A former Australian pop star with three top ten global hits is aiming to shake up the property market with an app aimed at simplifying the often complicated process of buying and selling a home.
With a music career spanning over a decade, Shaneal Funk – or Shaneal Sharma in the business world – has gone from rubbing shoulders with Madonna to working with the likes of Grammy award-winning artist and Kanye West affiliate, Malik Yousef, and producing for multi-platinum Australian recording artist Timomatic.
However, he has spent the last few years working alongside a team of coders out of his Brisbane home to bring his prop tech app called Houseroo to life.
The app is designed to bring all of the key stakeholders involved in a property transaction from conveyancers, real estate agents to building inspectors, insurers and lenders onto one platform, with the ability to track and manage the process in real-time right through to settlement.
Having bought and sold eleven properties of his own, Sharma says he believes the opaque and fragmented nature of the industry isn’t working as well as it could in the age of constant online connectivity.
“It’s still the same confusing, stressful, complicated and disconnected experience because there are so many moving parts,” he says.
“Every day, thousands of property sales fall through simply because someone doesn’t know about a potentially deal-breaking issue. Critical dates and correspondence constantly go unnoticed.
“And when they do, the buyer loses their dream home, the seller loses the sale, the agent loses their commission, and the conveyancer has to chase partial payment. Usually because of something as trivial as a missed call or lost email.”
Houseroo distils the process into a visual timeline and guides a user through the buying and selling journey. Buyers, sellers, agents and conveyancers can all see the exact status of the transaction in real-time and all concerned parties are warned immediately with a push notification to their smartphone if something needs attention before it becomes a problem.
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