TL;DR
Forbes published a feature on August 4, 2026 examining how data is transforming homeownership, from energy efficiency to home management apps to grid participation. Oply's CEO Lindsey Chrismon was featured in the piece, sharing data from inside the app that reveals something significant: homeowners are not waiting for someone to hand them a system. They are building one themselves.
Forbes contributor Jennifer Castenson published a piece this week examining what she called a new frontier in homeownership: the shift from reactive ownership to data-driven control. The article covers smart home technology, energy efficiency investment, grid participation, and home management apps, and Oply is featured in the middle of it.
Read the full Forbes feature here: Data Reshapes Home Control And Drives New Investment Frontiers
The reason we were included is what Oply's own data is showing about how homeowners actually behave when given the right tools.
What the app data revealed
Oply's data shows that nearly a third of the projects homeowners have entered into the app in the last 90 days are projects they had done previously, work that happened before Oply, now being documented retroactively.
That number is worth sitting with. Homeowners are not just logging new maintenance as it happens. They are going back, months or years, to reconstruct a history of work their homes had done that never lived anywhere except memory and scattered receipts. They are building a digital maintenance record for a home that never had one.
As Lindsey Chrismon, Oply's CEO, told Forbes: "They're going back and rebuilding a history of the house that never existed anywhere. And a lot of the rest isn't repairs at all; it's people documenting where their water, gas, and electrical shutoffs are, before anything ever breaks. They're writing the owner's manual their house never came with."
That last line is the whole thesis. The home is the only major asset most people own that arrives without an operating manual. Homeowners have always known this. What is changing is that they are done accepting it.
The second data point is just as telling
Beyond what homeowners are logging, Oply's data shows something important about what happens when they are given a clear, specific recommendation.
Recommended tasks from the app — the ones where Oply tells the homeowner exactly what to do and when — get completed at twice the rate of tasks the homeowner sets themselves.
This is the behavior pattern that makes a home maintenance tracking system work over time. Homeowners do not fail at maintenance because they do not care. They fail at it because the information required to act — what needs to be done, when, and why — is not surfaced at the right moment. When it is, they follow through at double the rate.
That is not a feature. It is a model for how homeownership should work.
What Forbes identified about the broader category
The Forbes piece is not just about Oply. It examines a wider shift happening across the home industry — one in which data is flowing from inside and outside the home in ways that did not exist five years ago.
GoodLeap, a financial technology company, reports that 156,633 homeowners have completed two or more funded home improvement projects through its platform, with 60 to 71 percent starting a different project category on the second project — suggesting homeowners are making data-informed decisions about improving different aspects of their homes over time rather than all at once.
Green Builder Media's COGNITION Smart Data reports that 73.4 percent of consumers said they would purchase an all-electric home in 2026, up from 36.7 percent in 2025 — a 100 percent increase in a single year, driven in large part by access to data about costs and efficiency.
The pattern is consistent: when homeowners have better information, they make better decisions. The question has always been how to get them that information in a form they can actually act on.
Wilhelm Lundborg, founder and CEO of home management platform Homer, framed it directly in the Forbes piece: "If there are two homes that are the same and one has everything documented, it reduces risk for a new homeowner. It lowers the risk stepping into a home with receipts, documentation, home improvements, timelines captured. That is added value."
Documentation is not paperwork. It is the difference between a home that can speak for itself and one that cannot.
Why this matters beyond press coverage
Getting featured in Forbes is meaningful. But the more important thing the feature confirms is that the problem Oply is solving is real, measurable, and being independently validated by homeowners' own behavior.
Homeowners are retroactively rebuilding home histories they never had. They follow through on maintenance at twice the rate when they are told exactly what to do. They are documenting shutoffs and panels before anything breaks — not because someone told them to, but because they understand, perhaps for the first time, that the home is the only major asset that comes with no operating manual.
As Chrismon told Forbes: "The home is the only major asset that comes with no operating manual. Homeowners are done waiting. They're building the record themselves, before anything breaks."
That shift — from reactive ownership to intentional documentation — is what gets a home insurance claim paid when a drone audit says "deferred maintenance." It is what protects resale value when a buyer asks what has been done and when. It is what makes the homeowner's problem solvable instead of just manageable.
Oply is an AI-powered home maintenance platform built for exactly this. Not a marketplace, not a home services directory, not a contractor CRM. A system of record that gives the home the memory it never had — so that the Carfax for your home exists before the moment you need it.
The bottom line
Forbes identified data as the new frontier of homeownership. The data from inside Oply's app confirms what that frontier actually looks like in practice: homeowners going back to rebuild histories that never existed, completing recommended maintenance at twice the rate when they know exactly what to do.
The owner's manual the home never came with? Homeowners are writing it themselves. Oply is the place it lives.
