Hello, we're IOT Homes.

This started with something most people have sat through. You ring a tradesman, somebody turns up, and nobody will tell you what it is going to cost. The rate is by the hour, the clock starts at the door, and you find out the total at the end — by which point the work is done and there is not much of a conversation left to have.

Almost nothing else is bought that way. We could never see why a leaking tap should be the exception, and when nobody could give us a good reason, we decided to run a company that did not do it.

So IOT Homes started doing the work London homes always need — leaks, boilers, sockets, the things that stop a house working properly. Most of it was in East London, and a good deal of it still is.

What built the business was not clever marketing. It was turning up when we said we would and charging what we said we would, until people started recommending us to their neighbours and their landlords.

As homes changed, so did the work. Air conditioning stopped being unusual. Thermostats, doorbells and cameras became things people wanted fitted properly rather than wrestled with themselves. So we brought in engineers qualified to do them.

The most recent change is this website. Booking a tradesperson online is not something we invented — but doing it with the price shown up front, for every service we offer, is still rarer than it should be. That is the part we are trying to get right.