Green Acres GO aims to be the Uber of home maintenance

Green Acres has taken a screenshot out of Uber's playbook and is introducing a new model of home service.

The service, Green Acres GO, aims to unlock an as-yet-untapped workforce, providing opportunities for people to supplement their incomes by providing home services in their spare time.

Green Acres CEO Logan Sears says, "Green Acres GO is a completely new business initiative, it's not about putting Green Acres on mobile.

"We're looking at a different set of customers and a different group of service providers, reaching both with an app custom-designed to deliver a mobile-managed solution that seamlessly connects the two.

Green Acres will shortly undertake a pilot of the service in Auckland's North Shore and refine the model and the application before rolling it out into other centres.

The business model for Green Acres GO has been developed following a research programme which identified a substantial requirement for specific home services supplied on-demand, one that is not being currently being met by other service providers, including Green Acres' traditional franchise model.

Those surveyed were happy to have these services delivered through a mobile app.

The research indicates that over 50,000 households will be willing to use household cleaning and lawn mowing services, with each making an average of 15 service requests a year.

The total annual market for on-demand lawn mowing and cleaning services is estimated to be worth over $40 million.

Green Acres also surveyed potential operators and found that there is a very large pool of people, at least sufficient to meet demand, interested in providing home care services.

Potential operators are likely to be younger adults who are not working full time and have a degree of flexibility around their free hours.

They want to choose when and where they work and what jobs they take.

They are interested in providing three to four services per week as a regular supplement to their income.

Another group of potential operators includes people already running their own cleaning and lawn mowing businesses who simply want more work.

According to Green Acres, they would rather fit new on-demand work around existing contracts rather than spend time and money on hit and miss marketing efforts.

Sears concludes, "Even though potential demand for the services is high, the supply of potential operators is even higher, so we're confident that we will be able to deliver services as and when people want them.

The majority of Green Acres' existing franchise businesses provide repeat scheduled services to long-term customers.

In its 27 years of operation in New Zealand franchises have mowed, cleaned and delivered other household services over 20 million times.

Currently, Green Acres franchisees perform over 100,000 services each month.