Two years ago I wrote that e-commerce was coming for our industry. It's here now.

Back in 2024 I published a post arguing that e-commerce would work for architecture, engineering and consulting. A few people agreed. Plenty told me I was wrong. The reasoning was always the same: nobody spends real money online without meeting someone first, and nobody buys a service they can't see.

I'd heard that argument before.

I worked at Amazon in 2001, when all they really sold was books, CDs and DVDs. Shoes were the punchline. You'll never buy shoes online — how would you know if they fit? Today something like one in every three or four pairs of shoes on the planet is sold online. The product didn't change. The way we buy it did, because the technology caught up and the market grew to meet it.

Property services are sitting exactly where shoes were in 2001.

So we ran the experiment in our own business. We packaged a service — an on-site 3D scan and design consultation — put a fixed price on it, and let people buy it online. No proposal. No three meetings. Just a clear product, a price, and a checkout. Everyone in marketing told us it wouldn't work. People don't spend thousands of dollars by clicking a link.

They do. We've since done over half a million dollars in online service sales, and the embarrassing part is how we did it: a Calendly link bolted to Stripe. Ugly, limited, held together with tape. People still bought, because what they actually wanted was a clear thing to buy and the confidence to buy it.

That told me the appetite was real and the tooling was the problem. So we rebuilt the checkout properly for ourselves — and then realised every good consultant we know has the same problem and no decent way to solve it. That's Buildipedia.

Buildipedia is a marketplace where property professionals package their expertise, find better clients, and get booked and paid upfront.

Here's the part most architects miss. When I talk to people about listing, the common reaction is, "Sure, as long as I'm the only architect in my area." That's not a marketplace — that's a phone book. And it misunderstands the competition entirely. You think you're competing with the architect down the road. You're not. You're competing with a kitchen renovation, an overseas holiday, a new car, a handbag. You're competing for discretionary spend, in a market so opaque that clients can't tell what they're buying or what it should cost. A $4,850 design consultation is competing with Gucci, whether you've noticed or not.

A productised, transparent service doesn't shrink your market by putting you next to peers. It grows the market, because it lets people buy who would never have picked up the phone to book a meeting and sit through a pitch.

We're launching softly. To start, that means a directory of several thousand property and built-environment businesses, and a first group of consultants offering real, bookable products. If you've spent years explaining your value in proposals, chasing quotes, and losing time to enquiries that were never a fit — this is the alternative.

A marketplace and a community endure. Tools come and go. We're building the place where good property professionals get found, get booked, and get paid for the expertise they already have.

We're open for our first partners now. Join the waitlist and let's put your expertise on the shelf.