The Advisor and the Transaction Companion

What the Companion is

A single workspace, tied to a single transaction (a sale you are running, a purchase you are preparing, or an active dispute), holding four kinds of content:

• A timeline. Every document, message, call note, and decision anchored to a date and a stage of the transaction. The spine of your record.
• A document vault. Encrypted storage for the sale and purchase agreement, the agency agreement, the LIM, the building report, the Healthy Homes compliance statement, disclosure documents, inspection reports, and the correspondence that accompanied each.
• A communication archive. Agent emails forwarded in. SMS and WhatsApp threads uploaded. Call notes written in your own words. Each entry linked to the documents and timeline events it relates to.
• The Advisor. Reads across all of the above. Answers questions, drafts responses, flags patterns, points you to the relevant rule and guide pages on this site.

What the Advisor does, in a session

• Document review. Walk through a sale and purchase agreement, agency agreement, disclosure statement, building report, or LIM against the rule pages that govern each document. Ask: what does this clause mean? what does it commit me to? is this standard?
• Conversation review. Forward or paste a transcript, an email thread, or an agent script. Identify the pattern it fits, the statute or rule that bears on it, and — if useful — a draft written response in your own voice.
• Decision briefing. Prepare for a specific upcoming call, meeting, or decision. Work through the likely scripts, the questions to ask, the positions to hold.
• Cross-document checks. Compare a disclosure draft against the building report it cites. Check a quote against invoices logged in the vault. Verify that a condition date is still live.
• Calendar of conditions. Condition dates, settlement dates, and auction dates exported to your calendar so nothing is missed.

What it is not

• Not legal advice. Every session ends on the same boundary: when a specific decision turns on legal advice, you are pointed to a NZ-qualified solicitor.
• Not financial advice. The Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 defines a regulated financial adviser. The Advisor is not one.
• Not an automation layer. The Advisor does not send emails, post to forums, file complaints, or act on your behalf. Everything it produces is for you to review and, if you choose, to send yourself.
• Not an agent portal. Agents are not users of the Companion. They remain external parties communicating with you via email, SMS, or WhatsApp — exactly as today. The Companion is your record of that communication.
• Not a marketplace. No referral fees, no partner listings, no "recommended providers." When you need a solicitor, inspector, or valuer, the Companion points you to independent NZ directories (REA, LBP register, NZIBI).

International context

The combination of independent (no broker commission, no referral fees), full journey (pre-listing through post-settlement), documents + communication unified, and non-profit is not currently offered by any product we have surveyed in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, or the Netherlands. Closest international analogs (Dotloop, Coadjute, Settled, Orchard, HomeZada, HomeOwners Alliance) each break one or more of these requirements. The Companion is, to the best of our knowledge, a globally novel product.

The full international benchmark and the systematic design for the Companion are published openly in the project repository, consistent with the radical-transparency principle. See the Founding Principles and the transparency ledger.

Who it is for

Members working through a live transaction — a sale they are running, a purchase they are preparing, a dispute after settlement, or a compliance question as an owner. The Advisor is not designed for browsers or researchers; the Glossary, Rules, and Guides serve that audience.

Privacy and data handling

• Client-side encryption. Documents are encrypted on your device before upload. We store ciphertext only.
• No training use. User documents and conversations are never used to train third-party or in-house models.
• Opt-in anonymisation. If you choose, the documents and conversations from your transaction can contribute (fully anonymised) to the research corpus — the source of the NZ-specific patterns research that currently does not exist. Your name, your address, specific property details, and any identifying third parties are stripped before the bundle enters the corpus.
• Deletion on request is immediate and permanent. Confirmed in writing.
• Export your data at any time. First-class feature from v0.7.

See the Privacy Notice for the full regime.

Roadmap

• v0.5 (shipped April 2026). The static content layer — guides, rule pages, letter templates, toolcase, case studies, glossary. Members self-assemble a workspace from their own notes.
• v0.7 (target mid-2026). Transaction Companion MVP. Account creation. Per-transaction workspace. Encrypted document vault. Manually added timeline events. Advisor bound to a transaction's documents and timeline.
• v1.0 (target Q3–Q4 2026). Email forwarding address per transaction. Chat-thread import (WhatsApp, iMessage). Calendar .ics export. Solicitor read-only share link. Opt-in anonymisation pipeline to the research corpus.
• Post-v1.0. Reviews integration (completed Companion transactions anchor verified reviews). Multilingual Companion alongside the seven-language rollout.

Pricing

Free until 100 active members. An active member is someone who has had at least one real conversation in the last 30 days — not signups, not dormant accounts. Once 100 active members is reached, a Pro tier (~NZD 19–29 / month) will be introduced. The founding 100 retain free or discounted access permanently. Hardship waivers are available on request.

Availability

The Advisor is in closed testing as of April 2026. Public access is planned for Q2 2026. If you want an early invitation — or to join the founding 100 — let us know via the newsletter.