Built after a first home purchase that should have been simpler than it was.
Homabu started with a frustrating first-hand experience of buying a home in the UK. The standard affordability figure quoted early on didn't factor in how much the specific property would change things — a short lease, an ex-local-authority building, or a flat above a shop could all change what was actually available, but that nuance rarely came up until well into the process.
Property portals didn't help either — service charges, one of the biggest ongoing costs of buying a leasehold flat, aren't required to be published on listings at all. The result was wasted time, wasted viewings, and decisions made with less information than they should have required.
Most tools in this space are built to help you borrow more. Homabu is built to help you understand what you can safely and honestly afford — including a comfort margin, not just a ceiling — and to be upfront about the lending nuances that a headline number glosses over.
Homabu is named after Mount Homabu, a peak in Papua New Guinea's Southern Highlands. Getting a clear view before you commit to something significant felt like the right idea to build a brand around — a home purchase is one of the few decisions in life where a bit of altitude, and a clearer line of sight, genuinely changes the outcome.
See what you can honestly afford, including the lending nuances that matter.
Get started →Homabu uses Google Analytics, but only after you consent via the cookie banner — it never loads before that. We don't sell data, run ads, or share what you enter into the calculator with anyone; your inputs are processed in your browser and never sent to our servers.
Some pages link to independent partners (see below). If you click through to one, that partner's own site may set a tracking cookie or similar technology to attribute the referral back to us — this happens on their site, not ours, and is covered by their own privacy policy. We link to a partner's privacy policy wherever practical.
Homabu links to a small number of independent partners — a mortgage broker, a conveyancing comparison service, a home insurance comparison site, and Checkmyfile, a credit report service. We may earn a commission if you use these links, at no extra cost to you.
Partners are chosen for genuine fit with a first-time buyer's actual next step, not for the size of the commission they pay. We favour whole-of-market brokers and comparison services over single-provider tie-ups, for the same reason the calculator shows every mortgage tier rather than just the standard one: a bigger number isn't automatically a better outcome, and neither is the first option offered to you.
Question, correction, partnership enquiry, or just want to say hello — send a message and it'll come straight through.