You can buy a house online—not a dollhouse or a Roblox mansion, but a real one.
And I don’t just mean look online. Right now, if you’re looking at homes in Denver, Dallas, or Houston, you can actually go buy a million-dollar home through Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilding platform founded in 2018. In some sense, the company came out of the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Northern California.
“In my backyard, 6,000 houses burned down over the course of about 48 hours,” said Nikki Pechet, CEO and cofounder of Homebound. “In the aftermath, people felt totally helpless. Even with multimillion‑dollar insurance checks in their pockets, they’d go talk to contractors who’d say, ‘Sure, I’ll put you on my waitlist. I’ll call you in four years.’”
Pechet, an early Thumbtack exec, said that she realized “the things that we were seeing in our disaster‑impacted market was actually just a microcosm of the industry… Homebuilding is totally broken and doesn’t have technology supporting it in the way many other industries do.”
Here’s how it all works: You choose a house online—one that’s already in progress or from scratch—with a lot, floor plan, and style. As you configure the home, the pricing updates in real-time. Then, it’s a checkout flow “like anything else online,” said Pechet. Homebound generates a digital twin of the house that lets buyers track progress and view AI-driven inspections. The supply chain, Pechet said, is managed to produce precise bills of materials rather than rough estimates.
