Bidday

[erezek]

Emmanuel: The price for an inspection, ANY INSPECTION EVEN A 5000 Sq Ft Home, is set at $240 and $50 for the video.

BidDay: Inspectors can reserve and inspect any property available in their area. If you do not like it, send one of your employees. If your business is 100% booked, then you may want to hire another employee to pick up a few of these jobs you would not want to do yourself. BidDay has a budget to work with, and if buyers are not buying on the site do to excessive costs, then inspectors will not receive jobs, because their will not be any properties to sell.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: WTF!!! After three days you are going to have the inspection taken away from you and given to another Inspector. In addition until they get around to doing that they are going to charge you $50 a day???

BidDay: If you commit to performing an inspection, why would we want to take it away from you? If you sit on an inspection, then we cannot post it for sale, and the inventory providers then get upset. Yesterday we extended the inspection period to 5 days, you can cancel the job within 24 hours, but will pay a cancellation fee If you commit to a job but cancel it after 24 hours. Is this fair? Any recommendations?

Can anyone recommend what BidDay should do if an inspector uploads a report that is incomplete or not readable/viewable, and we find out much closer to the sale date? Any recommendations on this?

[Joe Farsetta]

Eddie,

I fail to understand how an inspector can make money, performing an insection, using proprietary software, preparing the report, shooting a video, and risk getting labeled by your firm. One software package you mentioned is adequate, but quite expensive. An inspector would need to make a capital investment, suffer through a learning curve, then hope for a reasonable return on investment, if the program pans out at all.

It seems insane to most of us. Worse than that, I predict that the Federal Government will be steppng in and preventing many of the forclosure/predatory lending/foreclosures/keep the equity and sell this house on the open market schemes.

Beyond that, I have seen REO properties too often to count. There is usually a local office of a national real estate firm that is directly involved. Often, buyers choose their own inspectors.

So, why not go with a fair market value, by location, for an inspection fee? You are making money on the back-end with the auction, no? If not, are you making money of our already burdened backs?

[bdoles2]

There's a big surprise....Everyone let's welcome the newest vendor.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: WOW!! You get to pay big bucks for 5 zip codes of coverage!! WHAT A DEAL!!!

BidDay: Ok, 5 zip codes with a maximum of 100 miles radius. We though we were being very generous. We even thought of reducing the radius to 30 miles each. Lets do the math: CIRCULAR AREA = (pie*r*r) = 3.14*100*100 = 31,400 square miles….. times 5! (Grand total of 157,000 square miles of homes) Maybe BidDay should reduce this a little? What are your thoughts? Is any state that large?

BidDay’s goal is to enough inspectors to service an area when several thousand properties are available. That’s why we are offering an early registration of $200 (as savings of $300) before January 1.

If an inventory provider feels that not enough inspectors can carry the load in a area, they will reduce the number of properties at that time.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: And when you go to renew there is no guarentee you will get those for the second year. Stop and think about this people!! You will be paying big money for the possibility only of inspections in those 5 zip codes!! Pick your zip codes well and hope that the market in those five zip codes is very active every year or YOU LOSE!!!

BidDay: Ok, I got you here Emmanuel! Good eye, but you missed a key point. Our policy states “If an inspector’s annual membership expires and they attempt to register for another year, there is risk they may be locked out of the territories they previously serviced”. If members choose not to stay members with BidDay, that is really ok, we just need to free up those empty seats so other inspectors can cover the area sufficiently.

Any thoughts on this? Is this fair?

[erezek]

Emmanuel: You will be paying big money for the possibility only of inspections in those 5 zip codes!! Pick your zip codes well and hope that the market in those five zip codes is very active every year or YOU LOSE!!!

BidDay: Is $17 per month big money for you? How much do you spend on advertising and how effective is it? In other businesses I’ve owned, I’ve ran newspaper ads for only one day and they cost me over $300 in each city, one city produced many purchases, the other one none. BidDay does not know where our inventory providers will provide properties to inspect. But, when we know, we definitely need you to know!

[erezek]

Emmanuel: For such a paultry sum of money for the inspection, is BidDay ready to assume all liability for Errors and Ommissions???

BidDay: Wow Emmanuel, you really put a lot of time in our site, I think you definitely are a factfinder (see www.kolbe.com)! Working with BidDay needs to be fair for both of us. It needs to be a Win-Win. So, lets look at this for a minute. How much does it cost in marketing on average for each lead? How much time are you using and what is your time worth per hour? What is the extra time cost of the added time spending with a buyer on site? Do fill out an invoice and go over it with them? How do you track your finances, BidDay will post funds directly to your bank account electronically and provide list summaries in your Account Profile.

Can we assume your time is worth $75 per hour (lets be conservative). After typical out of pocket marketing costs and “extra” time spent with the buyer/posting ads/tracking/answering phones/selling yourself/networking to gain leads/coordinating schedules with buyers (are they on time?)/competing paperwork... (wow I getting tired already)…. How much is it really costing you?

With BidDay, you receive an email and obtain properties to inspect in minutes. You inspect them when you want to, on your own schedule, and then upload the files from your computer directly to the site (within a few minutes). We have worked hard to make your job as the inspector easier. We LOVE imput on how to streamline things… PLEASE email us recommendations.

ASHI inspector Randall Blixt, made a recommendation yesterday, and we are reprogramming a feature on our site that will be ready tomorrow. We need your guidance and expertise to help create the best possible solutions for you, and to make your job easier.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: So if you sign up for a job and it takes BidDay two days to have the utilities turned on are they going to start your three day clock after the utilities are turned on?? Or are you going to start collecting your $50/Day fine starting from Day 1 of accepting the job???


BidDay: You’re really on it Emmanuel, and I really appreciate bringing these details to life! Yesterday, our policy was once utilities were on, we then post them for inspection. The 3 day clock starts when the inspector RESEARVES (commits) to the inspection. Since Emmanuel has been a really great contributor here, we revised our policy to allow for more time to schedule BidDay properties in your normal schedules. We’ve instructed our programmers to allow 5 days, with a 24 our cancellation, after 24 hours if you cancel a committed job, there will be a cancellation fee yet to be defined. After 5 days, you are charged $50 per day if you hold a committed property and do not summit the completed inspection. BidDay has a commitment to excellence and integrity. If our inspectors make commitments and do not stand for integrity, then BidDay lets down our inventory provider by not promoting the property for the minimum time to the public, and thus must be pulled out of the auction event…. Possibly resulting in a several week (or single month) delay. I hope you understand our position.

[bdoles2]

Originally Posted by erezek

ASHI inspector Randall Blixt, made a recommendation yesterday, and we are reprogramming a feature on our site that will be ready tomorrow. We need your guidance and expertise to help create the best possible solutions for you, and to make your job easier.

So what was the recommendation?

[bdoles2]

So who will be the person verifying that utilities are turned on? If it's a realtor, your in deep trouble. I can't tell you how often I get to a REO that 1 of the 3 utils is actually turned on. That's fine, I charge an additional $50 for each utilitiy for a return visit to inspect.

But I see with your program I would get charged $50 a day after five days. Plus you have a cancellation fee??

Sorry too many variables that lay in the hands of other parties...

I'd rather stick to my piddly draw inspections than get involved with this. Thanks, but no thanks.

[erezek]

Emmanuel:I have never heard of BidDay. Has anyone else?? Has anyone heard of any of these auctions???


BidDay: This was our goal! With several million dollars invested, we have worked for over 3 years developing the most sophisticated real estate auction system available. We have purposely hidden our business model, technology, methods, and other very cutting edge functions from everyone during this time.

[erezek]

Emmanuel:Pick your video camera wisely as you may be written up for bad video's and get your name on the naughty list!!!

BidDay: I cannot agree with you more! Select a video camera that results with a file that you can upload to the website easily. If you have a traditional camera with a tape, you will need to take the lengthily process of having a software to digitize the file, which takes a lot of time and is somewhat difficult. If you become a buyer on the site, wouldn’t you want an accurate inspection report and a video that you can clearly view. Wouldn’t you be upset if the video were black fuzz? BidDay recommended a few inexpensive cameras that will do the job, but there are many better cameras out there. Video cameras that save into a digital file are the easiest to deal with and upload.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: Approved software: Inspector FX , InspectVue
Gee, I knew there was a catch!! Now what are the chances they will have your software package approved "After June 1, 2008"???

BidDay: We have spent a lot of time and money with both of these great inspection software providers to successfully integrate them into BidDay’s system. These companies are very well known and have spent a lot of time over the past months working with us to achieve many outstanding successes. Successes that you will understand once you start using the software with BidDay. I am so honored to have our programmers work with these brilliant teams!

BidDay thought it would be nice to offer inspectors who are using software the ability to obtain inspections with BidDay. Integration can be complicated and costly, and did not want inspectors who are committed to Non-Approved software to miss the opportunity to obtain inspections from BidDay. If you are a programmer or tech person, you will realize this was a kind and open gesture.

[erezek]

Emmanuel: Don't waste your time and money with this??? This group of potential clients are almost the easiest to get to. You can certainly do it yourself.

BidDay: If you choose not to invest $17 a month in your business, I’m sure you can use it in more effective ways to generate more business. If REO clients are the easiest clients for you to get, then please share how you would do it so that other NACHI members can gain more business also. Also, please email BidDay (BidDay-info@bidday.com) with your process and we will post it to our community section that we will be releasing shortly. Other inspectors could really benefit from your knowledge! This would be really great of you.