Easy and Efficient One Stop Home Management: Homezada Review

A home will likely be the most expensive purchase you ever make as well as an ongoing “cash magnet.”

Refurbishments and remodeling projects, combined with necessary maintenance and the odd emergency, can require savvy financial planning on the same level as saving for a mortgage deposit!

In 2014, whether you plan to buy a property, or gut-renovate your home, or just need to get on top of home maintenance and finances, we recommend checking out HomeZada. It’s a one-stop shop approach to household management where you can safely file away important facts, plan for projects, and even find inspiration.

Here are five ways this platform can bring order where there could otherwise be chaos!

1. If You’re Buying a New Home or a New Investment Property

If you’ve just got the keys to a new property – congratulations – you’re hopefully super excited and motivated. Make the most of that momentum and populate HomeZada with your pertinent property details – such as the purchase price, tax value, insurance value – and upload those crucial documents.

If you’re uber organized you can even itemize each room, take pictures from all angles and log all your furniture, including the value of each piece.

For individuals with investment properties, the ability to upload photographs is especially helpful to ensure you have evidence of the condition of your property and all items prior to renting to new tenants.

2. If You’re Selling Up and Moving On

If you took the time to complete your home inventory, including the furniture values, moving out is going to be a breeze (well, alright, perhaps that’s a little optimistic given the stress that moving brings.)

Rebecca, our Director of Strategy and Operations, knows this pain only too well given she just de-camped from New York City to Colorado. Several items of furniture were damaged during the process and, unfortunately, these were fairly high value items for which receipts had long since been lost. Itemizing everything at purchase, while admittedly not for the faint-hearted, would have provided helpful records for future claims. HomeZada does its best to make a detailed process as easy as possible by pre-populating the inventories with the most likely items you have in your rooms.

3. If You’re Planning a Spruce Up or a Major Home Renovation

Our Editorial Director, Sarah, is about to move to a property that she and her husband plan to remodel. If you’ve never tackled a home project, you probably have no idea what the potential cost will be or what materials you need.

HomeZada’s Project section contains multiple project templates which include sample cost estimates, project items you’ll likely need along with tips and videos for moving forward. The templates cover everything from the more perfunctory – rewiring, new roof, upgrading your washer and dryer – to more advanced (and exciting!) projects such as garden landscaping, kitchen remodeling and attic conversions.

One particularly nifty feature, that Sarah really likes, is the ability to drag and drop a button on to your browser toolbar so that you can easily add items for your renovations into the HomeZada project as you identify them while shopping online. You can also easily upload documents such as estimates from contractors to keep you from going insane as the project unfolds.

Plus, if you don’t have a natural affinity for interior (or exterior) design, there are even several Pinterest boards for inspiration.

4. If You’re Not Maintaining Your Maintenance Checklist

Jessica, our social media manager, was drawn to the maintenance section and the suggested to-dos as a great way to remind her husband what they need to plan for!

No matter whether you’re living in a condo or a mansion, you need to be on top of your maintenance schedule to mitigate incurring outsize costs down the road when things go wrong. HomeZada’s checklist section is a great (albeit potentially guilt-inducing) reminder of all of the little, and big, things that homeowners need to do.

For example, when did you last check your fire extinguishers or clean the grime off your kitchen ceiling? What about scrubbing the tile grouting in the bathroom or removing the germs from the phone handset? Never mind cleaning out the garage, the gutters and checking the crawl spaces!

If this is the only section you truly explore, we can promise it may save you a major headache in the future!

5. If You’re Simply Trying to Budget Better and Be More Organized

We wouldn’t be a finance site if we didn’t mention the household budget! If you’re already using a super detailed tracking platform this section may not be your top priority. However, if you like having everything in one place then complete the budget section so that it can flow through to your dashboard along with the asset values of your home and any project expenses you’ve also added.

With its built-in calendar – also visible from the dashboard – you can easily see when tasks are due and also deal with recommendations HomeZada makes to help you get on top of everything.

We can all agree that this is a great platform for homes big and small, and the free features alone are very valuable. The Premium features include managing home improvement projects, home maintenance calendar and household finances and are available for $5.95 per month – but, for every friend you invite who sets up their own account, you get a month free. Whether you’re just starting out with a new home, looking to update an existing property, or simply get organized, Homezada is a resource that can assist you in achieving all of your goals.

This post was sponsored by Homezada, as always, all opinions and statements are those of the GoGirl Team.