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More than 24,000 California homes have been destroyed by fires since 2017. Some owners sold. Others opted for ready-made homes built in factories. Of those who chose to rebuild from scratch, many continue to manage headaches ranging from debris removal to insurance claims to hiring contractors, engineers and architects. Hicks’ relatively speedy return was helped by, a startup formed 18 months ago that is now managing the whole process for 150 fire victims.
“As we watched people try to navigate the process and the complexity of everything they had to do to build a home, we knew there were really simple technology tools that were used in other industries that could make the process simpler,” says Pechet, who serves as Homebound’s CEO. The changes, in theory at least, are long overdue. McKinsey has ranked construction as one of the country’s most Luddite industries, citing fragmentation and hard-to-measure financial benefits as barriers to scale. The fires not only created unprecedented demand but also cleared away some major hurdles to adoption.
“I got to see what was possible using technology to match people who wanted to do work with people who needed work done,” says Pechet. But when the fires struck, Pechet, who also owns a home in Napa that nearly burned in a fire, saw that making an introduction was not enough for people starting from zero.
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