Introducing The Better Homes Guide
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Considering buying an apartment and finding it complicated?
The team at Local Peoples have developed a guide to empower home buyers looking at off-the-plan apartments. We sat down with Local Peoples founder, Giuseppe Demaio, to discuss our new Better Homes Guide and how it can transform the way you purchase a home.
What is the Better Homes Guide?
GD: The Better Homes Guide is a digital product that supports people throughout the complicated and difficult process of purchasing a new home – with a focus on off-the-plan housing. It highlights the right questions to ask at the right time so future homeowners can feel confident that they have made a decision that will meet their needs.
Why did Local Peoples choose to develop this?
GD: The guide was inspired by a couple of experiences. Having co-founded a deliberative residential developer, Assemble and worked in this space for over a decade, it became quite obvious to us how difficult making a great informed buying decision off-the-plan really is.
The lack of consistency is particularly evident. Consider the experience for example when you’re buying a new car. There are a variety of benchmarks around engine power and safety ratings that you can compare and contrast. With housing, there is no consistent way to compare different opportunities.
So it comes down to looking at brochures, having a myriad of conversations, visiting display suites, and ultimately piecing that knowledge together.
The Better Homes Guide is designed to help people gather relevant information and ask the most important questions. The guide itself is designed with our experience of becoming a B Corp in mind. The process involved measuring a whole range of different factors in regards to processes, frameworks and impact.
So we took some of those learnings and impact-measurement ideas into developing this service too.
When it comes to buying an apartment, there is a lot to consider. What are some things that people might otherwise miss?
GD: There are just so many different elements to consider; from the neighbourhood, to the building to the shared communal facilities, it is difficult to know where to begin.
For instance, an element we think is really important is sustainability. So the Better Homes Guide will help you gather information around the environmental impact of your apartment. These factors can affect your heating and cooling bills quite significantly – saving you up to $500 per annum. So over the life of a loan, you’re talking really significant amounts of money.
That’s just one example.
There are also the pragmatic aspects of purchasing a home that the Better Homes Guides helps bring clarity around. Like when would you engage conveyancing lawyers to have your contracts looked at? How much stamp duty would one have to pay? When would you start considering financing?
We believe that this tool can help you step through the various stages of the home ownership journey.
What have you learnt since developing the guide?
GD: We’ve learnt many things!
We already knew how complicated the decision making process was, but this has become more obvious as we continue developing the guide. That’s why we want the guide to be simple to use while honouring the complexity of the decision.
That is because moving forward, affordable and sustainable home ownership will remain a very real problem for so many people. And as cities such as Melbourne continue to densify at such a rapid rate, we will need to maintain our cities by building and responding for more density.
Right now, Melbourne has 4-5% of medium density housing; Sydney 11-12%; London 20%; Hong Kong 30%. We are a very low density city, and at Local Peoples we believe that densified housing developed in a thoughtful and positive way will allow apartment living to become a viable option for people well into the future.
Why is it important for us to think critically about the future of housing?
GD: Cities are becoming denser, and the way we think about them in design will have a big impact on a person’s quality of life. I believe there are ways to make neighbourhoods and cities more adaptable and we’ve put a lot of thought into that here at Local Peoples with our placemaking and sustainable cities research.
I think it’s also really important for people who are ultimately purchasing homes to be better educated so that they can ask the right questions. That’s because housing developers will create what people ask for. Regulations – like the Future Homes Project that DELWP have launched – are often the stick in this scenario. But the market can be the carrot that creates sustainable change.
If people ask for quality, sustainable dwellings and are willing to value that – developers will always deliver them.
That is the bigger mission behind the Better Homes Guide – we want to design healthy, resilient and resourceful communities. The Better Homes Guide can be the way to support market led system change and improve higher density living. It has the potential to facilitate trust and confidence between purchasers and developers. If the guide can create that accountability and transparency, we will have gone a long way to addressing some of the issues in the space.
It’s often not that much more difficult or costly to develop really great housing in the beginning, but it is difficult and often impossible to change that down the track.
Considering off-the-plan apartments in your house-hunt?
We are looking for people to test the Better Homes Guide for us.
