Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 2)

Min Alexander: Along the way, you realize that real estate is one of the most un-innovative spaces. When you think about early 1998 dot com burst, it did open our society and economy to the power of technology. Why is it that all of these spaces were influenced by technology like logistics and computer science, and web marketplaces, but not real estate? That started a lot of my thoughts around so many problems. It’s all so fragmented also.

Then in 2012, I was recruited by Alta Sources Portfolio Solutions as the Head of Real Estate Services. This gave me my first opportunity to create processes and technology at scale. At that time, we were serving institutional owners of single-family residential real estate. In my free time, I started working on this business model. This was in 2014.

The business model was called Homeworks. I had a couple of developers from Bangalore just freelancing. It was a portal like Amazon where you can order your home service. That was the seed of what we are building today. It wasn’t a clear path. For a lot of folks in the business, there are golden handcuffs that come with a very stable path where you know that your future is fairly defined. It took me a bit of time to have the courage to take the risk. Early last year after a lot of thought, the leap to PunchList happened.

Sramana Mitra: What is PunchList?

Min Alexander: We are building the future Amazon for home services and related products. We are able to do this because we have home inspection data in meaningful volume at scale nationally. We work with homeowners and inspection partners. We have a five-year data partnership with Pillar To Post, which is North America’s largest home inspection provider.

In a transaction, a buyer or seller orders a home inspection. You get 20 items that you might need to be fixed before you’re ready to close the deal. We extract that data. Instead of the 50 to 60 pages of an inspector’s report that can be cumbersome, we create a super-digested template. In two pages, we’re giving you a digest of what you should focus on. You’ve got high risks that you should really look at first. Then we’ll break it out by cost and line item for the materials.

We are fully integrated with Home Depot’s SKU catalog. Of course, we are able to source real-time pricing. Then you have systems issues like the water heater being seven years old. Then we move down to functional and cosmetic issues so that any homeowner or buyer can come to an agreement, based on data, to make sure that the transaction can take place easily. We provide the service. We schedule out all of the work that needs to be done. It’s delivered as an online shopping cart experience. Then we complete the work at a field level.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Min Alexander: Our power users are our brokers. I’m a late-stage co-founder. Earlier, it was more of a franchise model of handyman services that were serving brokers. There has been a lot of technology to displace the broker industry. For us, it’s about empowering our stakeholders, inspection partners, and brokers.

Right now, we have about 150,000 local and regional agreements with broker partners. They bring us into a transaction. We save them time and effort. If we’re not assisting, that work of grading those repair items falls on the broker. Then they have to tap into their network and say, “I’m going to need a handyman for these five items. I’ll have to compare and create separate appointments.” You can imagine two to three weeks to get an estimate and then compare bids.

Not all estimates are apples to apples. The way our industry works is still fragmented and non-standardized. What we’re able to do is a partner with brokers. NAR is a new commercial partnership that we just announced. We are the official estimation and repair partner for the 1.5 million NAR members. That’s a really important new partnership for us.

Our revenue model is based on the work. Based on the actual repair and renovation, we are able to monetize that by matching the work for the pro contractor. We vet, license check, and background check to make sure that they’re qualified to do the work. We pay the contractor and the homeowner will pay us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander
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