My investment in nHouse | My journey of becoming a startup investor Part 3
Tags: Architecture, Startup, Modular Homes, Housing, Startup Investing

Hi and welcome to this article of my startup investing journey article series. I’m happy that you’re here. Startups are a fascinating asset class to invest in. Startups are young and ideally innovative companies that will shape future products, services, and hopefully solve some of humanity’s problems by providing new commercial solutions. Investing in startups can be quite risky, depending on the stage of investing. Most (young) startups fail due to various reasons. However, those who succeed can bring great returns to early investors and potentially change the world we live in.

Pictures from https://www.the-nhouse.com/

I’ve written two introduction articles to this series. The first is about how private (small) investors potentially can participate in this asset class ( you can find it here). In the second article, I describe my approach to investing in startups (you can find it here).

I invest in startups primarily through equity crowdfunding using the British equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs. Since I’m at the beginning of my investment career and my resources to analyze a startup thoroughly are limited, I invest relatively small amounts in many companies I consider promising in order to learn and diversify the risks. I plan to double down in case the company is successful or add in future raises if it makes sense to me.

Today’s article is about my investment in nHouse.

nHouse

nHouse (founded in 2016) is a housing company from the UK. They build modular houses that are “eco-friendly, full of lifestyle technology, spacious, have healthy home attributes, are low cost to run and are made of high-quality materials”.

Pictures from https://www.the-nhouse.com/

Wait, housing? Is that really an area that has potential? I believe so. I was always attracted to modular and tiny houses. I also think that many conventional single-family home designs are not attractive at all, many of them did not change much in the past decades at all. I think this is where nHouse comes in. Most people only buy or build a house once in their lives. I believe the look of the house is one important factor in the decision of what to build. I was very attracted by the nHouse designs and the flexibility of house shapes available. When I saw their pictures the first time, I thought I could definitely imagine buying one myself if I’d be in a position to build a house.

Pictures from https://www.the-nhouse.com/

Besides the trend to modularity, they try to serve the demand for eco-friendly houses and housing technology e.g. by offering electric vehicle charging and solar panels. There seems to be quite some interest in their houses and I believe the future generation of housebuilders and buyers demand a next-generation single home such as the houses of nHouse.

Another important factor in the housing sector, that I think could still be “disrupted” besides the housing design and housing technology is the whole planning, buying, and construction processes. These processes are often slow and frustrating for the customer and the company itself. Some causes of that could probably be found in the bureaucracy coming along with building a house. But maybe there is still something that can be done on the housing companies' sites to make these processes easier, which nHouse might be able to also capture since they are a young and new player in the market. Tesla made buying a car as simple as some clicks on a smartphone. A house is still a much bigger thing, but cars were like that some years ago as well (some of Tesla’s cars cost roughly 100k USD). It would definitely be great if buying or building a house could be much easier and more fun. I’m definitely curious how nHouse will develop in the future. I’ll keep you updated on nHouse.

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Thank you for your interest and reading,

Hieroka