The maison.fr platform spreads its wings into Aix-en-Provence

A digital solution to obtain appointments with qualified craftsmen throughout France

The website maison.fr acts as a trusted middleman between customers looking for a quality craftsman and housing professionals looking for work, making home improvement easier for everyone. Backed by the UK-based international group HomeServe, the platform was initially aimed at professionals, but pivoted to B-to-C in 2020. It has become an independent company and a well-known web solution for quickly obtaining appointments with qualified craftsmen. The project has received support from Provence Promotion, which is helping maison.fr settle into new offices in Aix-en-Provence designed to accommodate 100 additional employees within a year.

The maison.fr offer is more than simply scheduling appointments. Its ten or so reservation managers are specially trained to help households select the professional best suited to their needs, then make appointments to ensure their work goes smoothly.

From small repairs to large-scale projects, not to mention maintenance and renovation, the maison.fr search engine has 1.2 million professionals in its France database. Households have access to an unprecedented and extremely well-documented source of information on all kinds of housing professionals, including painters, electricians, plumbers, masons and gardeners. This allows anyone to check on a provider's reputation, consumer reviews, photos of previous work, qualifications (including environmental practices), number of employees, date of creation and much more before choosing and making an appointment with the right professional for the job.

Founded in 2019 in Aix-en-Provence by Jean-David Habib, CEO, and Francisco Ortiz, CIO, under the original name of HomeExpert, the platform rebranded to maison.fr in 2020, operating independently of the international group HomeServe. The British-based HomeServe, a global home services specialist, still owns a stake in the company and is involved in the future of this new service. It has been a dazzling success and grown quickly with more than 13,000 appointments booked in just a few months.

Bold ambition and an expansion project in Aix-en-Provence

"Aix-en-Provence is all about family. It is my hometown and now it has become the launching pad for French Tech. The region attracts and retains talent and is good at nurturing unicorns, which is what maison.fr is aiming for!" says Jean-David Habib, CEO of maison.fr. He already has experience as an entrepreneur in the same industry from his stint managing Travaux.com some 20 years ago. Now he is returning to the region after an international career that took him to London and beyond.

Significant investments have gone into developing the platform's technology. A powerful search engine geolocates and ranks professionals according to their relevance to the customer journey, which has been painstakingly designed to save users time. The goal at maison.fr is to become the number one home services platform for all French households.

In conjunction with Provence Promotion, the company is currently preparing its growth phase in terms of both real estate and financing.

The current team of 48 employees works at Carrés du Golf in the Aix-en-Provence business park in offices the company has outgrown. So maison.fr is looking for new space in the same area with the hope of moving by the end of 2022 so it can quickly double its workforce.

The company plans to recruit several dozen additional reservation managers, as well as sales and customer service representatives to support its sustained growth. Older persons who are transitioning out of careers in the construction industry are a good example of the sort of profile that is particularly valuable to maison.fr. The company is also constantly looking for IT talent: developers, project managers and product owners.

Given the company's rapid growth, the founders go to great lengths to ensure employee well-being and to instill the platform's values in future recruits.