Website Habito is trying to make home-buying easier

Daniel Hegarty tells Andy Martin that an entrepreneur should fix broken things – such as the mortgage market

Where do you go when you need a mortgage? A bank or building society? Or, as nearly everyone else does, do you check online first?

If you do a search, you’ll almost certainly come across Habito, voted by its customers as the Best Mortgage Broker of 2020. I tried it and it came up with three viable options after Barclays turned me down flat. And that was at the weekend. Daniel Hegarty, formerly a teenage rock star, is Habito’s founder and chief executive.

The encouraging news for high-school dropouts is that Hegarty is one. “I had to choose,” he says. “Either buckle down and do my A-levels or go on a world tour with my band.” The 16-year-old Hegarty wasn’t exactly torn. He recalls that his English teacher once wrote on his report, “shows a complete lack of scholastic integrity”. But it doesn’t seem to have done him any major harm.

He left Enfield for Los Angeles and went on to freelance as a guitarist with Robbie Williams and S Club 7 among others but after eight years on the road, he decided he needed a proper job. He says: “I was a huge geek, really. All I wanted to do was build software. Anything that didn’t involve playing guitar.” In his mid-20s he came back and went to work as a technician at Wonga, the payday loan company.

He was given an unlimited Amazon account for research and encouraged to be creative. At the same time as he was taking online courses in machine learning from Stanford University in the US he was designing the website for prospective borrowers. “It was a steep learning curve,” he says.