer knows how to approach a conversation with their seller, agent or inspector.

These two outcomes allow us to make better decisions, improve financial outcomes and become better homebuyers. We hope this will radically improve buyers knowledge and information power towards sellers, inspectors and realtors. Using "on-the-ground" data - walkthrough photos, inspection reports, physical data - we're building the ultimate buyers platform with AI built in at every layer of the customer journey.