When 24-year-old Nick Melrose realised he was nowhere near buying his first property, despite working in financial modelling and diligently saving, he did what any spreadsheet-obsessed young professional might do: he built his own.
“I’d saved what I thought was a deposit,” Nick says, “but I quickly realised I was nowhere close. Given I was doing financial modelling for work at the time, I naturally just started building a financial model for that scenario.”
That model would grow into a 20,000-formula Excel sheet, passed around to friends on Zoom calls, and eventually become the prototype for ScaleApp, a new platform launching 14th July that lets users simulate and optimise a path to property ownership.
At its core, ScaleApp “helps young Aussies struggling with the cost of living by providing a free tool to simulate their life plan and visualise a pathway to home ownership and beyond.”
Originally kickstarted with seed capital from Nick’s former boss after he resigned from his previous job, ScaleApp has since raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, and most recently backed by REACH, the National Association of Realtors’ global innovation fund and incubator.
A fintech designed for first-home buyers
Nick calls it “an education-first, life-planning tool” that enables users to model everything from income tax and HECS/HELP (Higher Education Loan Program) repayments to capital gains, rental income and joint ownership.
“There’s not really a dollar left unturned,” he says. “First-time buyers no longer have to choose between traditional budgeting tools and property analysis tools which neglect their personal finances.”
By bringing personal budgeting and property portfolio forecasting into a single tool, ScaleApp aims to give clarity to the 3.5 million Australians currently facing the dual pressures of the cost of living and housing affordability while saving towards ownership.
Unlike most financial tools that rely on static charts or broad annual assumptions, ScaleApp uses a gamified, interactive 50-year financial timeline to visualise life decisions on a monthly basis, from deposit savings to refinancing or portfolio expansion, in a format Nick says feels “more like editing a TikTok or iMovie than building a property strategy.”
The platform lets users simulate different scenarios to assess & compare their wealth trajectory. Powered by PropTrack data, “ScaleApp provides the real-world utility of being able to stand in an open home, search the property, and know immediately if it fits your strategy,” he says.
“You can compare real properties, import them directly into your strategy and see which one makes the most sense.”
It’s already resonating: 2,600 people joined the waitlist prior to launch, with projected access to over 68,000 users through early partnerships.
Anonymous, accurate, and AI-supported
Privacy is a major point of difference. Users create accounts anonymously, no surnames, no ID verification, no bank integration required.
“You can be whoever you want,” Nick says. “Our first screen says, ‘What’s your first name? Don’t worry about your last name – we’re not a bank, and we don’t care.’”
This anonymity hopes to build trust, particularly with digital-native users wary of having their financial data sold or used for lead generation.
Behind the scenes, the app’s financial engine underwent an extensive audit by a global accounting and advisory firm to ensure its accuracy.
And if users need help understanding a concept, the in-app AI Tutor, trained on ScaleApp’s proprietary content library, delivers real-time explanations on key financial concepts from tax to property metrics and more.
A monetisation model that grows with the user
Despite being free to use for first-time buyers, ScaleApp has a long-term commercial strategy.
As users mature into owners and investors, they can access paid features including $25/month portfolio tracking, in-app property analysis tokens, and access to curated service partners.
Nick also created ScaleConnect, a broker-focused tool that eliminates the industry’s reliance on annual reviews by providing live updates on clients’ financial readiness.
“Brokers were telling me they were always too early or too late when reaching out to existing clients,” he says. “We’re replacing the need for annual reviews with a direct feed into the client’s strategy.”
Future growth will also be driven by Scale Insights – an analytics engine using anonymised cohort data to assess how macroeconomic and policy shifts affect real Australians. Nick sees this as essential infrastructure for regulators and institutions.
“We want to be able to say; what’s the genuine impact of a 25 basis point change in interest rates for first-time buyers who have just bought in NSW, for example,” he says.
“We already show this to our users, but that kind of granularity doesn’t exist right now at the macroeconomic level.”
A product built for the moment
Nick is clear on the problem: “Housing affordability has become the generation-defining issue faced by young Aussies. ScaleApp exists to provide an impartial, versatile tool to help users navigate an increasingly fluid property market with low-cost access to the insights required to plan for ownership, mitigate risk, and succeed in their property goals”.
It’s a bold ambition, but in what Nick says is the only consumer platform combining personal budgeting, tax simulation, and full-cycle property analysis, it might be one of the few with the technical and product foundations to support it.
“Everyone in my generation is actively trying to solve this problem,” he says. “We just want to give them the tools to do it properly.”
