Evitat: The Service Book Your Home has been Missing

If you have ever renovated or built a home, you know the dizzying array of choices involved. My guest on this episode of The Proptech Podcast, Evitat co-founder Sonja Markovic, describes her own renovation as feeling like doing a PhD. I can relate. Evitat, winner of Most Innovative Startup in the Environment, Social and Sustainability category at the 2023 Proptech Awards, exists because of it.

The Problem: We have been renovating for bench tops, not for performance

For two decades, the way we improve our homes has been driven by resale value and the perception of luxury. Bench tops. Miele appliances. Multiple retreats and play areas, most of them barely used.

Sonja's point is that all that extra space is a pile of extra material choices. "Each of these added spaces are, in the end, actually added material choices, and that contains a huge proportion of embodied carbon," she told me.

Price has never been a reliable guide to quality, and it is almost impossible for a homeowner to see the green or health credentials of what they buy. Sonja's turning point came in 2017, when the family's Queensland house was badly damaged in a cyclone and they decided to build back better. Coming from a user experience and systems thinking background, she asked the obvious question: "Why do we make it actually so difficult for someone who wants to do a good thing and improve the quality of their homes?"

The consequence is predictable. Overwhelmed homeowners hand the decisions to the builder, and once you hand over that decision point, it is no longer about your needs and aspirations.

How Evitat works: a service book for your house

Evitat's pitch is that it empowers renovators and owners to create healthy, low carbon and climate resilient home improvements. The mechanism is the e-logbook, and Sonja's analogy for it is simple: a service book for cars.

Rather than modelling every possible material, Evitat narrows the field to choices it regards as genuinely sustainable, and tracks decisions across six categories: health, affordability, water and energy efficiency, comfort, social and environmental impact, and carbon.

Buy a hot water heat pump through a business on the platform and it lands in your logbook automatically, with material information, installer details, certificates and warranties. Repaint the bedrooms in VOC-free paint two years later and that goes in too. When you are ready, you can generate a sustainable home report.

"It allows actually to visualise these good decisions," Sonja said. "And that in itself has a lot of value also for future buyers because they know exactly that this property has been de-risked."

The model is neat: the paying customers are the vetted, responsible suppliers and professionals who join as members, while the audience is residential consumers. Funded by the B, talking to the C. It is a team of five in Melbourne plus two overseas developers, with co-founders Shruti Wati on tech and Amin Tavakolia on operations.

Why Evitat matters for the Australian property industry

The CSIRO has been working on a residential energy efficiency rating, working title NatHERS, which will eventually give every property in the country an energy star rating. The expectation is that most Australian housing built before the 1980s will land at around two stars out of a maximum of seven. That will be a shock for a lot of homeowners, and my prediction is a period of unprecedented demand for green renovations.

Add mandatory climate risk disclosure, and the likelihood that your mortgage rate and insurance premiums will reflect your home's efficiency rating, and the financial logic changes. We have seen this pattern in commercial property: NABERS has run here since 1998, and the evidence is clear that higher-rated buildings attract higher rents and better quality tenants.

Sonja also made an argument I have not heard put so plainly. An underperforming home drains money from a household every winter, and with cost of living pressure already at breaking point for many families, the consequences run beyond the energy bill. "We need to have a little bit more awareness what actually a quality home is," she said. Once buyers can see quality, they judge properties differently, and that demand flows through to agents and listings.

That is where our industry has work to do. Sonja has seen listings with a hot water heat pump installed and no mention of it anywhere, probably because the agent cannot tell it apart from a gas system. Her view is that the information should be captured at the point of install and attributed to the property, rather than left to an agent to validate.

Evitat takeaways

What I like about Evitat is that it needs no heroics. Add insulation. Put in a heat pump. Choose the untreated material. Log it. The value accrues, and eventually you can prove it to a buyer, a lender or an insurer.

The green credentials of our homes are becoming the new differentiator that decides what our properties are worth. Proptechs like Evitat will be the ones telling us what to do, in what order, and what difference it made.

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