Before I co-founded Repair Pricer and started building our home inspection cost calculator, I was an agent and broker in Texas. We had offices in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio with up to 85 full-time agents working across the state, and as the partner in charge of marketing I was INUNDATED with cold-calls and sales requests from all sorts of companies – contractors, marketing agencies, sign companies, janitorial services, (strangely a LOT of vending machine companies?), AND also home inspectors. 

It got so bad that I actually switched my phone to “do not disturb mode” 24/7. Basically, if you weren’t in my phone book, you weren’t getting through to me. The main problem wasn’t that we didn’t need any of these services, we often did, it’s just that there was no value to the messages I received. 

Normally they were boilerplate, non-personalized mass emails, voicemail drops and even flyer drops at my office that were aimed at every agent in the city, so I never felt compelled to respond. 

Because it was so clear it was just mass marketing, and I simply didn’t have time to talk to some random salesperson for three hours. 

So how do you break through the noise and actually get home inspection referrals, and more importantly, is it worth it?

Firstly, for those of you who may be skeptical about home inspection marketing to realtors to get your business (or part of your business) let me explain why this is actually a good approach:

• Agent referrals are (almost) FREE
• Agents are trained to give/receive referrals already
• If you don’t take referrals your competitors will
• Even if you do your own marketing most buyers STILL ask their agent before deciding
• In some markets the agent calls the shots