Less than a month into his new role as CEO, Oisan Hanrahan is overseeing a major rebranding and relaunch of Angie’s List, the 25-year-old home improvement platform that he was promoted to lead late last month. The company will now be known as just Angi. In a conversation with PYMNTS, Hanrahan said the timing and decision to “lose the List” only made sense.
“Once upon a time, Angi was an actual list of pros, and now it’s so much more than that,” Hanrahan said. “We thought it was a good time to drop that literal reference and have the name better represent what Angi has grown into.”
In addition to the new name, the company is also relaunching its online and mobile app to include more features that will make it easier to discover and select from hundreds of different services, find nearby professionals to do the job and then seamlessly pay for them. “It’s a great time to redefine what the brand stands for and to redefine where we’re going, and it also coincides with this broader mission that we’ve got at a time when ‘home’ really is the most important place in the world,” Hanrahan said.
Home Improvement Staying Power
There’s no question that the past year of pandemic living has had a huge impact on the time and money people have spent to make their homes more comfortable — and, in the case of those who work from home, more functional, too. While many have wondered what awaits the beneficiaries of this nesting trend once life returns to normal, Hanrahan believes the segment will prove to have staying power for two key reasons.
“I think as people move their purchasing behavior online, whether it’s on the web or mobile, that isn’t going back. People are going to continue to buy more products and more services online,” Hanrahan predicted, noting their willingness and comfort to do larger-dollar transactions as well. “We now see on a weekly basis hundreds of people buying $5,000+ projects online.”
At the same time, he noted that a lot of people — including many first-time buyers and urban relocators — have invested a lot of money into their homes this past year, and he expects that most people will continue to invest in renovating and taking care of their properties.
“If you fast-forward a few years, I think the single biggest thing that will come out of the pandemic in terms of consumer behavior is that we’ve accelerated the shift to online activity and online commerce,” Hanrahan said. “That’s a huge net positive for Angi overall, and one that we think we can leverage to build an even better consumer experience.”
Balancing the Businesses
Like any service business, Hanrahan said one of the biggest challenges he faces is balancing supply and demand, and points to the sudden shortfall of plumbers in Texas after the state’s deadly cold snap last month as an extreme example.
As it stands, Angi gets over 30 million service requests a year coming through its platform, which are fulfilled by 250,000 service professionals, but Hanrahan said the growth of the platform produces a win-win scenario. “The more we can drive density, the more we can increase consumer behavior and adoption, and the better experience it is for each individual pro, who just gets more work with the more transactions we have,” he said.
On the consumer side, Hanrahan said that adding value is not that difficult, since the $500 billion home improvement industry has historically been one of the most frustrating categories for people. “They couldn’t find a pro, they didn’t know if they could trust them, there was price obfuscation, there was uncertainty around insurance, uncertainty around financing, uncertainty around what would happen if something went wrong, and all of that just evaporates with Angi,” he said.
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