Building a property company during the most unusual housing market in a generation

HM Haus Group was incorporated in January 2022 and has been building toward the current platform ever since. Over that period, the UK housing market has been through a sequence of conditions that would have been difficult to predict in sequence: a post-pandemic transaction surge, a sharp correction when rates rose, an extended period of subdued activity, and a market in 2025 that has been characterised by high stock levels and buyers with more negotiating room than they have had in years.

Building in that environment has shaped the product in ways we did not fully anticipate.

What a shifting market teaches you

When the market was hot, the demand for information was about speed. Buyers wanted to know about properties the moment they listed. Alerts, instant notifications, fast search: these were the things that mattered.

When the market cooled, the demand shifted. Buyers became more deliberate. They wanted to understand whether a property was fairly priced, how long it had been listed, what the seller's position was. The premium on transparent data went up.

Building a platform that had to serve both conditions, and that we expect to serve future conditions we cannot predict, pushed us toward data transparency as a core rather than a feature. If a property has been on the market for 120 days without a price reduction, that is information a buyer should be able to see. If a postcode's average sold price has moved meaningfully in the past six months, that context belongs in the listing experience, not buried in a separate data product. This is also why we treat stock levels as a more honest market signal than headline prices: a market with 45,623 new-build listings on Home right now behaves differently to one with a fraction of that supply, whatever asking prices are doing.

The rate environment and what it changed

The rapid rise in mortgage rates from 2022 affected both sides of our market. Agents faced a sharper transaction environment and more price-sensitive buyers. Buyers needed more information to make confident decisions.

The rate environment also shaped our thinking about the moving platform side of the business. When a transaction costs more to finance, every week of avoidable delay in the conveyancing process has a measurable financial impact. That is part of why we built conveyancing directly into the Home process rather than leaving buyers to find and manage it separately. The incentive to make the move faster and less fragmented is higher, not lower, in a high-rate environment.

Building with uncertainty

There is a version of proptech startup culture that treats market conditions as noise and assumes the product vision will prevail regardless. We have tried to be more empirical. The product that exists now is not the one we would have designed in a vacuum; it reflects what agents and buyers told us they needed during a period when the market was difficult.

The AI tools in Inigo, the focus on price transparency, the canvassing features for agents who needed to work harder for instructions: these grew from the market conditions we were building in, not despite them.

Home now tracks 1,249,531 live UK listings across sale and rental, gathered through the same conditions described above. You can explore properties at homes for sale and homes to rent, and agents can find out more about the platform at estate agents on Home.

Market observations in this post reflect the team's experience and are not presented as formal market analysis. UK property market conditions vary by region and property type.

Further reading: the ONS UK House Price Index.