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ATCO CEO Nancy Southern addresses the company's annual meeting in Calgary, May 15, 2018.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press

Calgary-based ATCO Ltd. is launching a new home-services company as its CEO, Nancy Southern, says she is optimistic about the prospects of Alberta’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new company, Rümi (pronounced “roomie”), is an online service that will connect users with providers ranging from plumbing and home cleaning to roofing and lawn care. The pitch to consumers is that all of the providers have been vetted by ATCO, a brand that most Albertans are familiar with as a major supplier of home electricity and natural gas.

Ms. Southern said ATCO believes there is a market for a service that takes the guesswork out of hiring contractors while also helping to co-ordinate small and large projects.

Equally important, she said the launch of Rümi is a bet on Alberta’s anticipated economic recovery as vaccines allow the province to open up from a year of pandemic restrictions and disruptions. Alberta expects to lift nearly all of its pandemic-related public-health orders by the end of the month as part of an aggressive plan designed to ensure a quick return to normal.

“We’re starting to see demand is going to materialize and people are getting ready for it,” Ms. Southern said in an interview.

“I am actually quite bullish on the Alberta economy right now.”

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Rümi will mean 200 new jobs at ATCO, including in information technology, marketing and sales. The company’s business model relies on commercial agreements signed with service providers listed on the Rümi website, which also sells housewares and other products.

Alberta was struggling long before the pandemic. A crash in the price of oil in 2014 triggered a recession that the province hadn’t fully recovered from by the time COVID-19 hit. And the start of the pandemic coincided with yet another oil collapse in early 2020 linked to a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Ms. Southern noted that housing starts, a key measure for ATCO’s residential utility business, have increased significant higher than the company’s own projections. Housing starts in April, for example, were 44 per cent higher than the same month last year.

She also pointed to commodity prices – West Texas Intermediate crude is higher than it’s been in more than two years – and increased activity recently in Alberta’s oil patch.

“I get the sense the the activity level has taken a turn,” she said. “Maybe that’s because we’re plateauing in the trough that we’ve been in, but that’s not my sense. My sense is that we’re on the uptick.”

The Alberta government’s Activity Index – which combines a range of economic indicators from employment and wages to housing starts and oil rig drilling – increased by more than 8 per cent in March compared with the same month last year. That’s the highest year-over-year increase since 2017.

The new company, Rümi, could also benefit from a home retrofit program announced by the federal government last fall. The program pays for home energy audits, after which homeowners can receive grants of up to $5,000 to make upgrades to reduce their energy use.

Marshall Wilmot, the president of ATCO Energy Ltd. and the company’s chief digital officer, said Rümi will make it easier for users to take advantage of that program, for example by allowing someone to book several services, such as window and furnace upgrades, all at once.

“We’re working actually with our service vendors on how can we best communicate those incentives and how we can actually facilitate our customers getting the value out of those government programs,” he said.

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