Bluehammer is a home maintenance and renovation pricing tool for consumers and real estate agents.
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Bluehammer is a home maintenance and renovation pricing tool for consumers and real estate agents.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: All agents, teams and brokerages
Top selling points
- Exceptionally detailed project lists
- Categorized project selection
- Intuitive user experience
- Homeowner’s insurance report
Top concerns
An integration with a transaction management tool would be very beneficial (but not necessary).
What you should know
Bluehammer helps real estate agents closely estimate the cost of a home improvement project for their clients and track the items, appliances and systems in their home.
Conceptually, there’s nothing original about bluehammer, as a number of personal home management sites, tools and apps already exist.
However, bluehammer stands out in its milieu for several reasons, the first being its very clean user experience.
Despite needing to communicate a great deal of pricing data, unique items names, finish types and essentially the entire lexicon of a homebuilder, bluehammer chose to consolidate user content into a sleek, half-screen ladder of drop-down menus and tabs.
This way, users can review and interact with small blocks of information at a time. It’s a subtle design element that doesn’t overwhelm the screen or take away from the software’s core competency.
The heart of bluehammer is the home improvement calculator, a highly granular home project oversight tool.
Users start by selecting a Popular Project, such as a bathroom remodel or new kitchen counters, or they can search by “individual actions,” which are smaller, one-off projects.
After entering a few summary items about the home, each project is then broken down into a Summary, Details and Report.
The subcategory menu of projects is where users will choose to do a complete remodel or work on a specific item within a room.
The Project Details feature gets deep into the nuts and bolts of what it takes to fix or upgrade anything in the home, being detailed enough to ask for individual wall dimensions so it can estimate time required and paint volume based on the average costs within the home’s ZIP code — nationwide.
Bluehammer for Professionals enables real estate agents to enter a property’s details and transfer them to a buyer. Each time the buyers log in to manage their home, they’ll see their agent’s name and contact information.
Bluehammer also includes a compendium of home improvement and maintenance content for agents to share with clients on social media or via email.
The highest and best use of bluehammer is in its potential to serve as an industry standard for gathering quotes on negotiated repairs while sales are in escrow.
Far too much time and emotional energy is spent on not trusting the other party’s contractor or juggling vendor schedules. It’s an antiquated, overly-emotional part of the traditional home sale, and it plays directly into the hands of the iBuyer movement.
Bluehammer is built by Bluebook International, which has published “Residential Repair and Replacement Costs” since 1964 and has provided “residential replacement cost, risk analysis and other essential property value information reports for nearly 91 percent of the nation’s single family residences.”
If agreed upon by both parties as the benchmark estimator for repairs before close of escrow, a range of frustrating negotiations and nail-biting delays could be avoided.
The software is also an excellent way for agents to work with buyers who are considering a “handyman’s delight.”
Bluehammer offers an easy home inventory tool and can combine that report, recent projects entered and location data to create a nice-looking Home Insurance Report for owners to gauge their level of coverage.
Again, bluehammer stands out in this subsection of real estate software because of its rich history of providing construction and repair data and its sharp, simple user experience. Bluehammer for Professionals costs $99/year.
This software can quickly eliminate a number of pain points for agents before and during a transaction, as well as further the collective effort to modernize the way homes are sold.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
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