4 Steps to Succeed in Any Real Estate Slowdown

October 19, 2022

The trick to success in any real state slowdown is simple. Make it easy for your clients to navigate through the home inspection process and make sure agents know how you are doing it.

Any home inspector can do it with these four simple steps.

1. Know Thy Inspection Client

Over the past few years, agents and clients have become a bit more “millennial”. They use their phones for everything except making a voice phone call. They would much rather text, email, or use a website.

White glove or red carpet service has taken a completely different meaning. It used to mean personal one-on-one relationship based service. Now it means simple, low friction, and easy to do from my phone kind of service.

Have you adapted to meet the changing needs and expectations of your clients and agents?

2. Build Your Brand to Stand Out

It’s hard to stand out in the home inspection business. Most homebuyers just don’t understand the difference between one home inspection company and the other. That is where branding comes in.

Your brand is not just a pitch. It is how you and your company stand out from all the other home inspectors. Do you deliver reports onsite? That speed of delivery can make you stand out. Do you offer a warranty or recall check? People love a freebie. Do you offer discounted Radon, mold, or sewer scope? Your competitors MAY NOT.

Deciding how your branding will fit into a new market takes time. But now is the best time to do it and use these 5 Musts to Market Your Home Inspection Business on the Internet.

3. Socialize to Grow Your Referral Network

Now is the time to be out there talking and meeting up with agents and even other home inspectors. You may have had to turn away an agent or two when things got busy. Now is the time to reconnect and let them know you are in it for the long haul. Be sure they will come back to you.

Not all home inspectors are your competition. Once you establish a place in your local market, there is plenty of work to go around. Other home inspectors become your colleagues, and you realize it is in all your interests to work toward some common goals.

Over the last few years, it’s been next to impossible to find a time to meet up. Once the days get shorter and everyone’s business slows down, it gets easier. Make the effort and meet up. Tell your war stories, and listen to theirs. Share the struggle. Being a home inspector is unlike anything else.

4. Scale Up With a Tool Like Tap Inspect

Now that you’ve taken care of the basics to help your home inspection business succeed, it’s time to invest in solutions that will save time, boost efficiency, and help grow your business even more.

Tools like Tap Inspect let you schedule new jobs right from your phone while you are out in the field networking and inspecting. Being able to share media rich reports almost immediately after the inspection helps you stand out from the competition.

Tap Inspect Autopilot helps you scale up even more. Automating your agreements, invoicing, and collecting online payments gives you more time to market and inspect.

Autopilot messaging sends automatic reminders and follow up messages to your clients and agents. Giving your brand the professionalism to stand out from the competition.

NEW: Autopilot Scheduled Messages

October 19, 2022

Good communication is the key to keeping your clients and agents informed throughout their home inspection process. Messaging is the primary way your clients and agents experience that communication.

This works well but it is only part of delivering an incredible experience to your clients and agents.

Why Scheduled Messages?

Client and agent messages are sent when certain events occur in the lifecycle of a job. These are events like when you confirm when you reschedule, or when the inspection results are available for the job.

Scheduled messages are different. They let you set up and send automated messages before or after many points in the lifecycle of a job.

This lets you can send reminders before the inspection and send follow-up messages afterward. Providing an end-to-end customer experience that your clients and agents will appreciate.

What does it look like and how can I use it?

A scheduled message is just like any other Autopilot message. With one exception. You can tell Tap Inspect to deliver the message before or after an event that occurs in the lifecycle of an Autopilot job. Not just when the event occurs.

You can schedule your messages to be delivered minutes, hours, days, or months before and after most events.

Your account is set up with a few default scheduled messages but they are disabled by default. You can use these or add your own.

Get Started With Scheduled Messages

Sign into your web account and go to your Messaging settings page. This is where you can enable the default scheduled messages to start using them immediately or add new scheduled messages.

Tap on an Inspection Reminder message to open it. Enable the message and tap Save Changes at the bottom of the screen. That message will be sent the day before the Inspection Date of the next job on your schedule.

You are all set! Enable the other messages you want to send. Edit the body to fit your voice and branding and save the changes.

Your clients and agents will appreciate you keeping them informed and prepared with end-to-end communications.

How Simple Pricing Helps Land More Inspections

July 7, 2021

Landing a new home inspection client usually comes down to only two things. Can you do the inspection within the time allowed in their purchase contract? Is your price reasonable?

In a Porch survey of 998 home buyers, 72% only considered one inspector before deciding who to hire. That fits with the home inspection industry opinion that the first home inspector to talk to a buyer will usually get the job. So why do so many home inspectors stress so much about their pricing?

Do you Guesstimate or Complicate Your Pricing?

A lot of home inspectors seem to “just know” what the price should be once they’ve talked to someone about a job. I’ve heard more than one inspector say “That will be $350 for that size home” while talking on the phone and driving down the highway. It’s pretty much just a guesstimate so they can get to a yes or a no and get on with their day.

Others have incredibly complicated pricing models that take into consideration almost everything they could know about the property and the job. How far away is it? How many square feet is the home? What is the age of the home? Is there a crawl space? And more!

It can turn into a game of twenty questions and your potential client might not even know most of the answers. That is not way to help a new client feel comfortable and confident that you will help them through the home inspection process.

Keep it Simple

Autopilot starts you out with the most common industry pricing model. There is a base price that goes up based on how much larger the home is above some minimum. You only need one piece of information about the home, the square feet, and the pricing calculator does all the math for you.

You know your market best. Is the base price too low? Is it too high? Adjust it to what makes sense in your area. Is the minimum square feet ending up being too large of a home? Adjust it to fit the types of homes you typically inspect.

Why Simple Pricing Works

Simple pricing helps land more inspections because your new client feels comfortable with you and does not get overwhelmed. Remember, the home inspection process is just another step in the Homebuyer’s Journey. When we help our clients feel comfortable and cared for an extra $25 or $50 becomes a small price to pay. You become their home inspection hero by guiding them through the home inspection process.

New: Save Time and Simplify your Inspection Business with Autopilot

April 6, 2021

There is so much more to running a home inspection company than just doing inspection reports. That is why we built Autopilot.

Autopilot is a suite of powerful features that automate job scheduling and the back office tasks of providing your home inspection services. It is our biggest update since we launched Tap Inspect over 10 years ago.

We had three goals when building Autopilot.

Reduce the hassles of providing home inspection services.
Save you the time spent doing repetitive scheduling chores.
Deliver a better inspection experience to your clients and your agents.

We translated all of the best practices that we’ve developed in our 20+ years of personal experience in the home inspection industry into building a shockingly easy-to-use system. It is simple, sleek, and efficient. Just like the Tap Inspect reporting app.

Autopilot is based on the idea that clients contact you to provide some type of service. Usually a service like a home inspection. Once you set up your services Autopilot takes care of the rest. Just set it and forget it to prevent costly mistakes and remove worry. Learn more about Services in our help center.

Have confidence that you are providing a professional experience, regardless of how busy you are. You will have happier client relationships by earning more positive reviews and referrals to grow your business.

Scheduling Made Simple

When it comes to booking new inspection jobs it usually comes down to availability and price. Scheduling jobs with Autopilot makes it simple to get to both quickly and simply. We designed the scheduling workflow based on how you already talk to potential clients on the phone.

Your Tap Inspect calendar makes it easy to find open availability at a glance, even with multiple inspectors. Connect your personal Google calendars to block out time so you don’t double book.

The simple price calculator easily lets you bid the job on the phone so you can book it on the first call. Then it’s as easy as getting the property information and the people involved.

Provide a Better Inspection Experience

The web based Client Portal provides a professional experience to your clients and agents by putting everything related to their inspection in one place. To add more of a professional touch it is branded with your Company and User information.

Clients & agents are kept notified with important updates or when they need to take action with Autopilot’s automated Messaging system.

There’s no need to manually send messages. You can also customize the messaging language across all of the automated emails.

Agreements and E-Signing

Autopilot Agreements help prevent a simple mistake from costing you thousands later. Reduce your home inspection liability by sending your agreements as soon as you schedule a new job and by requiring signatures on your agreements before anyone can access your inspection results. Your clients can electronically sign or sign in person on your device when you are at the job.

Agreements are automatically added and sent before the scheduled job to give your client plenty of time to review and ask any questions. Add one or multiple agreements for each job. You can also add or remove agreements after the job has been confirmed.

Autopilot Agreements are much cheaper than services like Docusign and easier than manually sending agreements from another service. Learn more about Agreements in our help center.

Invoicing and Price Calculators

Autopilot Invoices are created for you automatically from the services you are providing on the job. The Invoice feature lets you choose to require payment before clients can access the inspection results so you can quit chasing clients or manually sending reminders for payment.

The Invoice feature is also what lets you do near instant pricing of potential jobs while you are still on the phone with a potential client so you can respond quickly & win more jobs.

No more guesstimating because Autopilot does the math for you. The customizable price calculators work for any business and accommodate multiple variables like square feet, travel distance, age of home, crawlspace, etc They even work with optional add-on services like Radon Testing, etc Learn more about Invoicing in our help center.

Online Payments

Tap Inspect Payments is an optional feature that provides a Pay Now button on your invoices. That makes it quick and easy to get paid by your clients. You will often get paid before you even show up for the inspection.

With Tap Inspect Payments there is no more switching between payment systems or double entry job prices and contact info. You can accept payment through the mobile app at the job site, over the phone in the office, or clients can pay directly from the Client Portal.

Accept all major credit cards and the fees are competitive with other credit card processing alternatives. Learn more about Payments in our help center.

Get Started with Autopilot

Some home inspectors will only need the ability to send agreements and collect signatures. Other inspectors may also want the ability to send invoices and to enforce payment before anyone can access the inspection results. You choose what features and what restrictions you want to enforce for your clients.

The best part is that you can start today without any extra costs because all these features are included in your existing Tap Inspect subscription.

Getting started is simple. Go to your Autopilot settings page of your web account to take the Quick Tour. Then use our 4 step setup wizard that will help you set up your first Service along with a sample agreement and some default pricing to get you up and running.

Get started with Autopilot to take control of your business today!

Tag: autopilot