Letter to all inspectors from Porch.com's CEO.

An open letter to inspectors from Porch’s CEO March 2, 2018

Dear inspectors,

For those I haven’t had the privilege of meeting yet, my name is Matt Ehrlichman and I am the CEO of Porch.

We invited 12 respected and independent inspectors (see the list at the bottom of this letter) to create and serve on an Inspector Advisory Board to ensure Porch is forever a strong partner to inspectors and providing the right products to help your businesses grow. We had our first quarterly meeting at an industry event a couple of weeks ago, and these inspectors requested I write an open letter to all inspectors to provide an update.

What you likely know:

  • Porch has made a strategic long-term decision to partner deeply with inspectors. We believe homeowners need help moving into their homes just as they do ongoing with home maintenance and repairs. Porch fills this void effectively and in doing so, helps our inspector partners in meaningful ways.
  • We provide Home Assistant Gold (usually priced for consumers at $350/year) for free to every inspector we are partnered with. You get to provide this service to each of your customers for free forever.
  • In addition, we will provide you with $100 of Porch Handyman Service coupons to provide to each of your customers to give them strong value. (We are seeing inspectors using this value as a long-overdue opportunity to raise their prices by $10 to $25.)
  • The Home Assistant will help your customer with whatever they need, from changing over their utilities (gas, trash, water, electricity), arrange service or mounting their TV, painting a room, security, or making repairs that come up from the inspection report.
  • If you are signed up for Home Assistant Gold, we create great marketing value for your business whether that is paying for InterNACHI’s “We’ll Buy Your Home Back” Guarantee, providing you full ISG Benefits such as RecallChek and/or 90 Day Warranty (and maybe even free ISN as well for qualified ISG customers), providing you with an Inspection Guarantee, paying for your full ISN fees (or $’s back to you), providing an extra $100 of handyman services (for $200 in total), or other options.

What you perhaps don’t know:

Homeowners like the experience:

  • We don’t harass your customer nor ever will. The Home Assistant who is assigned to make your customer’s move easier, will send an email to introduce themselves the day after the inspection is finished. If a customer doesn’t want to be called, they won’t be called. A day later, the Home Assistant introduces themselves and helps with whatever the homeowner needs.
  • Reasons calls are needed? For one, the first value the Home Assistant provides is as a 3rd party independent review service for your business. We want to cut off the bad reviews before they are posted online (we surface these to you to follow-up with the customer), and we encourage happy customers to post reviews online.
  • Another reason we want to speak with each homeowner is to find out exactly what help they need. We don’t do anything unless the customer tells us to.
  • Homeowners get called an average of 2 times. On average, 52% of homeowners are using their Home Assistant to help with service requests. On average, a homeowner uses their Home Assistant to help with 2 or more services.

We provide more inspections to your business:

  • Based on feedback from members of our Inspector Advisory Board, as of the start of 2018, Porch is no longer selling leads to inspectors. We distribute leads, but notice at the bottom of an inspector lead that these are priced at $0. This will continue into the future. We are not here to charge the inspectors for
    anything, but to be strategic partners helping us both assist our collective customers and grow our
    businesses.
  • The Home Assistant stays in touch with your customers and will ask for an annual inspection each year. All
    of these inspections are directed back to you.
  • If your client wants an inspection of any repair or project, these requests are directed back to you also.
  • We provide you with $100 of Porch Handyman Services to provide to the Seller as well – a perfect way to
    get introduced to both the listing agent as well as the seller; hopefully resulting in working with them as
    they move into a different home.
  • There are many big Real Estate brokerages we are working with who are interested in using inspectors
    who are providing Home Assistant Gold to their customers given the improved customer experience. Some exciting things coming for those inspectors we are partnering with and more to come here.

You are protected and in control:

  • Porch does not sell the data, nor will we ever sell the data. Only Porch and our team of Assistants and Connection Specialists will call the customer. If a customer specifically requests help with a service, then and only then do we introduce them to others for help. Further, Porch never receives the inspection report – this is the customer’s property and only they get to choose if they want to provide their inspection report to their Home Assistant. Porch does not get the report from any source.
  • While Porch is the pro for small jobs and we have a large strong network of professionals for large projects, we have learned that many inspectors either offer certain services themselves, or have specific professionals they want to use. The Home Assistant experience is fully customizable per inspector. This means that you can identify a specific roofer you want used for all your customers, or that you want all of the pest control business routed back to you.
  • Porch assumes all liability from the inspector… when we send a Porch professional to the home. If you want us to use your recommended professionals, that is perfectly fine; however, we do not assume liability in these cases. Otherwise, if a Porch pro is used, you can know that you will not have any liability.

Porch will always be an option for inspectors and greater than 800 inspection companies have taken a closer look and turned on this offering.

This includes some inspectors you likely know from the Advisory Council as well as others like: Axium, BPG, Champia, Mike Crow’s TexInspec, Home Team, WIN, Bentley & Associates, Liberty Inspection Group, and 800+ other inspectors. They have clearly done their research to make sure it will work well for their company.

If you have any questions at all, please email me directly at matt@porch.com, call a team member who can help at 844-730-7359, or turn on Porch in ISN (and if not using ISN call and we’ll get Porch setup for you).

Onward,

Matt Ehrlichman (and signed with support and confirmation by our fellow Inspector Advisory Board members)

Bill Compton, Champia Inspections, GA
Chad Hett, Elite Inspections, CA
Dave Klima, Aardvark Inspections, IN
Randy Surette, Cornerstone Inspections, IN Jeffrey Donaldson, Ace Preferred Inspections, SC Jerry Linkhorn, Linkhorn Home Inspections, OH
Mike Crow, Tex-Inspect, TX
Preston Sandlin, Home Inspection Carolina, NC John Shishilla, Honor Inspections, FL
Rob & Michelle Hopkins, Pro-tec Inspections, MD Scott Patterson, Trace Inspections, TN
Wade Williamson, Axium Home Inspections, CO

Meh…

LOL.

Now that’s funny

Interesting how after you 3 guys posted, and 3 hrs after the original post, Nick goes back and EDITs the post. Sure gotta wonder what exactly he changed??

It said Porch… I stopped there

Why?

Did any inspectors reach out to Porch and say “if only there was a big corporate company we could partner with?”

Partnership is a two way street.

Porch is attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exit.

That’s what moving services are for.

And Porch isn’t a moving service.

And moving has nothing to do with inspections.

What void? You haven’t explained any void that inspectors have or inspectors are trying to fill.

Oh wow, for free, we get to give people the opportunity to call you so you can sell them services?

Hey, I can give out the phone number to the local Baskin-Robbins and tell clients I have a free phone number to call if they want to purchase an ice cream cone too.

That’s selling data.

How can you say you don’t sell data and then turn around and admit you sell data? You’re certainly not just making these connections out of the kindness of your heart. You’re doing all this to make a profit. Which is selling data.

Well, then, if I can specify which roofer, etc to use, what the heck do I need porch for? I can do that myself.

First you say they only get two calls, then you say you’ll stay in touch.

Those statements contradict each other.

Which are not independent inspectors.

Again, those statements contradict each other.

Baloney. If you send someone who does a crap job, it still reflects back poorly on the inspector who set up their client with your service.

This whole “explanation” is a joke.

A really poor joke.

1 Like

Ahhh, but see, there is a problem… for multi-inspector companies! They can’t get enough business to keep all of their staff busy and still turn a profit. Proof? Look at the names of the “12 respected and independent inspectors” that were chosen. I don’t know all the names, but I would wager that damned near all of them are multi-inspector companies!

As always… follow the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Great post Ian. Excellent points.

Why was this “open letter” posted in** Legislation, Licensing, Ethics & Legal Issues for Inspectors**?

It should have been posted in Classified Ads.

According to a very well established pattern, should there be too many inconvenient truths revealed, the edits will stop and the thread will be moved to “NFE” (out of the public eye) to die with the others.

Yup. I see this thread (and vendor) as no different than the NT thread.

It was posted here as a subliminal message due to the significance of this BB sections title. :wink:

I think most of the Home Inspector Advisors are larger multi-man shops (Crow, Elite, Klima, Surettte, Donaldson, Sandlin, Linkhorn, etc).

The one that I’m not sure if is OR is not multi-man is Scot Patterson

I thought he might be one of ASHI’s national officers or maybe just a similar name??

Not sure why you guys are not going to give Porch a chance… I’m telling you, once their reviews hit two stars I am all in.

So he edited someone’s open letter to all inspectors…

You are correct.

Though seems a little funny that he would even consider something like this. He’s usually pretty anti-fluff.

Don’t forget he’s major ASHI and one of the drafters of the NHIE. He has a huge stake in getting involved, same as Nick.

Scott recently drank the Gnat kool-aid. And he’s going multi-inspector.

Had they been truly sincere about serving home inspector’s customers they’d have invited Jim Bushart to serve on their Inspector Advisory Board, few people understand our CoE and how it operates to protect our profession the way Jim does.

Could someone give me a nutshell of the deep problem with Porch? I am a relatively new home inspector. My instructor had briefly mentioned Porch, but never really went into the inherent problem with Porch and it’s intentions to eliminate the need of home inspectors…?

Thanks!

Shaun