HouseCall, Led by Ex-Qualcomms, Advances App for Home Chores

four years ago (as Neer) in Qualcomm Labs, the wireless giant’s in-house technology incubator. The five co-founders started HouseCall in mid-2013.

The company provides one mobile app for homeowners and another for service professionals. (So far, both mobile apps are only available for the iPhone, although homeowners also can access HouseCall on the Web.)

Unlike Angie’s List or Yelp, Olfat says homeowners don’t need to scroll through online reviews or negotiate prices. Homeowners instead select the type of service they need, select someone to provide the service from listings that include picture profiles and ratings, and pay a (usually) fixed-price charge. For service providers, HouseCall’s app includes tools for customer relationship management, scheduling, payment, and billing software they can both use to run their own business and participate in the HouseCall homeowner marketplace. Both apps are provided free.

The company lists home maintenance services in 20 categories, including carpet cleaning, electrical, landscaping, maid service, painting, plumbing, tech help, and even seasonal holiday tasks such as delivering Christmas trees and hanging Christmas lights. After writing recently about San Diego’s inaugural Mini Maker Faire, I’m thinking maybe the do-it-yourself movement isn’t that big after all.

After a three-month beta test in San Diego, HouseCall says, “We were particularly encouraged to see that over a third of our users ordered service at least twice (and often in different categories).” So far, HouseCall is only operating in San Diego, but the company says it is looking to bring its platform to additional cities in the future.

As HouseCall expands, the big question, of course, is how well it can meet competition from established players such as Angie’s List as well as the likes of San Francisco-based TaskRabbit, founded in 2008 with nearly $38 million in cumulative venture funding, and Zaarly, founded in 2011 with more than $15 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, CMEA, and others. And then there is Skyfer, Done, TaskWant, Agent Anything, ViaTask, and more.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.