The Home Advantage

This AI-dependent reno-tech platform is cutting out the middleman for interior designing and, recently, its financing.

- ALVIN LIM

The road to designing the home of your dreams is often riddled with potholes. There’s the difficulty of hunting down an interior designer with an aesthetic sense that matches your own — and a portfolio of work to back it up.

Then comes the issue of designing an actual working blueprint, which, once iterated upon and approved, has to be translated from paper to reality — according to specifications, on time, and, especially, within budget.

As you’d expect, that last part is where most of the problems come in. Interior design firms are notoriously finicky to work with, particularly regarding opaque pricing strategies and hidden markups.

On the other hand, prospective customers have responded with extreme price sensitivity, leading to wasted time on both sides of the transaction. These are all bugbears that Tyson Lim, CEO and founder of home renovation platform Homeez, became intimately familiar with after 10 years in the field as a practitioner straight out of National Service and eventual business owner with designers under his purview.