BOOM! and the Race to Electrify Aussie Homes

The hardest part of electrifying your home isn't the money.

I'm in the middle of it myself. We're looking at solar for our roof, mostly because I want our appliances off gas and onto electricity. But the adulting is exhausting. What do you do first? What changes if you swap the order? Which supplier do you trust? Sonja Markovic from Evitat told me recently that working this out feels like doing a PhD. That lands.

So when Alex Houlston, CEO and co-founder of BOOM!, joined me on The Proptech Podcast, I was listening as much as a frustrated homeowner as a host.

The scale of the problem is confronting

There's a concerted push to get 82 per cent of Australia's energy from renewables rather than coal and gas by 2030. To get there, the vast majority of our 12 million existing homes need to come off fossil fuels.

Alex put the arithmetic in new terms. As the grid gets greener, most of our remaining emissions end up coming from the gas appliances inside our homes and businesses. Retrofitting the household market by 2050 would mean converting 50 homes every working hour between now and then. Compress that to 10 years and it gets dramatically bigger.

And here's the part that should bother all of us in property: nobody knows how far along we are. As Alex said, "we don't really have a handle on what's happening out there... because there's no one single repository for that kind of information." The work is done by tradies quietly swapping appliances, one house at a time, with no record.

Turning 32 combinations into one decision

BOOM! is an Australian climate tech business focused on electrifying Aussie homes and Alex's elevator pitch was short: "BOOM! is Australia's leading building electrification platform. We make it easy to make the switch."

It's purpose-built software for existing buildings that strips complexity out of the decision, connects you to suppliers through a marketplace, then tracks financial and environmental impact using data from solar inverters and meters.

The clever bit is the front end. There are roughly 32 combinations of appliances and products a household could choose, and each produces a different cost benefit. Solar plus hot water stacks up differently to solar plus heating and cooling. As Alex put it, "what we do is turn really sophisticated energy modelling into something simple."

Almost nobody does this in one hit. Alex is three years into his own house, having done solar, heating and cooling, an EV charger and the cooktop, and he still has instant hot water to go. For most households the journey could run a decade, so the platform is built to be something you return to. On cost he was careful not to over-promise: setting EV charging aside, full electrification sits between $10,000 and $20,000.

Why the banks are the way in

BOOM! runs a B2B2C model and its beachhead is the finance sector. It's launching with Bank Australia, which will offer a BOOM!-powered calculator to its mortgage loan book customers. Social and community housing came first: BOOM! covers around 80 per cent of Victoria's social housing market, and the country's two largest housing associations use it to assess portfolios and procure through it. The ABC uses it for solar across its buildings, and around $12 million of projects have been procured.

The insight that unlocked banking was neat. "A mortgage loan book is a property portfolio just like a residential landlord," Alex said. Lenders want what a landlord wants: a portfolio view of what they own and what impact they've had, so they can report on financed emissions without greenwashing.

Scope one is what a bank controls in its own buildings, scope two the energy it buys, scope three everything it has financed but can't control, including your mortgage. For a lender that's an order of magnitude larger, and regulation is coming that will make them responsible for reducing it.

Alex's summary of why this is a workable business was my favourite line of the episode: "banks just want to sell money." He's pairing that with local government, where councils have net zero targets and want to offer low-cost finance to constituents.

What BOOM! tells us about proptech

Asked about his biggest challenge, Alex named three Ds: data, distribution and dollars. Data, because organisations you'd assume have a firm grip on what they own often don't, whether that's a housing provider or a bank that doesn't know it holds a mortgage on a home.

He also reflected that things in his career have consistently taken longer than they should, which is the honest truth about this category. Proptech is technology trying to move physical things, and physical things always take twice as long and twice as much money as planned. That's not a flaw. It's the job.

For a team of eight, BOOM!'s ambition is enormous: electrify every building. I asked whether we'll turn this around. "I'm a born optimist, Kylie, so yes."

There's no consumer version yet, my only complaint. But that's the point: without the homework you risk an expensive mistake, and a platform that pulls the elements into one spot is a real asset. When BOOM! needs a beta user, Alex, call me.

Listen to the full episode of The Proptech Podcast with Alex Houlston on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More from this episode: read the show notes or read the full transcript.