Are you looking to grow your home inspection business? Perhaps you have heard of the original marketing strategy… visit real estate office, after real estate office, after real estate office, in essence, relationship-based marketing.
You may have many questions when using this marketing strategy. Like, how do you calculate your ROI? How do you find which office to visit most?
Home Inspection marketing strategies change every year. Let’s talk about the updated marketing tactics for 2022.
Automated Marketing Systems
Automated marketing systems are on the rise as home inspection companies grow larger and larger within their areas. You may have heard of Search Engine Optimization, Google Ads, Social Media, or Email Marketing. Are those strategies working for you? Well, wealthier home inspection companies have more financial backings to figure out how to adjust these systems to fit the home inspection needs. Moreso, they have a larger audience to practice with.
You may have also heard of HomeAdvisor, Porch, or Angi. What do you believe is the general consensus, on these online platforms? Do you believe they work for you? Marketing specialists in our industry are less reliant on online leads, and next year, they may find ways to become completely self-reliant.
Austin Hintze, from Waypoint Property Inspections, has developed something else though, an automated agent retention system he calls it.
From what I have heard and understood, it works. It works well. Here is what the marketing genius says about his system:
“There isn’t really anything out there right now that is built to help our industry automate the process of handling referral relationships from start to finish, whether it be a realtor, loan officer, title rep, insurance company, etc. The current process is to run reports from whichever CRM a company is using and try to use those reports to maintain new/current relationships as well as revive “inactive” relationships. After trying (and failing) to stay consistent with it myself, I knew I had to build an automated system. This system allows our company to maximize the follow-up with a new agent who just did their first inspection with us, maintain relationships with current referral sources, and reach out to referral sources when they become inactive. What excites me the most is that I’ve barely scratched the surface. What I’m working on next is tracking ROI on presentations and events. One question that we always ask is how will we know it was worth our time and money? Right now we have to regularly run manual reports to track when the agents who were at the presentation/event refer us business. That’s the question I’m working on answering next through automation. Stay tuned!”
Austin Hintze – Waypoint Property Inspection (Tampa, FL.)
Other companies catering to home inspectors, Realtors, and insurance companies are developing even more sophisticated systems.
These kinds of systems may have access to MLS data. This is basically a Gold Mine of Realtor data that can be used to find out which agents you should market directly to, which agents you should ignore, and which agents are on the rise to become top-performing agents.
As a marketing agent for a home inspection company, you basically get to know your EXACT return on investment for relationship-based marketing tactics. It’s kind of a big deal.
You could use these marketing systems a step further…
What if, after using a top-performing agent, you gave your home inspection report to an insurance company, or to a local roofer, electrician, or plumber to fix the reported items. Your report findings are worth something to those local professionals. Your report data is money waiting to be taken.
It has been in talks from multiple sources, that large corporations are engineering software to be able to extract MLS data, and translate it to home inspection business owners for this purpose. Therefore, streamlining home inspector marketing and selling your report data for leads.
What does this mean for your business in 2022?
This practically means if you are not up to date on current industry news, your business could overlook massive growth opportunities. Moreover, home inspection companies with the most data (the most inspections completed) could be targeted to use these automated marketing systems FIRST. This means they could potentially use these systems not only for free but perhaps, even get paid to use them!
Here’s how it works:
Now stay with me here…
If an average report data lead equals $50 (which seems on the very low end for what the actual number could be), meaning, a professional is willing to pay $50 for this job lead, then the more inspections you complete, the more money your company is worth.
Taking this a step further, if you are using an MLS-accessed marketing software system, that costs $750/month, you need to sell 15 inspection reports for job leads to afford your marketing system.
If a home inspection company completes 3,000 jobs/year. 3,000 reports then equal $150,000 in job leads by using my made-up number. This means the data you are releasing to the MLS data accessed software is worth way more than the software itself.
This is the best kicker of it all…
Home inspection report leads are worth way more than $50. They actually are worth hundreds. According to Ben Lindberg from Lion Tree Group, a marketing agency in Wisconsin, he speculates the average job lead for the home improvement/real estate industry could be anywhere from $250 to $350 on average. Just take a look at his chart.
And when you think about it, it makes sense. From my personal inspection findings, my buyers probably save a few thousand on the deal. Taking into consideration a buyer may need a new roof, have plumbing leaks, have hazardous electrical, or even a structural issue, this is thousands of repairs that are left sitting on the table waiting for someone to buy your job lead.
Insurance companies can even utilize your home inspection report data to find homes of high liability risk.
Redoing my math from before, let’s break down your report data worth using $250 (being pessimistic about up to $350).
1,000 inspections/year x $250 avg report lead = $250,000/year left sitting on the table.
That’s just ridiculous. And guess what, it’s true. You get to use marketing or CRM software for free, and large corporations bank millions.
Should you care?
If you use the data releasing software, you can refine your marketing process. If you don’t, prepare to struggle as larger home inspection companies know their exact ROIs.
If you are a home inspector in Florida, consider joining a professional organization like the Florida Association of Building Inspectors (FABI). We meet quarterly to discuss the latest in education, industry news, and collaborate on ways we can improve our business.
