Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. And for a guy that says he doesn’t like solo podcasts so much, I sure do a lot of them. But I wanted to really talk about this subject, because it’s something that’s very close to my heart as a business person, as a home inspector, is the market that’s going on. We’ve been having a lot of podcasts about it, we had Mike Crow on, we had a whole bunch of people on, matter of fact, the past, probably five, six weeks have been mostly focused on the changing market.

So I’ve seen this before, I’ve been around during the great recession. And I see how we as an industry react. And I just want to say that this market is not necessarily bad. Instead, it’s an opportunity. But it’s an opportunity for those with staying power. So what I’m basically getting at is when the market starts to change, when we’re going on a high, like we were in 2020, and let’s be honest with you, most of the late 2000, teens, were really good years, it was fairly easy, comparative to other years, to grow your business, get inspections, and make a good living with relatively, and I’m gonna say that, relatively minimal effort. Now it’s a bit tougher, interest rates are high, they’re still low inventory, inspection businesses, and I’ll be frank, I don’t mean this to be depressing, but there are inspection businesses going out of business right now. I have personally learned in the past couple of weeks of about seven. And that’s just the ones that I know about. I don’t know everybody in the industry, I have a wide reach, but I definitely don’t know everybody. But multi-inspector firms, going back and scaling back their business to one or two people. I’ve seen a home inspection firm that was seven, eight guys now down just to the owner and his assistant.

And, you know, that affects us emotionally. But it’s an opportunity. Don’t feel bad if this is you. Not everybody’s being affected the same way. We still see that rare guy on Facebook, instead of selling his business or retiring or moving back into whatever he was doing before, we see that rare guy saying, “Oh, man, I’m killing it this year. I’m a single inspector and did 800 inspections.” All right, cool, good for you. But for the mass, vast majority of people, there’s a lot of raw data out there. However you want to interpret it, it’s not looking good for most of us. Before you get depressed about that information, though, go back, and listen to our q4 Market Outlook podcast that Beon and I did. Matter of fact, if you look at prediction that Elon Musk, think whatever you want of him, he actually came out with a very similar prediction to ours, which we’re very proud of, and he came out with it after our podcast. Hey, maybe Elon Musk is listening to our podcast, that’d be cool. But uh, all joking aside, it’s going to be a lean winter, in our prediction, it’s going to be a pretty decent spring, and then the rest of 2023 will probably be meh. But I predict that 2024, starting in early to mid spring is going to be a banger year. But whoever is left over is going to take advantage of that.

So I want to give just a little bit of an illustration to kind of help us change our view. Because I see so many people pulling back their marketing, getting discouraged about visiting offices, and agent referrals, and things like that. View the market this way. Back in 2020, we had a little farm, and it was about one acre. And everybody around us had their own farm. And we couldn’t expand our farm easily. Because there was so much competition, we’d want to go and take over another farm and boy, that farmer is going to be putting up a fight. So we’d have to live with our little market share, but you know, it was producing well, so we didn’t get bothered by it. So that, that’s our market share. We have a little spot, we carved out our little niche, we did X amount of inspections a year, we have X amount of inspectors, and we were happy with it expanding little by little. But now there’s a drought, farmland is not producing much food. So that one acre that we used to have of market share is not producing what we needed it to. And that same thing is happening to our competition. So what happens when that happens with our market is farmers start to give up the plow so to speak, they start to move on, not all at once, but little by little. So now that opens up market share. Now we might take five acres of market share where we used to have one and still not produce what that one acre used to produce.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is you have five acres. I’m going to tell you why in a second. Now if we want to take market share from someone, they’re not going to put up as much of a fight as they did before. So it’s going to be a lot easier to take market share, gain, and gain market share. Now, that’s important, because everybody initially thinks the same thing. Oh, cool, so and so went out of business, or oh, cool, you know, there’s an opportunity over here, hey, this inspector scaled back, or this inspector retired. So that opens up opportunity. But then when we go after it, we say I visited, you know, 40 realtor offices this month, and I didn’t get one referral, it doesn’t matter. Because once that drought is over, that’s what counts. So now we have 30 acres, and the drought is over. Now, we used to produce enough with one acre, imagine what we’re going to produce with 20 acres of market share. The difference is going out there and getting it and waiting for the drought to end.

But unfortunately, I see most inspectors, and I saw this back in the Great Recession, that most inspectors say, “Well, I’m gonna hunker down, hoard my food on my one acre, and wait this out.” The problem is, that’s not going to work out for us business wise, we’re eventually going to just fade away into the sunset, or just not grow any. And we might be around when this is over, or we may not. The point is, it’s a much easier lift right now to go out and get market share. The problem is changing our mindset. We have this mindset. I see inspectors say this all the time, what’s my return on investment? What, you know, what’s my ROI? What’s, what am I going to get out of this? You’re not always immediately going to see it. You don’t see McDonald’s saying, what are we going to get out of having our logo on our bag? Or how many hamburgers, extra hamburgers do we sell? It’s about the long game. So I built three inspection companies on basically the premise of, okay, I’m gonna hold on, do exactly what I just told you, take a bunch of market share. And then when the market turns around, half my competition is gone, and I own 20 acres instead of that one. Worked out well for me.

But it’s all about mindset. So I’m going to talk about two aspects real quick, that home inspectors tend to pull back on because of either discouragement or not seeing immediate results. That’s going to be person-to-person marketing. If you go back in our podcast, we talk a lot about that. We talked about it with Mike Crow, we talked about it in our podcast, how to properly visit real estate offices, we’re a people business, that’s the low hanging fruit. We’re also going to talk about online marketing. There’s other types of marketing like group and top of mind marketing, we’re going to leave that off for just a moment, because I want to focus on these two things, because these are the things that I see home inspectors pull back on. So let’s talk about person-to-person marketing. I hear a lot of different things right now.

So I hear an inspector saying, “I am visiting more offices than ever with no results”, or “I stopped visiting offices because no one’s there”, or “I met 100 new agents and didn’t get one more referral”. Those are all very short-sighted views. Think about it this way, agents are hurting just as bad, if not worse, than us. They were selling 10, 20 houses a year. Now they might have one or two good leads, and they’re trying to really, really hold on at the moment, for the most part anyways. So you may have won them over, you have, maybe won over an entire office. You gain three acres of market share right there. But if there’s no fruit or food being produced, there’s nothing to, nothing to glean from that field. If they’re not selling houses, they can’t give you a referral. But now you planted the seed. When they do have referrals, that’s going to come back to you. So don’t think that it’s useless visiting offices because you don’t see the same yield that you might have seen in years past. I’ll be honest with you, it was always low hanging fruit. And I say that because it’s, you walk into an office a few times, and I’d pick up a few agents, and that would be 30 inspections a year, and it was just easier. But now it’s different. So, don’t give up on visiting real estate offices and doing person-to-person marketing. The other advantage to right now is agents are open to things that they weren’t before. So it’s an easier lift to gain agents. So maybe we weren’t the most charismatic person walking into an office, maybe we didn’t have a great retention rate on agents, that’s probably going to be a lot different now.

Agents are going to listen to things because, you know what, they’re not at their listings taking 30 offers of you know, 50 grand over asking. They’re in their office and now busting their butts. So when somebody says, “Hey, what about a pre-listing inspection.” And I bring this up a lot because pre-listing inspections are awesome, and they’re finally coming back. But oh, okay, well let’s talk about pre-listing inspection. Or you know, what about this? Or what about that? What about 11th month inspections? They’re going to be more open. They’re also going to be more open to any kind of presentation that you could do with their office meetings, not just talking about how great we are. You should never do a presentation like that. But you know, how to sell your listings faster, how to get more more listings, how to interact with your clients better, whatever it happens to be, something to benefit them. You’re planting a lot of seeds, that when the drought is over, you’re gonna reap. I know, I’ve been there. Another thing, we may have had trouble pushing into an office before, taking market share, taking an acre of land away from another inspector that had five acres of market share. But now their favorite inspector may have just said, “Well, okay, this is about time to retire.” Or maybe they’re out of business, or maybe their bandwidth isn’t as good because maybe they were a 10 inspector firm, and now they’re down to two or three inspectors.

Boy, that’s your time to really get in there and take that market share. We’re never really going to have an opportunity as good as this without things getting bad. That’s the point I really want to drive home. This is the time to go and grab market share. Now, the second thing that I see a lot of home inspectors do is pull back with their online presence. And I don’t, I don’t really understand this, because I built my inspection companies with a strong online presence. So just a quick note about me. I started my first inspection company in my early 20s. And I looked like I was about 10 years old. People would ask me if my father was coming. And I just, you know, so I had to have a strong online presence because I looked 12. And that was a really hard sell, especially at the time 20 years ago, it was, it was less of a young person’s industry as it is now. Whether or not you have an opinion on that, I don’t know. But the point is, I had to have a strong online presence, and it always worked out for me.

I love it when my competition says, “Oh, SEO, I don’t do any of that. I don’t need any of that.” I’m like, okay, cool, because a third of our work still comes from online. It’s fantastic. But it’s not just a matter of website and SEO, it’s social media. It’s your online presence with reviews and how many citations you have and how easy it is for people to find you. And if you go back to our Ben Gromicko podcast, having that overwhelming value, like no matter where they look, oh my goodness, this guy has 300 Google reviews, he has 50 Yelp reviews. He’s all over Facebook and TikTok. And it’s just everywhere. So now when they call you, they’re not like, okay, prove your worth. You’ve had that overwhelming value, when they look at your professional website, when they can find you everywhere, when they can see all your reviews. But the first thing guys drop in this market is their online presence. And I never understood that. We used an illustration a couple of weeks ago on a podcast, that turning off your marketing, when the market is bad, is kind of like only watering your lawn when it’s raining. And then when it’s not, you turn off the watering. It doesn’t make any sense.

This is when we want to market more. I use an illustration with guys all the time. So pretend we have a pond, and we’re fishing with 10 other home, or the line of the home inspectors so there’s 10 total. There used to be nine fish in that pond, there used to be enough for nine out of 10 of us. And life was good for nine out of 10 home inspectors. But now in this market, with home inspectors kind of, you know, retiring and things like that, we might have eight fishing poles in the pond, but only two or three fish. So it’s going to be easy for most inspectors at the pond to say, “Well, I’m pulling my pole out. That’s it, I’m out of here,” and leave. So by the time the dust settles, there might be five poles still in the pond, but then there’ll be nine fish again. So what you want to do is to have 10 poles in the pond, you have those 10 poles in.

So when there’s nine fish, you get nine out of 10 of them. There’s going to be openings online for you to be able to do that. I can’t tell you how important that, I think most of you understand the importance of an online presence. But don’t let that be the first thing that you drop. Because that doesn’t come back quickly. So let’s say you’re like, okay, I made it through this downturn. Let me ramp things up again. There’s going to be some guy out there that took your fishing pole while you’re gone, that took three of your five acres of market share. We want to be on the other end of that and be taking market share where the market is in a transition right now. So the other aspect is, if we’re experiencing a downturn, we probably very likely have more time. So when we’re not visiting real estate offices, we should be recording a quick video on our phone and putting it on Tiktok. Heck, combine the two and shoot a little video at the office. “Hey, we’re visiting our friends here over at Keller Williams over on State Street.” Whatever it happens to be, however you want to make that angle happen. Start using the time that we have to go and have a better presence.Shoot a YouTube video, take that same video, and post it all over all your social media. Don’t know what social media to get into?

Go back and listen to our podcasts and social media strategies that we did with Inspector Media, Nick Gromicko’s company. Listen to that, because it’s not that hard. And then you can just take one image, one video, and blast it all over your social media. You’re going to have 30 poles in the pond, you’re going to take market share from half the inspectors in the area. Now is the time to do it. The question is, are we going to do it, are we going to go fishing? I use that as an illustration too, because I had this client one time that, he said when he was slow, he’d go fishing. And then he kept complaining that it was getting slower and slower. And I’m like, don’t go fishing.

And I use that as an illustration. I told inspectors, don’t go fishing. If you want to go fishing on your, plan free time, awesome. You need to have a life. But if work is slow, don’t take your time that you would have worked, to go fishing. Is it Tuesday afternoon, you don’t have an inspection? Great. Go shoot a couple of videos. It doesn’t have to be an actual inspection, go on your brother’s roof and shoot a video, whatever it happens to be. Go visit a couple of offices. Make things happen. Because whoever takes the market share now is going to be doing extremely well when the market finally turns around. So whether or not the market is bad for you or an opportunity, really comes down to our mindset. So really think about that, stealing acres of market share. That’s what we want to do. We want to take market share so that when those acres start to really produce again, we’re the ones who have it.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.

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