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Home inspection reports are commonly the most frustrating component of a home sale for buyers and sellers.
The delays caused by inspections and the ensuing train of experts nitpicking every nuance of their field of speciality is a major source of stress for the people on the paying ends of the deal. Everyone has their preferred person and doesn’t trust the other person’s.
However, they also mark a point in the transaction where the expertise of agents really shines. What’s worth negotiating? Should we care about a missing deck spindle? Every driveway has a few cracks in it, right?
The back and forth over how to handle inspection issues has cost agents a lot over the decades.
But maybe Repair Pricer can mend some fences.
Repair Pricer is a web-based service that translates inspection reports into actual cost estimates. The company claims its repair pricing solution is 98 percent accurate and can be turned around in less than a day.
The process is pretty simple: Once the home inspection is complete, and should there be issues of contention, the buyers can upload their report to Repair Pricer.
The company’s report could feasibly offer the benefit of serving as a neutral middleman, provided both parties agree to use and abide by the service.
The PDF pricing reports go a long way toward humanizing what is often a very clinical, tough-to-swallow technical document. It color-categorizes repairs thusly: Defective, Cosmetic and Potential (warrant ongoing evaluation, such as tree branches reaching along the siding).
Each item is summarized in the pages that follow in spreadsheet format, with item costs and category totals.
The company uses actual people, backed by “AI” and “satellite” technology to determine costs and generate the report. A national database of estimates provided by an array of construction industry resources is also part of the process.
The primary advantage to a service like Repair Pricer is the time saved. A 24-hour turnaround is pretty remarkable in terms of keeping a deal on its toes.
The company’s pricing models are applicable across markets, nationwide, according to CEO Christian Adams.
“We conduct rolling market surveys to get quotes from actual contractors to accurate quotes, and we have to think like contractors to ensure accuracy,” Adams said. “We look at thousands of data points, including satellite images, images from Google Street View, even median income in an area.”
Adams is also a non-practicing broker with Dallas Luxury Realty and Austin Luxury Realty, overseeing 85 agents between the two offices. He developed Repair Pricer in-house as a response to the all-too-familiar agent pain point.
“There are thousands of different formats for inspection reports across the country, and they all use different terms and approaches. We have a taxonomy of more than 30,000 terms that we use when translating that data into our solution,” Adams said.
There’s enough ballpark data in a Repair Pricer report for good agents to help even their most passionate buyers and sellers realize what items are deal killers and what’s worth a bickering about for a couple of days.
Agents can also have a subscription account to Repair Pricer for ongoing access and advanced use of report data.
A similar service, called PunchList, will present in Startup Alley at ICNY 2019 in January, also promising a 24-hour repair estimate turn-around.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said PunchList uses data from Repair Pricer.
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