working for anyone yet? If so how many inspections has it landed you so far? How much interest have Re agents shown? Has it been an easy sell to sellers? Inquiring minds want to know, share your stories with us please. 
Ken,
Yes to answer your question. Read the following thread, http://www.nachi.org/forum/showpost.php?p=257961&postcount=21
Bump
Just started my venture on this program yesterday…I will keep you posted
Good work Mark, I can’t give them away.
I even asked a friend of mine who is a realtor if he wanted me to inspect a listing for free, he said he would rather take his chances of the property not being inspected, or somebody the buyer hires who doesn’t know a door from a window.
I hear ya Dale… I have more Realtors here that are that way then I have that want to do the MIC. I am having more luck with the F.S.B.O than the Realtors. I did get lucky and latched onto 3 new Realtors who saw the light in this program and are using this program to attain clients. TIPS: Be selective, look for signs that say new price, price reduced, and make offer. Also, I only travel in the H.V home areas for the weather strip campaign. These home owners are more likely to go with the MIC program and make the need repairs if you do find any. Chances are you will not find any major problems. Hope this help. Please feel free to call me if you would like to talk more about it. JUST remember, I am in the eastern time zone. :mrgreen: And lets hope Nick, Chris, and Tim and get the blasted "server problem" worked out. I was trying to show off the program yesterday and it was down, and it is still **DOWN!!! :mad: **
Depending on a server or any of the other upload websites for inspection reports has always been questionable way to deliver IMHO, especially when I can just email it to the customer and be done with it. Many others really like it but Ive seen several times in here where folks were in a panic because their report host servers were T. U. for a fairly long duration. Recommend anyone who uses these to have a contingency plan (one that has been tried and tested).
I use to email all my reports too. But then for some reason I started to get refused notices, or email file to large. I have 3 different upload sites that I can fall back on when needed.
Exactly!
Email is the way to go. I send the reports as an encrypted pdf file and attach the photos as a separate slide show in groups of photos no larger than (30). I advise the client to check their email in box, trash and or spam folders if they don’t see the report by the next morning. I almost never get a phone call where someone can’t find the report.
I’ve had clients and realtors who are on dialup and complain about getting large emails. I’ve never had a complaint since I started posting the reports on my website and sending links to the client and their agent if needed. Not sure what FetchReport would do for me that I can’t do for myself fairly easily.
Brian:
FetchReport is slowly adding optional deals and gift certificates from the Fortune 500 companies in the HeadStart Guides http://www.nachi.org/homeheadstartguide2007.htm. These are free to your clients simply by clicking on them. They are located at the bottom of each report uploaded to FetchReport. Your client can click on any coupon or gift certificate that they want or none if they don’t want any of them. Currently we don’t have many on the FetchReport system but we have deals for about $1,200.00 worth of free stuff for your client in the works.
What we’ve done basically is added $1,200.00 of value to your home inspection. It costed you nothing. It costed your client nothing. We hope to eventually get to the point where people who have NO USE for a home inspection, order inspections anyway, from those members who upload to FetchReport, just to get the $1,200.00.
Having worked with these companies for years now, I can assure you that it is very unlikely that you can “do it yourself fairly easily.” They are slower than molases in January.
Nick -
That’s interesting. All I’ve really heard about FetchReports is the problems posted on the forums, and the delivery of my report is something I’m very protective of. Sounds like you are making progress, new server and all these coupons, etc. I will check it out this winter when things slow down a bit. Thanks for the headsup.
– bz
That, of course, also means that he would rather take his chances in the legal system when everyone gets sued for playing ignorant. Ignorance in today’s real estate transactions is not the way to go. In fact, I read a court case in Summer 2006 where the judge said that Realtors who are making 3% commission, or $15,000 or a $500,000 home, should be spending $399 for a home inspection so that they will know exactly what they are trying to sell. I think he had a great point, and I used that successfully to get many Realtors here to do pre-listing inspections. It works better with new Realtors than with older, established Realtors. And it probably won’t work with the #1 Realtors at all since many of them, making millions and millions of dollars a year, apparently don’t care about the measly lawsuit for $15,000. They just consider it a cost of doing business.
“Let’s see. I just got another lawsuit, this one for $25,000. I’m projected to make $14.7 million this year, and $25,000 would be a tax-deductible business expenses. Hey, Martha? Can you write a check for $25,000 to Paul and Heather McCartner for me? Thanks!”
If it’s always been a questionable way to deliver something, I suspect one hasn’t been using the right hosting companies. There are many companies around that have been using multiple redundancies, mirroring, and T-5 lines for over a decade now.
And as the Internet world grew, and bandwith became scarce, many Internet Service Providers started putting limits on the size of attachments, as well as the number of attachments, especially the free ISP’s.
Outside of people setting up their sites and servers (such as fetchreport.com being in beta testing still, I believe), the only people I’ve found with problems are those on dial-up since their computer or ISP will time them out because the download process is soooooooooooooo slow.
The reason was that as more and more people joined the Internet, bandwith became scarcer and scarcer, so ISP’s started putting limits on the size of email attachments, as well as the number of email attachments. When I started error messages and complaints about files that were 500 MB, or had too many attachments, I started uploading reports to my web site and simply sending a link. Solved every problem.
Even in my scraper reports, by using the best PDF-creating software I could find (usually Adobe), a report that was, say, 5 MB in Word only created a 500 KB PDF. So my regular reports, even with 50 pictures, are rarely over 400 KB anymore.
I read where someone has PDF files that are 1.5 MB. If your files are over 500 KB, you need to find better PDF-creating software. There’s a ton of them out there.
I use the real Adobe product mostly, but Cute PDF, PDF Creator, and PDFX-change also create very small PDF files.
Email is the way to go! Simply upload one’s reports to one’s web site and then include a link to the report in the email. Drives traffic to one’s web site, thereby increasing traffic rankings and search engine results.
After I started doing that, my web site ranking in Alexa went from nowhere to, 30 days later, 1.4 million, and 30 days after that, to 465,000. All of a sudden I went from nowhere in search engine results to #1 on page 4 which was the first home inspector listing for San Diego County and various cities here–Realtors and other real estate companies had purchased the first three pages of “home inspector” listings.
Ditto here.
However, I think the benefits of the “Move In Certified” program with FetchReport will far outweight whatever I could possibly do myself.
I believe that when one has professionals providing products for free, one should try to use those products. In all of my business career, I’ve never been disappointed yet, and I don’t expect Move In Certified and FetchReport to disappoint either.
While you’re checking it out, remember to read my question and answer interview with Michael & Michelle about the Move In Certified program. Whenever I find a new question, I email them and put their answer in the document, so it gets updated on a regular basis.
Hey Russell;
How do you up load a report with photos to your website, but keep it confidential where everyone else can’t see it? For example, I have sample reports via links on my website, but anyone can look at them.
Thanks,
ps: How’s the NACHI E-Newsletter coming along;-) I know the answer, but was wondering if you’ve been denied access to the system as well…