Home-in

The app promises a lot, making the home buying experience easy and overall providing support throughout the whole process. In reality, it’s far from that. • The app itself is clunky, often getting stuck on screens, needing to be forced closed and reopened. It is clearly lacking development and not up to the standard you would think. • Communicating with the parties you need to us extremely frustrating. The only way to contact anyone is to send a generic message to your “buying assistant” through the app and waiting for a reply. You have no direct link to your conveyancer, and no phone number to call and speak to a human. • The process through the app actually felt more clunky and more onerous than simply going through these steps myself. For someone who has never purchased before, I can see the appeal, however for most, the app actually complicated and slows down the process.

Home-In makes the process of buying (namely conveyancing) super easy. I’ve had a contract negotiation done in the palm of my hand and the legal team I was paired with explained things super easy - I just clicked yes or no to things they found in the contract. I actually enjoyed opening up this app to see how the contract negotiation was going on. I never thought I’d say that having gone through the ‘old school’ way in the last. Also, the six hour turnaround time on contract reviews gave me confidence to wait until late in a home buying process to reach out, saving time and money.

Bottom line, my home-in experience was fine, but I wouldn’t use it again. Pros: * Mostly very easy * Never had to speak to anyone * No issues arose during settlement * Cheap (heavily discounted because I was using CBA for my loan, and they own the app) * Checklists! Cons: * Only two complimentary contract reviews, and they force you to agree to use them for settlement before they’ll provide those (and if you don’t eventually settle through them, they’ll retroactively charge for those contract reviews) * Very impersonal * Little/poor actual communication during the process * Document download/upload process was a little difficult, and I had to transfer things to a PC at one point so I could fill it out * Feels a bit weird writing the home-in details into documents at the real estate agent This was my second experience purchasing property and although the whole process went fine, I had a much better/easier experience the first time around (ie without home-in), and felt more valued as a client. Without the discount it also would have been more expensive than what I paid last time, and I got less for it. I wouldn’t recommend this app to anyone, but I would tell them about it, especially if they were interested in a good deal (due to the huge discount when also getting a CBA loan).