I`ve never posted anything but thought SUN would be the only place where I would get some hopefully great ideas with our particular business situation.
My husband and I run a successful home inspection business. After having several very busy and successful years, with all that is transpiring in the real estate and mortage industry currently, our business has suffered.
We have been looking to start another service related business so as not to have all our eggs in one basket. We have inspected thousands of homes in the years we`ve been in business and still continue to inspect over 500 homes a year. We have a network of real estate agents, attorneys and mortgage brokers that is the result of years of doing business with them.
Here is my question plain and simple. What kind of business service or otherwise could we start that would allow us to take advantage of the fact that we have the eyes and ears of hundreds of real estate agents in three counties, several hundred new and current homeowners, etc.? What other service could we market to homeowners that would not represent any conflicts of interest in our role as home inspector?
Some things that I`ve come up with are a referral service to connect contractors to homeowners since we get at least several calls a week about recommendations for all types of home repairs or services. However, I don`t know if contractors would actually pay a referral fee to us to steer clients to them when most of them are pretty busy without our referrals.
I also thought of starting a website that would offer all sorts of house warming gifts, employee incentive gifts, etc. and market it to the thousands of real estate agents in our area who usually give housewarming gifts to their clients. The difference in my website would be that the gifts would be high quality and not the cheap gifts I`ve seen online.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Determined Lady



