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Revolutionising Housing Finance: Tim Buskens of HOPE Housing.

August 16, 2024 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In Episode 191 of the Fintech Chatter Podcast, Dexter Cousins is joined by Tim Buskens CEO of Hope Housing a not-for-profit initiative assisting Essential Service Workers. Dexter and Tim chat about the very real issue of home ownership in Australia for essential workers, as they battle to afford housing closer to where they work.

Revolutionising Housing Finance: HOPE Housing

About Hope Housing

Tim has witnessed first-hand the issues faced by our essential workers in their fight to afford home ownership. He was struck by the stress many of our essential workers face on a daily basis. Observing how they are often forced to move away from their community in order to buy a home, resulting in long journeys to get to work. 

Mainstream banks view essential workers as too high risk for the traditional mortgage route and Tim felt there could be a better way.

From this Hope Housing materialised. An innovative way for people to finance their home purchase through alternative investment, not just the bank route. Now in its 4th year, they are working with great partners who are helping make this happen.

They’ve assembled an experienced team of financial and technology experts, culminating in a group of people who continue to innovate the solution and deliver the mission to help Australia’s unsung heroes buy a home.


About Tim Buskens

Tim is Chief Executive Officer and a Founding Director of HOPE Housing. Tim brings over 25 years’ experience in financial services across both private and public sectors to the role at Hope Housing. 
Most recently as COO of the Australian Superannuation Funds Association, Tim has also held executive positions in Link Group, Oasis Asset Management and ASIC. 
Tim has a Bachelor of Business from Victoria University and a Masters of Applied Finance from Macquarie University.

Links from this episode.

More on housing affordability on Fintech Chatter.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter Podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders for a bit of a chat. I’m your host Dexter Cousins and today’s guest is Tim Buskens, the CEO of housing. Today’s show is a little different as we focus on the fin side of fintech and get back to the origins of why fintech started in the first place, to create a fairer financial system. Tim started HOPE in 2022 along with co-founder Tim Sims, the managing director of private equity firm Pacific Equity Partners, with the aim to provide affordable housing to essential workers. With a proof of concept complete, HOPE have now hit the market with an innovative solution to help the unsung heroes in our society, essential workers.

Tune in as Tim shares his vision for HOPE and how he is focused on innovation to create a unique financial product which balances the needs of investors and customers. Tim also shares how his experience in private equity has shaped their approach to growth, and we talk about having a mission which does good for society, helps attract top talent and investors. But before I chat to Tim, if you’re new to the show, make sure to follow us on your podcast player of choice, and if you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support and please make sure to share this on your socials if you enjoyed the show. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Buskens
Thank you, Dex. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here.

Dexter Cousins
Thanks for coming down to Sydney and joining me in my office. Yeah, before I blab on anymore, do you want to maybe tell our listeners about HOPE Housing and the big problem that solve?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, happy to. I think the way I think about the problem, Dex, is sort of in two parts, or two sides of the same coin. The first big problem we here to solve is that wealth in Australia, investors are really struggling to access residential, probably the biggest asset class in this country, with a strong long-term growth characteristics and really interesting diversifying effects in portfolio, which they just can’t access. So there’s no way for that institutional capital or even the high net worth family offices and foundations to access that in an efficient way.

The other side of that problem is essential workers in Australia, or Australians generally, are struggling to get into home ownership, and home ownership is so critical for their future wellbeing, their future wealth, a whole range of social and family situations. So we have workers, essential workers, we focusing on police, nurses, teachers are sort of the types that we generally talk to, but it’s a very broad definition, now getting into a situation where they either don’t own homes and more likely to be renting and retiring in poverty, or they’re living a long way away from homes.

In fact, we had a recent case study, Sophie, who’s, we just recently supported, she’s a nurse at St Vincent. She used to live in your neck of the woods, Newcastle.

Dexter Cousins
Wow.

Tim Buskens
She was travelling from Newcastle down to snon hospital. She’s telling me, Dex, like, I’m having micro sleeps in the car, I’m here trying to support people in my work and I getting a home ownership. Yeah, so that’s a really simple case study.

And then if I go back to the other side of the coin, Dex, we just had a investor come in, Tim Norton. He’s a very classic self-made multi-millionaire in Australia. He’s been a landlord and that’s only way he’s been able to get into property, and he saw HOPE, he said, this is fantastic, I can now get into property without all those headwinds and headaches and cost associated with being a landlord, and I’m getting a much bigger exposure, I’m getting much more diversification, I can do it at scale. So that’s the problem in is two sol out coin.

Dexter Cousins
One of the reasons I love fintech, I love recruiting in fintech is I’ve been doing this 25 years, and when you do the same thing for 25 years it gets boring. The complexity of fintech I think is what really kind of keeps me stimulated. Not only do you have to find unique people who can operate in that kind of startup small business mentality, but then you’ve got the regulatory and compliance burdens and challenges and problems to solve that come with that. How have you solved some of the kind of regulatory issues around that would have prevented perhaps others from applying a similar model previously?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, that’s a really good question, Dex. I think you, I guess my starting point on that is, and you mentioned it, I know this is a fintech podcast, but when I started HOPE I never started with a view of this will be a fintech, yeah, initiative. I always saw fintech as sort of an enabler of what I’m trying to do. So where I started with was, here is the problem of enabling people into home ownership. How do we develop a product, a solution, a model that fairly treats those people into home ownership, balances their interests with the interests of investors who are ultimately the capital providers to support?

And as soon as you started approaching something that says let’s look at fairness, balance, and making sure the interests of both parties are evenly met, yeah, you kind of start there moving through fairly quickly some of the regulatory, right, various challenges, because it’s about, so regulatory guidelines and barriers work, then it’s about solution. And then when you start applying, once you work through that solution and you start then saying, well, how do we make it more efficient, more accessible, that’s where you start applying some of that fintech language and fintech thinking into that problem.

Dexter Cousins
I think the interesting thing for me is the kind of word fintech, it means a different thing to every person that I speak to, and ultimately, kind of before the term fintech I was still working with fintech businesses, they just weren’t called that. And I think the kind of, the time rule focused on innovation, and that term innovation I think has been misused as well, and it’s kind of led itself more to what I would say have been efficiencies internally for businesses than it has been in innovative products or innovative ways of solving problems for customers. How did you get the kind of inspiration for HOPE and also kind of get the inspiration about being really innovative around tackling the problem?

Tim Buskens
So I guess I got to credit part of inspiration to my business partner and backer, Tim Sims. Tim Sims has been successful in private equity in a commercial sense. I worked for him in a Pacific Equity Partners portfolio company, so he knows, he has known me well and we’ve been working together in a commercial sense for close to 20 odd years. And the inspiration really came from our relationship and how we’re continually looking for opportunities to work together, and the realisation that we both have been very lucky in our roles, in our positions, we’ve learned a lot, we’ve developed a lot of skills and knowledge.

And recognising within our communities, and he’s very connected in with essential work because his wife was a nurse, his brother’s a police officer, and as I was mentioning you before we came on, I got three boys and I’m started to talk to them about their future careers, and I see wanting to give them as many options from a point of view of working across different sectors, or give them at least the capability work across different sectors.

With that influence we sort of thinking, well, how can we apply what we’ve learned into solving what’s a really significant problem right now, not just for the essential workers that are here now working today in our various industries that we really need and they support us, but that future generation, yeah, that’s coming through. That’s really the inspiration here. It’s sort of recognising that in life you give an opportunity, you develop capability, and you’ve got to be always looking for the way, the opportunities to how do you give back, to share that and support that.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. What benefits have you seen kind of applying the private equity way of thinking and approaching business growth with HOPE Housing versus saying if you’re on the VC route and look to get seed capital and raise money and kind of get a lot of investors in early, multiple investors, and you’re just trying to get a product out the market?

Tim Buskens
You ask all the hard questions.

Dexter Cousins
You know what, and this wasn’t on script, but it was when you mentioned it, I just thought, wow, this is really interesting to hear about an earlier stage business having private equity kind of thinking around it, because it’s something that I’m highly supportive of.

Tim Buskens
I think there, this for me is really focusing on understanding the problem, and looking at how you can develop a product or a solution or an experience around solving that problem. So not starting with a product. So when I started with HOPE, when Tim and I sat down said, look, we have a really clear view of the product, yeah, we shook hands and said, look, let’s get on this journey and see what we can do to solve it. We had no, it was a blank sheet of paper. It took us collaboratively, working with others in the industry, getting consultants and talking to industry experience on what does HOPE actually look like, what is the HOPE solution, how does it solve the balance that we need to be able to solve in this space between investor interests and homeowner interests.

We can’t be too far on skewed on one way, and you see product out there that skews, yeah, to investor interests, and it may have an initial kick up but has no market to pick it up, eventually dies, or it skews too far to the consumer or the homeowner interest in this case, which is really nice and altruistic, yeah, but eventually doesn’t get, yeah, the traction it needs. So I think, I mean there’s no magic in that, there’s no sort of formula I could sort of lay down on the table, apart from just always mindful of that, yeah, that balance, and because we’re dealing with a key piece of social infrastructure here being home ownership, it’s really important to keep…

Dexter Cousins
Sorry, it’s, no, it’s just fascinating to hear you share that, right? Because I think if I look at, I think one of the challenges that’s faced the industry here in Oz is, with a fairly immature and early venture capital industry, it’s lacked the experience to be able to help businesses grow, right? I mean, that’s just inevitable, that’s not a slight on anyone, that’s just a fact. And if I look at some of the kind of things where I hear founders talking and sharing stories, it’s almost like they’ve been given this magic formula that you take from a highly successful Silicon Valley tech startup, and if you apply that magic formula here in Australia it should work, and it doesn’t, and the reason being is it’s just very, very different markets.

And I think the other challenge is taking a formula that works in a tech startup and applying that to a finance business that’s using technology to help it grow, usually you’re then measuring a lot of the wrong metrics. So it’s really fascinating to hear you kind of share that the kind of strategy and the plan has really been about how we solve this problem and make sure everybody’s a winner.

Tim Buskens
How you evolve what eventually solution is. So taking your point, when I started researching what potential solution, yes, you always go international, that’s place you start, you look domestically and see what others are doing, and you’ve got to ask yourself how is this going to suit this problem solution. It’s not a lift and shift, yeah.

So shared equity is a model in HOPE Housing where, as I was talking about Sophie earlier and one of our investors, Tim Norton, it’s saying, okay, what is this model, how does it work? It is effectively saying, shared equity, Sophie, you go and work with your bank, and this is that connection with Greg you mentioned, Greg McKenna, Police Bank, who’s a absolute leader, gentleman, and a strong advocate for HOPE. So we’ve partnered with Police Bank. So if you go into the bank, you organise half, you’re financing for half a house, and through the HOPE fund we’ll give you equity for the other half of house, effectively matching that mortgage amount.

But in addition, what we say is, bank and Sophie, this is about housing affordability, but the definition of affordability for us is very precise, not about a discount to the market, not about a trade-off of return. Affordability is the amount that you are servicing on this portion of your home must be less than 30% of your salary, your take home, yeah. And so that enables Sophie not only to get in in an affordable way, it gives her an ability to start a journey, and that journey, Dex, is from a 50% ownership share of a wealth producing asset to progressively move to 100% ownership share, so she has the opportunity to buy us out.

Now that is essentially the product, and you start there, getting that balance, and you taking those metrics right, you think about the risk and return elements, and then we overlay that fintech component, yeah, that you talk about, and overlay that the recognition that this is a journey for, this is not a one-off consuming a product, this is a journey now, a life’s, yeah, a life journey for all the Sophies of the world that will progress through the home ownership.

Dexter Cousins
And how many people have you been able to help so far?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, so we’re still very early stages. We started in October 2022, yeah, and I was really keen, cuz one of the, around the table there’s a lot of institutional capital, yeah, saying, Tim, we really like what you do, we’re interested in your model, we can see the value, but where’s this track record? Show us actually working practice, show us working practice. That’s a, okay, chicken the egg. So we started very small back in 2022, and I’ve supported 26 essential workers into homes, and what’s really important about that, Dex, it actually demonstrates that this model works. The model works from a banking distribution strategy, the model works from a homeowner purchasing strategy, and it works from an getting into the market now, getting the purest form of exposure to residential property.

And over that time, not only have we supported those 26 workers in, we’ve delivered growth double what the markets been doing back to investors. So our portfolio ending June 2024 over the last 12 months is growing just over 12%, and if you look at the indexes, CoreLogic is the one that’s generally quoted, old Sydney dwelling index is 6%.

So what, so you, because how you do that, I mean we’ve got a, this is really what part of, and this is where some of the fintech comes in. We’ve got a process that takes people on a journey which hasn’t ever existed in the marketplace before. Yes, what happens in the market when someone buys home, they go in the bank, bank gives them a wad of cash, they’re left to fend for themselves in a marketplace that has a whole bunch of information but a whole bunch of competition, and then hopefully at the end come to the end with a home ownership or some level of home ownership.

So what we do is we say, well, look at that journey, how do we support them from the very point of them getting a pre-approval from a finance perspective, helping them through our fintech, well, digitising a buying experience, supporting them to not only get into home ownership but get the right property with a proper due diligence with unemotional view, and enable them now to not only live in that property but also have a ability to buy us out and increase their wealth.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, what kind of feedback have you been given by the unions and government and, kind of, I guess those that are really interested in the welfare of kind of public service people?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, so I think my conversations with unions are really important because they’re groups, yeah, that have that welfare of the worker. The feedback that I get from the union is great to have another solution, great to have other options out there, yeah. The reality is, Dex, there’s no one silver bullet around this, there’s people going to have very many journeys into home ownership, and the union say, look, we really like what you’re doing because you are actually giving the ability for our membership. The police union is one, Police Association one I’m very close to, but also Health Services Union, teachers and so on so forth, the very open to having an option there for their members to get into home ownership and very supportive of us, through word of mouth, and I think through employer, union, we’ve now got 3,000 workers sitting on a waiting list.

Dexter Cousins
Oh wow.

Tim Buskens
Very keen to get an opportunity on the HOPE shared equity product. We’ve got, through the work that I’ve done with Greg, got a system with the bank that can scale that in, and yeah, we’re demonstrating that track record to investors and building that investor base to scale up into that solution.

Dexter Cousins
Sounds, as I said at the beginning, that fintech being a force for good, fintech being there to create a fairer financial system, it sounds very much like that’s what you’re doing at HOPE.

Tim Buskens
Yeah, again, and I suppose maybe I’m coming from the wrong direction here, Dex, but I never sort of see fintech coming, I mean I always see that as an enabler, yeah. You got to start any business with the value proposition of the problem that you’re here, yeah, here to solve in a fair and reasonable way, yeah, and then to do that you need to deploy the technology in fintech to be able to do that.

Dexter Cousins
Do you think maybe that kind of whole ethos of fintech, which essentially emerged from what had happened in the GFC, and you look at the challenges that they had in the UK around the banking system there, London is said to be the birth home of fintech, but the reality is I was working with fintechs in 2008 here in Sydney. There’s always been those businesses that have been innovative and used technology as a way to get ahead and be resourceful and do more with less.

But do you think that the kind of whole push of the virtuous push of we’re going to be better than the banks, we’re going to treat you better than the banks, we’re not going to do the stuff that they did in the GFC or that came out of the royal commission, do you feel kind of perhaps maybe’s that they’ve created a rod for their own back now, that it means that there’s going to be challenges around them being able to commercialise?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, I never thought of that deeply in that way, Dex, but I guess the principle I apply in business is don’t get ahead off the back of someone else or putting something down or, I’m better than this person or this product or this group or this industry. You get ahead by focusing on the real problem you here to solve and how you add value and how you demonstrate that. Yeah, I think there is a, yeah, maybe there the Australian tall poppy syndrome, maybe that’s sort of bringing in some of that thinking, I’m not sure.

Dexter Cousins
But I mean that’s something that’s really prevalent in the UK as well, right? I think it’s only the US where it doesn’t exist.

Tim Buskens
Yeah, but, and I don’t think fintechs should be sort of looked at as like the ones that just do that. I mean, I think there’s a cultural element in what you were just saying there and how you demonstrate, and as soon as just, you might, it might be right, you might be doing something better and more efficient and delivering value.

Dexter Cousins
And I see some fintechs, right, and the way they go on is if like they’re saving the world, or we’re democratising whatever, or we’re going to solve world hunger with the blockchain, or we’re going to solve poverty by an app that, or we’re going to give you a pay advance and we’re going to charge you 10, 15% of your salary for it. It’s kind of, all right, yeah, that doesn’t work for me. I think if you’re kind of, you’re claiming that you want to make a difference and you kind of save lives, go and donate blood, it’s a lot easier than.

But your point, and I’m going to keep going back to this because I think it’s so critical, is focusing on that kind of equitable nature of, the complexity is you got two stakeholders, right? What I see with businesses is usually, when it’s early days you can be successful because you’ve usually only got two kind of key parties to factor in, your people and your customers. Then when investors come along, kind of managing that trifecta is really difficult, but usually the investors get the priority, and one of the other two kind of is second and third on the list, and it varies and it can vary within organisations. Sometimes a customer becomes the second priority, sometimes it’s the people, and it really depends on what’s happening in the business, yeah, but the investor is always the one who’s the priority.

And I think that’s why we see all of the challenges that came out and issues that came out of the royal commission, is that the kind of incentive structure then that’s in place when you’re focused on shareholders is based on short-term bonuses and short-term results, yeah, not kind of long-term and actually doing good for your customers, yeah, which I think that it’s set very much by what you’ve talked about, the kind of ethos and genesis of the organisation and the cause and the mission is all around how do we do right by these two different groups of people who both have different problems, but they can help each other.

Tim Buskens
Absolutely, Dex. I mean, as soon as there’s misalignment in there, that problem start to, things can shift and evolve over time, they always do, right? I mean, it’s inevitable, but you got to be very constant on the alignment, and in my experience if you start to preference one group or one stakeholder group over another, there may be a short-term win, may be good from a shareholder or board perspective, but ultimately if you don’t bring it back into balance you’re going to head for a disaster. And there’s a lot of movements out there around impact investing and triple bottom line and a lot of thinking around that, and we go back to your comment about government, we have Charmers out there talking about the social capital elements, but you do need to recognise that that has to come with a balance of return, yeah.

There has to be that, and that goes back to what Tim and I was thinking right from the very start. This challenge is, with essential workers and home ownership, very deep, and it’s getting worse. We need to be have a solution and a platform that can scale, and that doesn’t mean just how many, how we help people get into home ownership, but how do we scale institutional capital. And as much as we want to wave our arms around essential workers are important, and they are very important in the community, we must be able to deliver a balanced solution that delivers a strong, yeah, long-term return and a model that accesses the largest single asset class in Australia and across the world.

Australian residential property, 101 trillion dollars. The next biggest asset class is the collective superannuation industry, and then we’ve got the listed equities. So it kind of shows there is an asset class that capital that is growing has to be able to access in a really effective, efficient way and get a commercial return out of it.

Dexter Cousins
Now I want to kind of talk a little bit about, I guess, the people side of your business. How have you gone about bringing in top talent and what’s been the approach to that?

Tim Buskens
Yeah, so the way I think about bringing in top talent is I don’t employ people into roles, I employ, or look for, like, I’ve got a job, I need to fill this job. I look for skills and experience that I don’t possess, and that are inherently good in the people that do possess them. So what does that mean? Yeah, I bring in good people and I find them work and they evolve a role around them, yeah. That’s fundamentally how I think about that.

Dexter Cousins
That go wrong an awful lot, you know. I kind of, I’ve been fairly vocal about the chief of staff role, not because of the individuals themselves, but usually that role is a kind of somebody that’s got good skills that is really liked and they try to find a role for them within the business, so.

Tim Buskens
Yeah, that’s a good call out, that’s a very good call out, yeah. And I’m not pretending that there’s like no role, yeah, say there’s no.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, which is kind of why I’m digging down, right, because answer that you’ve given, I think there’s probably a lot more to it than what you’ve shared.

Tim Buskens
Yeah, I have seen good people in chief of staff roles as well, and chief of, you got to have something there up, but not necessarily, I’ve now defined a job, yeah, I’m going to go out and say I’ve got this role here, I’m looking for someone to fill this and they’re immediately engaging in that job, yeah, and they’re talking about their skills and experience and qualification of that job.

So let me give you an example, Dex. One of my first hires, I mean one of my first employees was one by name of Allyson Bailie, and I was introduced to Allyson through another friend in my network, and I was talking to my friend and say, look, in starting up HOPE I wanted to bring the voice of the customer into the table, into the environment, having someone will be the advocate, having someone that have a really clear and articulate way of us ensuring we maintain that balance of, I was talking about earlier, and she introduced me to Ali, and it didn’t take me long to really say, hey, yeah, this Ally, who has a great level of experience across a number of ranges, from retirement products to banking to other financial institutions, is this type of the skills that I really want in this organisation.

Now that was kind of the entry point, they said, well, where does that skill sit with the voice of the customer? Head of operations. So go to your point, it’s not like, oh, I’ll bring someone in, there’s no role there or no purpose. You absolutely need a defined purpose and job there because otherwise it’s a waste of my money, it’s a waste of her time, but I didn’t go out and say I need a head of operations.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, that’s kind of the clarity, and look, it’s kind of really what you’ve described there is very, very similar to the approach and methodology that we’ve got at Tier One People, right, which is applying the principles that our clients apply day in day out to their business, but for some reason don’t apply to hiring, right? So what you’ve described is exactly what you described when you’re identifying the problem for the business, you kind of go the first principles: well, what’s the problem I’m trying to solve? I need a voice for the customer, right, we need to kind of get close to them, okay, is that somebody that you would hire, yeah, right.

And I think what happens when people are hiring, it goes the reverse. It’s like we need a head of operations, right, let’s create a job description, and then you come up with this wish list of things that aren’t even relevant to being successful, and the irony is within the first 90 days the job’s changed anyway from that job description that you put, because the business is a small organisation.

Tim Buskens
Exactly. I had it working on compliance at one point in time, it was interesting experience.

Dexter Cousins
And I think that’s the reality, right? It’s part of the attraction to the role for somebody who’s going to be good in it, they actually want that stuff, they’ve got a growth mindset, they’re like, yeah, give it to me, let’s go, but they’ve also got, I think, the kind of brevity to be able to say, hey, look, I don’t know this stuff and it’s compliance and this could get us in jail, let’s, here way I can take it to, but we’re going to need to get some support. In terms of leadership, what have you found out about yourself since starting the HOPE journey?

Tim Buskens
So I guess what I found out about myself is maybe even reinforce myself, the importance of being resilient, being motivated, motivating others, how do I keep that energy up. You got to keep the energy up, and it’s a different type of energy in starting a journey of a startup than it is in a day-to-day, yeah, well-defined role. And I’m naturally a sort of more of a thoughtful, introverted type person, and I found out that I can’t pivot and flex myself, takes a lot out of me, but I found out much more versatile in that, yeah, in that my leadership style could be a lot more versatile than I ever was in other organisations.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, one of the things that I really find fascinating is the comedy series The Office and the character David Brent, and I think it’s such a intelligent observation of how most people who are managers go about motivating their people, and yeah, kind of the things that you described were more what I would say would be qualities that would be inspiring to people rather than motivating. And I think the difference for leader, the one who recognises that their behaviour inspire people, and that to motivate them you can give a Churchillian speech and it may kind of get them going in the moment but it doesn’t last very long, and you kind of got to be always on it with your own behaviours, which are going to be the things that are going to kind of change or move the needle for them.

Tim Buskens
Absolutely, and also on top of that, it’s really understanding where your limitations are, yeah, and being honest with yourself around that, and being open to asking for help. I think there was an early part of the journey where I felt that I had to be the guy, and that’s incredibly, is a lot of burn your place, place of myself, and realising, well, to really achieve what we want to achieve, it’s being honest and saying, well, I’m not going to be the guy on that part, and who around me will be that person, and feeling very comfortable with that. It’s their strength in recognising that you got the weakness and you need to find someone that you can bolt on as the ability to achieve what you want to achieve.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. Tim, we’re coming to a wrap. What can we expect and what’s got you excited about HOPE Housing in this next 12 months?

Tim Buskens
Well, I’m excited that there’s 3,000 people that want access to our solution, and that’s without much, well, that’s without no marketing, that’s all word of mouth, yeah. I’m excited by the investors sitting around the table, all really engaged and seeing some value in what we do, or seeing value what we do, and I’m really excited that over the last sort of 18 months we know we’ve proved the on’s working, we’ve delivered, and we’re showing how we can get people in efficiently and effectively, how we can deliver real returns to homeowner, to investors, and how we can deliver that security to the homeowners. So all the hard work, I mean there’s a lot hard work to keep going, but all the hard work in terms of getting to where we are is delivering exactly the result that we were hoping for, and it’s only going to get better.

Dexter Cousins
We get a lot of people who are investors themselves listening this podcast wanting to find out more about the HOPE Housing solution and potentially becoming an investor in there.

Tim Buskens
So you can Google HOPE, ay, you get LinkedIn, we’re all across that sort of social environment and internet environment, so yeah.

Dexter Cousins
Great. And we also get amazing talent listening to this podcast who very much tend to be mission driven people and doing things for good. If they’re interested in potential careers at HOPE Housing, where’s the best place for them to head?

Tim Buskens
Well, I would suggest them send me a message on LinkedIn, that’s the best way. Drop me a note, connect with me, and I’m always open for a coffee.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. Tim, it’s been fantastic to chat with you. Good luck with this, just an amazing venture, a real problem solving and making people’s lives better, and it’s kind of, it’s not been very often that I’ve been able to genuinely say that on this podcast, so thank you for that opportunity to do so.

You can follow me, folks, on LinkedIn. If you’re coming back, thank you very much for your support, it really does mean a lot and it helps me get great guests like Tim. If you’re new to the show, make sure to follow us on your favourite podcast player, and if you’re feeling generous, leave us a review and share on your socials. Until the next episode, keep well.

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