Aera
Aera is a financial app that helps New Zealanders buy a first home.
- Category
- Consumer and Marketplace
- Website
- aera.nz
What Aera does
Members train in the app to learn what the purchase takes, hit milestones that pay cash toward the goal, and then work with a personal coach who secures the mortgage and finds the house. The app is free to use. Derek Handley, who built and sold companies in New Zealand and the United States before returning home, founded it after concluding that the next generation could not buy a first home without a different kind of help.
The secret
The hard part of buying a first home is the years before the mortgage, and no bank earns anything from those years. Aera does, because it is paid when the buyer completes the purchase, so it is the one company in the chain whose incentives run with the buyer from day one.
Why NZVC invested in Aera
We backed Aera because first-home ownership is the defining financial problem for a generation in New Zealand and Australia, and Derek Handley is a founder with the record, the network and the reason to solve it. Putting the training, the coaching and the transaction in one place, paid for by the purchase rather than by the saver, ties the company to the buyer actually getting the house.