With homeownership comes responsibility, and, inevitably, sticker shock when the water heater gives out. If you live in New Castle County, the NESTER app can help soften the blow.
Brendan Kennealy of Wilmington created NESTER, an online tool that gathers information from potential homebuyers, in 2020. With a click, it generates a report that estimates how much to expect to spend on home maintenance over 15 years, broken down into easier-to-manage monthly payments into a savings account.
The City of Wilmington recognized the tool’s value in 2023 and contracted with NESTER, offering it for free to individuals and families participating in the city’s partner homeownership programs.
Last week, just after NESTER completed the inaugural CAFE Fintech Accelerator at the Fintech Innovation Hub in Newark, New Castle County announced that all homeowners and home buyers in the county have free access to the tool. Homeowners and homebuyers who don’t qualify for free access can purchase access with a one-time fee.
“We had so many people come to us and say, ‘I already own my house, but I’d still love to know [my estimate],’” Kennealy told Technical.ly.
With this pivot from a homebuyers tool exclusively to a tool for both homebuyers and current homeowners, the number of potential users has jumped, since there are more single family homeowners than homebuyers in the county.
Governments, surprisingly, find value in the tool’s resourcefulness
Kennealy didn’t foresee government contracts to be a big focus for NESTER at first.
“[Government] was sort of on our radar, but it was much further down on our list,” Kennealy said. “We didn’t think that was going to be an obvious fit right out of the gate. We were wrong.”
State and local governments usually have programs that encourage homeownership, but without financial planning built in, they’re not always sustainable for the homebuyer. Adding the tool to government programs and, down the line, financial institutions, gives it a consumer protection angle, Kennealy said
Currently, Kenneally and the NESTER team are in talks with several states about embedding the tool into various government processes. With New Castle County, he says, the county is effectively running the NESTER program. In some cases, it may be a state State Housing Authority running it.
“The challenge was, how do we deploy it in a government setting?” Kennealy said. “Where is it going to live, who is going to own it in the government world? That’s part of what we’re still navigating.”
Looking forward: NESTER for enterprise
Earlier this month, NESTER was one of five businesses to receive a STEM-class EDGE grant for up to $100,000 for eligible expenses.
It plans to use that grant to help build the enterprise version of NESTER. That could potentially be used by companies with multiple housing units, allowing them to anticipate how many appliances, water heaters and roofs they’ll need to purchase for a given year.
“They can replace them before they break, which is cheaper,” Kennealey said. “There’s a lot of things that we can do.”
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