Slice To Buy: Buy Your First Home For A Slice Of The Price
BY MAHI KUMAR
I caught up with Slice CEO Amy Stevens to talk about how the platform is reducing barriers to home ownership.
4 May 2023
Home ownership has always been one of those concepts that seems extremely daunting at the outset.
Not too long ago, I attended a podcast launch event for Slice where they were talking about their online technology platform. The live podcast recording featured Girls That Invest’s Simran Kaur. If you’re interested in knowing more about the housing market, the platform and just general personal finance education, I would highly recommend listening to the podcast. Amy hinted at some great guests coming up soon with different industry perspectives such as builders and agents. The first episode, and the launch which I attended, was tabled as an open discussion about home ownership and the educational and cumbersome process involved to purchase a home.
Amy’s previous work involved working in the law, and working in technology based finances and rebuilding core banking. While working in that space, she built a vehicle management software tool called Gravy which is still running to this day. She then bought her first property with her mother and realised that despite having a background as a lawyer, working in foreign exchange and financial technology, the home ownership process was one of the most complex processes that she had gone through. The process of buying a house was a challenging task for somebody with industry knowledge, which indicated to Amy that it would be an even more intimidating feat for your everyday buyer.
Slice’s “Why”
That, and the need to educate people on the possibility of co-ownership was the idea that prompted the creation of Slice. Slice’s “Why” is derived from the fact that home-ownership tends to be the dream, but as it stands nearly 40% of Kiwi’s don’t have access to the market. New Zealand is considered one of the most unaffordable markets.
What is “Slice”?
In Amy’s words, Slice is an innovative end-to-end platform which focuses on making co-ownership and entry into the housing market easier. It provides people with an opportunity to own property for a slice of a price by helping with education, step-by-step guidance and automated software. The platform itself is an end to end co-ownership platform to facilitate ownership with friends, family and partners etc.,. To put it succinctly, it helps you get on the property ladder, safer, smarter and quicker. The platform is targeted towards people that are co-owners (acknowledging statistically that majority of people are co-owners) and aiming to streamline that process, protect and safeguard their rights with the intention that everybody should have the opportunity to purchase a home.
If you have $20k, you can buy a house, or start the educational journey involved with it.
How does Slice work?
You sign up for free on the website, and take an initial quiz to see where you are on your journey. The quiz will point you to where you need to go and angles you in the right direction to the relevant processes. You are then guided through various processes like what you can afford and how to secure finances, the pre-approval process, understanding the co-ownership options available, managing the relationships with legal agreements reflective of the specific circumstances, finding a property and completing due diligence to tracking equity (i.e. what happens if someone loses their job and payments need to change etc.,). They are also moving to have more integrated video content on the website to support the website and help users with their journey overall.
When Amy bought her second property with her partner, she used a version of the current platform to document and digitise the process - meaning that it is tried and tested! Amy takes pride in the extent of user-testing of the platform with the first page giving you an understanding of what the platform does.
Slice’s Partners
As I had noted at the start, I first met Amy and was introduced to the Slice platform at the podcast launch which was backed by sponsors such as Vega and Bayleys. The platform is partnered (non-exhaustively) with the likes of Vega, NZ Housing Foundation, Simpler and You Own as financial providers. There are also a number of lawyers that they are partnered with to streamline legal document drafting such as Donald Sherry, Carson Fox, House Me Legal and MMP Lawyers. The future is looking very bright for Slice with them currently capital raising so they can scale up the amount of customers on the platform and develop further technology for lawyers and brokers to streamline the overall experience for everybody.
What should you take away?
The key takeaway from Amy is that buying a home is more accessible than you think! If you have $20k, you can buy a house, or start the educational journey involved with it.
My personal take on the platform is that it’s great. Slice is taking active steps to respond to housing unaffordability and facilitate a space where people can actually explore their options, which means that ultimately homeownership is more accessible and inclusive for all. I see no downside to what the platform has to offer. It takes away the extremely onerous aspect of researching and doing your own due diligence before embarking on a process. The way it streamlines the process, and presents co-ownership as an option not only makes the property ladder far more accessible to the average Gen Z or Millennial, but it also works as a great way to safeguard your rights in co-ownership by actively considering and catering for any relationship breakdowns in a professional and contractual way that you may not be so comfortable considering at the outset of such a process.
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