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HomeBinder is a centralized home management solution.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Homebuyers, agents and preferred partners
Top selling points:
- Transaction managements integrations
- Home-value focused
- Sharp, consumer-first UI
- Seller report
Top concern:
HomeBinder isn’t a new concept, and thus, it faces stiff competition in the space of digital home oversight. Add it to your list of post-close recommendations for buyers.
What you should know
HomeBinder is a home management app that assists owners in knowing the pulse of everything going on in and around their property. It centers its pitch heavily on maintaining home value and connecting to a local network of professionals.
Agents can realize value from recommending it to clients and integrating their network of local vendors, either manually or from Home Binder’s growing list of homeowner-added professionals. It’s available throughout the United States and Canada.
I could have really used HomeBinder’s closing document compendium feature recently.
Applying for any sort of financial instrument based on your home’s equity is a nightmare from which Freddy Krueger would retreat in a sobbing mess, partly because of the unreasonably burdensome document retrieval it demands, but more so from the inability of the people on the other end to keep track of what you sent them. (But I digress.)
HomeBinder has a system for collecting all of the closing documents and requisite loan data shortly after closing. In turn, that data becomes the benchmark for the software’s monitoring of home value, refinance recommendations and home improvement ROI tracking.
Users can upload appliance pics and documentation, room-by-room details, like color palettes and finishes, as well as lists of to-do’s and pending projects for each.
The Home Seller report can be compared to, as many others in this milieu do, to a Carfax for the home. HomeBinder also uses the Ancestry.com analogy, an apt one when it comes to conjoining home value with its history of upkeep. It helps to know where the previous owners come from in terms of home care.
In fact, a major underpinning of the company’s mission is to make asking for such detailed home history reports commonplace. It’s a worthy one, for sure.
However, I think HomeBinder makes it too easy for homeowners to think that a new appliance immediately means a house is worth more or that a paint refresh will return 100 percent of what it cost to do. Plunk is similar, but I feel does a better job of pulling in live market data.
But this major misconception is largely the fault of the industry’s overzealous push that homes are more financial investment than a lifestyle choice. Reality television isn’t exactly innocent on this front, either.
Thus, I pin no blame on software like HomeBinder, which by the way, I think is very well done and worth being an active part of homeownership.
I feel it’s encouraging home care from the perspective of potential ROI, not its intrinsic value to simply being safe and comfortable. Plus, its Mortgage Coach partnership suggests it’s heading faster in that direction.
But, as a software product? Home Binder excels. Its user interface is sharp and consistent with smart integrations for agents, such as BrokerMint and dotloop, and users can easily sort functionality with clear categorization of projects, maintenance tasks, home pro access, and so forth.
So yeah, overall, HomeBinder is a worthy competitor, if not at the top, of this software space.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
