If you want to learn how to start a home inspection business, this can be a great way for people to earn money and make a difference. Although it may seem daunting to start your own business, it is possible with the right information and tools.
With a growing housing market and the use of new technology to write inspection reports and send them, there are fewer barriers for home inspectors.
However, is it really that easy? Will this process of planning, investing, and working in the business opportunity be that basic?
Starting any business will be tough as it requires time, and you will notice that money, as important as it is, will be your second or third worry.
Just make sure that you follow the basics yet vital steps if you are compromising to this process.
In addition, we decided to add them but give you some extra recommendations to your process so you can achieve the desired result.
For it, let’s start with the basics.
What Is a Home Inspection Business? Should Your Start One?
A home inspection company provides thorough inspections of the interior and exterior homes for potential buyers, homeowners, or sellers.
They may also inspect the property to identify any issues that need fixing. They also give detailed written reports to customers on the issues they find and how to fix them.
On the other hand, there are many reasons to start a home inspection business. Here are some benefits:
- If you are looking to work remotely, a home inspection is a perfect business for you. You don’t require a lot of space and can choose your own hours.
- There’s a growing need for home inspectors. Home inspections play an important role. There is a growing need for home inspectors and home inspection companies, with approximately 90% of homes being subject to a home inspection.
- No need for a lot of experience. While you will need professional inspector licensing in most states, you don’t necessarily need to have extensive experience to start your home inspection business. You can also find many resources to help you get started.
- Starting a home inspection business is easy. It doesn’t take much money or space, and you can start offering services immediately.
What Is the Cost to Start a Home Inspection Business?
The costs to open a home inspection company vary depending on how you are planning to deal with this type of business.
However, we can indeed conclude it isn’t exactly cheap in terms of spending less than $1.000. That’s pretty much impossible, but the business remains viable as it is much more affordable than regular solutions.
These are some estimates of startup costs so you can have an idea of how much you may spend:
- Certification and licensing: Prices vary by state but are usually between $200-$300.
- Home inspection software. About $800 per year
- Equipment: $300 Basic and $1.000+ more specialized equipment
- Marketing: $50-200, but you can easily go over $1,000 if your website is custom and you use SEO marketing strategies.
- Home Inspection School: $400 – $1.000
You can generally expect startup expenses for your business around $1.300 at the low end and $5,000+ at the high end.
Is It Profitable to Start a Home Inspection Business?
The home inspection trade is profitable… when you start the property.
Many inspectors earn between $45k to $97k by only being part-timers. Multi-inspector home inspection companies can make even more money, earning anywhere from $500k to even millions as the industry isn’t in a bad spot at all.
Be aware that it can be difficult to build a business from scratch. Surprisingly, 60% of home inspection businesses fail.
According to Dan Bowers (a professional inspector and educator), the majority of this failure rate is due to the “horrible reality of starting a business from scratch.”
Be prepared for hard work and expenses, especially at the beginning. If you’re willing to put in the effort, the financial rewards can be quite attractive.
Let’s Start: How You Can Start Your Home Inspection Business
It’s time for you to start your home inspection business, and we are all in for the challenge of guiding you in this process. Thus, just take notes properly:
Certifications & Qualifications Above All
You must have the right qualifications and certification before you start your home inspection business. Many states require home inspectors to be properly trained and certified.
You will need to complete an accredited training course in order to become certified. There are many programs available, including online and in-person continuing education classes.
There are also certification programs offered by organizations such as the American Society of Home Inspectors.
You can contact your state’s licensing board to find out what certifications and qualifications you need to become a licensed home inspector. They can help you identify what your state’s requirements are.
Find Nearby Home Inspectors
It’s a good idea to research your competition before launching your business. Learn about their services and what they charge.
This information will allow you to determine the services that you offer and how much to charge for them. It is also possible to find out which nearby inspectors have taken training courses and whether or not they are licensed.
Know Your Target Market
Who are your customers? Are you trying to reach homeowners, sellers, or homebuyers? Your target market will help guide your marketing efforts and help you choose which services to offer.
- Homebuyers: They are usually looking for the best deal and have a budget. Before making an offer, homebuyers may inquire about the condition of the property.
- Home sellers want to sell their homes at the highest possible price. They may also hire a home inspector to help them determine what needs to be done.
- Homeowners: Owners are those who own their home and aren’t looking to sell it. A home inspector may be hired to inspect the property and give advice on what they should do.
The type of marketing and services that you do will depend on your target market.
Differentiate Your Business
It is important to distinguish yourself from other home inspectors when starting your own company. Why should they hire you over another inspector? What is unique about your business? A particular type of inspection can make your business stand out.
You can also offer additional services such as radon testing or energy audits. Your prices can be lower than those of your competitors, but don’t make it so expensive that you lose quality.
It is also essential to find a niche. You could, for example, specialize in inspections of new construction homes and foreclosed properties.
Start Working on Choosing a Name for Your Business
It is crucial to choose the name of your company. This will be the first thing people see when searching for local home inspection companies.
Make sure your name is memorable and easy to remember. To describe what you do, you can use your name.
Here are some tips to help you choose a business name.
- Check that the domain name is available for social media handles and as a domain name.
- You can check to see if your name is trademarked.
- In the business name, include your address, such as “Home Inspection of Sioux Falls.”
- You should choose a unique name that is easy to remember.
- In your business name, use keywords that relate to home inspection, as they will also help with your marketing efforts.
Create A Plan for A Home Inspection Business
A business plan is a document that describes your business goals, the steps you will take to reach them, and the time it will take to do so.
This is your blueprint for creating your company. It contains information about your company, including its history, mission statement, and target market. A strong business plan will help you get bank loans and attract investors who might want to be your partners.
You should include financial information in your business plan, including startup costs, projected profits, and financing options.
You can use the Small Business Association (SBA) online resources to create a complete business plan. Online tools and templates can be used to assist you in writing your plan.
Your Business Should Be Branded
It is important to establish a strong brand when starting a home inspection company. All marketing materials should reflect your brand, including websites, brochures, and social media pages, to ensure that all materials are consistent and well reflect your brand.
It’s also crucial to distinguish your business and identify your niche when branding. This will allow you to attract customers who are looking specifically for your services.
When branding, you should consider new construction homes, commercial buildings, and foreclosed properties as niches.
Your company could also be the only one that recommends specialists who provide clients with a more detailed opinion about mold, termite, or structural damage. A consulting service with homeowners or business owners could also be a unique niche.
Legal Entity + Registering Your Business
You will need to create a legal entity in order to start a home inspection company. This involves creating a business name and filing paperwork with the Secretary of State.
You will also need to file paperwork and pay a fee. The registration process in most states is quite simple.
This is important in order to avoid any future legal problems. Do you know the niche that is involved? At this point, it is a good idea to contact an attorney who specializes in this topic, specifically in home inspection businesses.
There are many legal entities that you can choose from. Each type has its advantages and disadvantages. Before making a decision, you will need to weigh all the factors.
These are the major business entities that home inspection companies use for their home inspection services:
- Sole proprietorship.
- Partnership.
- Limited liability company (LLC).
- C-Corporation.
The SBA website provides more information about each type of entity, and you can have a look properly, based on your location and the full documents you will need.
Register for a Business Bank Account
It is important to open a bank account for your business when you start a new one or even after if you didn’t do it. This will allow you to keep your finances separate from your personal accounts and organize them. This act makes it easier to file taxes at the end. A business credit card is a great way to start building a credit history for your company as well.
Buy the Essential Tools
You will also need the tools and, thus, an investment to start an inspection business.
You may also need to purchase certain equipment for a home inspection as part of your state’s professional licensing requirements. The good news is that most tools are affordable and can be rented.
These are some of the most important tools to help you start your own business.
- A digital camera.
- Tablet or laptop.
- Moisture meters.
- Infrared thermometer.
- Stethoscope.
- Flashlight.
- Safety glasses.
Consider Acquiring Home Inspection Software
You may consider home inspection software to make your inspections more efficient, saving time and money in the whole process in both the short and long term.
You can track and create reports and store information about clients. There are many programs out there, but we have listed some of the most popular below.
- Jobber.
- Home Inspector Pro.
- Horizon.
Build a Website for Your Business
A website is essential to promote your business and attract new clients. It will provide information about your company, rates, and services to potential customers and be a “touching” point for your leads when you start marketing your services.
Many home inspection firms use WordPress.org to power their websites. It’s simple to use and affordable. Many plugins can be used to enhance the functionality of WordPress.org and show the best option when it comes to optimization.
However, website builders can be used while you save your SEO and overall optimization efforts.
Taxes? Make Sure They Are Check
It is essential to have a system in place for tracking income and expenses when starting a business. This will help you file your taxes much more easily at the end.
Talk to a tax specialist or accountant to get started and also invest in proper software that will save you time and effort.
As a home inspector, the main taxes that you will need to pay are self-employment and income taxes. Keep in mind taxes can vary from one state to the next.
Get Business Insurance
It is essential to purchasing insurance when starting a business. This will protect you and your employees.
Indemnity insurance covers any injuries or accidents that might occur while you work. The most popular types of business insurance are:
- General liability insurance.
- Professional liability insurance.
- Insurance for property damage.
- Automobile insurance.
Learn How to Write an Inspection Report
Writing an inspection report is one of the essential skills you should have to run a business. This knowledge will enable you to record your findings and present them to clients in a clear, concise way.
Start Marketing Your Business
It is essential to market your business to attract new clients effectively. This is especially important for small businesses just starting out. You can also design your website using SEO optimization to promote your company. Flyers, brochures, and an online presence are great ways to spread the word about your home inspection business.
How can you market yourself as a home inspector?
You have many options to use your marketing skills in order to get potential clients to know about your business and your abilities as a home inspector.
- Advertise in local newspapers and online classifieds.
- Establishing relationships with contractors and real estate agents.
- Participating in trade shows and conventions.
- Networking with other professionals.
- Trade shows and home shows.
- Potential clients offered free inspections.
- Presenting at community events.
Get Leads and Take on Clients
After you have started to market your home inspection business, it is time to generate leads and take on clients. It’s important to follow up with leads once you have them.
Prepare to provide a quick overview of your services to potential clients and answer any questions they might have. Once you have booked your appointment, make sure you show up on time and are ready to go.
Not all leads will become clients. It may take several leads to find someone who is interested in your services. Don’t let this discourage you. Keep working hard and market your business.
How can you generate leads for your inspection company? There are many ways to do it.
- Flyers can be posted in local businesses or online.
- Emails to potential clients.
- Contacting local agents or visiting them.
- Create a landing page for leads on your website.
- Listing on a directory of home inspectors like Hire an Inspector.
Get Started Inspecting
Once you have the required knowledge and skills, it is time to begin inspecting homes. Make sure you document all aspects of your inspection report when inspecting a home. This will enable you to give your clients a complete overview of the property.
It is important to inspect the exterior and interior of every home as well as the surrounding area. You should pay attention to potential problems and record them in your report.
When you inspect a house, there are some things to be aware of:
- Structural damage.
- Water damage.
- Mold and mildew.
- Termite damage.
- Lead paint.
- Gas leaks.
- Bad roof.
- Air conditioner units that are damaged.
Scale Your Successful Home Inspection Business
You may need to hire more staff or subcontractors as your home inspection business grows. This can help you manage your client base and ensure that inspections are completed on time.
You should also keep track of your personal assets and ensure that you have sufficient insurance coverage. You will likely be purchasing more expensive equipment and properties as your business grows.
You should also keep an eye on your finances so that you’re charging the right amount for your services. As your business grows, you might also consider expanding into new markets. This is a great way of scaling up your business.
It is important to continue offering excellent service and maintaining professionalism to grow your home inspection business. Keep up to date with the latest industry trends technologies, and ensure that you always give your clients the highest priority.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Home Inspection Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Home Inspection Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Home Inspection Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.