The report and website formats translate very nicely onto a smart phone screen.
“Terreport now free for all InterNACHI members”
Well, that’s because its free to everyone, according to their site.
Watching… Looks interesting. Waiting on a review from the first wave of guinea pigs.
What’s wrong with you giving it a try and reporting back??
One would wonder how a company can create and maintain a product without charging something for it. No in app ads. No monthly fee.
Nothing is ever totally free. There has to be a source of revenue for them somewhere.
Did you read these in depth??
I might in the off season. Too busy right now to look further into it. When I do, I will.
No, didn’t go that far. Figured that with no cost, no advertising on the website, there had to be something behind the scene. Just looked over the terms, etc. Pretty much what I suspected. Like I said, nothing is free. No company does things that don’t in some way drive revenue.
A few of you have asked about our model… You’re right nothing is truly for free. So whats the catch. Well No catch really. We just have a different business model. We are a new media magazine company. In short we can make far more revenue from advertisers like HomeDepot, Quicken Loans, Geico and IKEA advertising in our magazine than by charging home inspectors $20 / month.
The latter SaaS fee has obvious limits in terms of revenue. Meaning even if we have 1,000 inspectors signup to use Terreport - thats only $20,000 per month.
The real question should be - how do our competitors make any money? Perhaps prices have gone up in recent years?
So there really is no catch. We wont charge home inspectors anything but we will be making a magazine called Yardgrass & Co available in the near future.
This magazine (think Better Home & Gardens but with less decor and recipes and more economics and houseware) is entirely opt-in and opt-out for the inspector and the client at anytime.
Its a high quality content magazine that we know consumers will value, its free and best of all for home inspectors that decide to opt-in to the magazine they get their name, photo, logo, and contact details on front cover of the magazine to their clients. It’s great crm that drives repeats and referrals - and is also free for inspectors
What isn’t free is the HomeDepot ad or article inside the magazine.
That’s our business model. Partially display ads and partially affiliate marketing.
We are also launching a product for Realtors called TerRealtor later this year. Same basic business model.
So do we ever spam your clients - Never
Is there advertising the Terreport app? Never
Is there advertising in the Terreport inspection report? Never
Do we sell data? Never
But we do enable our inspectors and realtors to provide clients with a high quality digital magazine that is free and optional - and yes there is advertising in that magazine.
We like our business model. It makes much more sense to us to generate revenue from deep corporate advertiser pockets than trying to nickel and dime individual hard working home inspectors.
I’m currently checking out Terreport and have come across an apparent issue. It seems you cannot save custom phrases specific to certain sections of the report (i.e. “debris observed in gutters” in roofing section). Instead, it requires you to choose from the entire bank of saved phrases (hundreds??) regardless of what part of the property you are inspecting. I do not want to sift through plumbing, garage, deck etc. comments when trying to find my go-to phrase for communicating that there is a family of armadillos living in the crawlspace.
Any Terreport experts know how to solve this issue? Thanks!
Hi Adam - we have smart search in the phrases section so that if you type any word that is part of the phrase you are looking for - it will show up. For example - if you saved “Debris observed in gutters” in phrases - you just need to type in gutters and every phrase having to do with gutters will appear. hope that helps!
Thanks, Adeleine. I appreciate your help and that is a smart feature. From my perspective, however, it would be better to have the the specific bank of phrases stored in each section as clicking a box is much more efficient than typing a word on an iPad or phone. I imagine the time saved by clicking vs. typing throughout the entire report would be significant.
None the less I am impressed with many other features and will be testing out Terreport this afternoon.
Thank you for the insight.
A question though.
You are a magazine company that earns revenue from advertising. Nothing new there.
Why then, would you go to the expense of developing software and supporting hardware to offer free to inspectors with no expectation of any funding? What is the connection?
Hi Adeleine, great software. My question is:
How can I create a single template that is shared by multiple inspectors? From what I understand when I tried the Terreport, the template that I created stays within my account only? And that if the other inspectors are to use the “company template”, each of them need to copy-n-paste each narrative? Very tedious task, but I’m sure you’ve already figured this out. Looking forward to your advice! Cheers!
Hi Norman - can you send me the template (or a sample inspection) you wish to have shared to multiple users? I can have it created as a system template. this will allow other users to select it. thanks! marketing@terreport.com.
Also, Adeleine, I’ve read the FAQs regarding working offline. I do work in a somewhat rural area and there are just a handful of times that I don’t have data connection in the field, so I’m creating a template that will also work in offline mode and I may just use offline mode every time. In the FAQs, it said that if you work offline, you would just need to upload the report to the server when you’re done. It’s that simple right?
Adeleine,
I’m creating my own report template in Terreport now and it seems like it will speed up my reporting time tremendously. I do have a question…InterNACHI specific. Is there a way to upload, drag/drop, etc. the narratives from the InterNACHI library? I have the library in both Excel and Word formats.
Thank you
Hi Ryan - regarding working offline - yes - you just need to click “sync to server” when you are back in an area with internet. In fact as soon as you are back in internet range and you open the app - a system notification will ask you if you want to sync to server.
To set your own template as your default in offline mode:
- Go to Report Templates (Create your own report template if you haven’t created one yet).
- Click on “Actions” button of the report template you want to use, and click on “View/Edit”.
- Click on “Actions” button on the report template view page, and select “Set as an Offline Template”
You can also convert any inspection you are in the middle of completing - into an offline one by clicking on the orange action button.