Month: May 2017

Google My Business can be very helpful in marketing your home inspection firm. It is a one-stop listing that displays your reviews, website address, photographs, and much more and Google is where the searchers are. Ninety-two percent of mobile searchers and sixty-six percent of desktop search occurs on Google. That's huge! However, at The Savvy Inspector, we have a love-hate relationship with Google in general and Google My Business too. Here's why. GMB is a very powerful tool in local marketing, but there are fewer Google My Business slots available today than ever before. Google My Business offers three slots that show up in search and guess what, the one at the top can/is a paid advertisement. Ouch! Here's another issue. Recent information has surfaced that "proximity" will be the way l...Read More

The first reason to have a home inspection website that converts visitors into paying customers is so that you can get home inspections directly from the public. A lot of inspectors are marketing strictly to real estate agents and overlook the opportunities to go to the public. Going to the public is the direction that everybody needs to be heading in because there are fewer and fewer agents in the real estate offices (except Keller Williams Offices). Also, millennials are looking online for everything, including home inspectors and that's going to continue. It's essential that you have an effective online presence. It's shocking, the number of inspectors who don't, or what they do have online is stagnant and not helpful to online shoppers. The second reason you need a website that convert...Read More

I think that you would agree with this statement… Even with the inventory shortage and rising mortgage rates there will always be people who are going to buy a home, now the numbers may be less but there will still be buyers. Heck, I bought a home when mortgage interest rates were 17% and so did many others. ;-( But here's the problem. You may be relying heavily on real estate agents for referrals right now and many of those agents are non-top producers. Non-top producers always have fewer sales when the real estate market is somewhat troubled. So in order to Bulletproof Your Business against the inventory shortage and increasing mortgage interest rates you need to spend more of your marketing efforts going direct to the public for business. In the next few posts, I'm going to share ...Read More

In my last blog post, I detailed how the inventory shortage was having a serious negative effect on home inspectors in many areas across the country. Hopefully you took a minute to visit the blog post to watch the SWOT video. If not, here is the link again. Today I want to talk about the second threat to your home inspection firm and that is rising interest rates. Higher rates can have a negative impact on housing affordability and may decrease marginal demand, especially if interest rates move significantly higher over today's levels. Did you know that for every 1% increase in interest rates it reduces the buyers ability to purchase by 10%. Let's look at an example of what this means to home buyers. The interest rate is 3.5% and the home buyers qualify for a $500,000 home, now the int...Read More

Many home inspectors are having to turn away business and even those who never wanted to be a multi-inspector firm are reconsidering their position because of the demand for inspections right now. Ken Compton here from The Savvy Inspector and I wanted to congratulate you if you have a packed schedule now but I also want to make sure that you are an effective "Marketer of Home Inspection Services" because there are a couple of external factors that may hamper the real estate market in your area as we move forward. The next housing crisis is here… and this time the crisis is primarily about one thing: lack of inventory! There is an ongoing inventory shortage across America. Some markets are desperately short of homes for sale while others aren't quite so troubled. We have talked to ins...Read More