All Forum Posts by: John Bodrozic

It is time to provide your clients with a gift that will really help them manage their home improvement projects, home maintenance, and home inventory after the sale.

HomeZada Professional is an easy, quick and affordable way for agents to gift a one year subscription to HomeZada to their clients AND the agent gets their online profile ad in front of their client everytime they login for a year. This creates a great opportunity to keep your personal brand in front of your client which can lead to more 'warm' referrals because you differentiated yourself after the sale.

Check out the site and video at http://www.homezada.com/pro.html

I am curious how real estate agents provide value to their clients after the sale? This is also related to some research we are doing on how much of a marketing budget for real estate professionals goes to finding new 'cold' leads versus trying to keep your mindshare with your clients after the sale and trying to build a loyal customer base that produces more 'warm' referrals. We are interested in understanding this dynamic. THanks.

Our users vary in their needs, and which modules they find the most valuable. Some users find value in the suite of all the functionality, and other users find value in one of the three core modules today. Yes, landlords are more likely to find value in all three modules, and some rehabbers find value in the projects piece, especially if they don't use some other system and want to get more organized than multiple excel spreadsheets and folders.

Hello J Scott,
Lots of great questions that I will try to address. HomeZada is designed with the premise of managing key data elements of a house or multiple houses in a secure cloud based offering. We are not trying to replicate what accounting software packages provide. There is a lot of non-financial data and project management aspects that other packages do not provide. Here is the current functionality that HomeZada has that we believe many accounting packages do not provide.

1. A Home Inventory of both fixed assets tied to the home as well as possessions. This includes photos, owner's manuals, warranties, serial numbers, and other documents pertaining to items in the house. This is primarily for insurance documentation purposes as most people don't know the value of these things, therefore are probably underinsured, and at significant risk of not getting reimbursed if a disaster or fire were to occur.

2. A Home Maintenance Calendar that the user can customize and personalize as smart reminders and alerts on common maintenance that tends to either get forgotten or missed. This can be easily integrated with existing internet calendars and used to manage third party service providers responsibile for maintaining various aspects of the home.

3. A Projects module that focuses on areas that other systems may not. The systems comes with 50 common home improvement projects with the common bill of materials already provided. The user can then develop budgets at the line item level, and then save both their online and offline product research. As an example, you might do research on appliances online, or at a local appliance store, and the 5 or 10 different brands you are considering both from a feature and budget standpoint are consolidated into one location for your analysis. Once you buy an item, you can track the costs, but also the warranty expiration, owner's manual and instantly updated the home inventory for insurance purposes.

Our solution may not be for everyone depending on their needs and we encourage people to evaluate and try our solution and determine for themselves if they find value in it. We have a robust product roadmap of more features to come to help people manage various key data elements about their houses in the cloud with a combination of both web and mobile apps.

hello Shane Woods
great question. It is essentially 5 active at any time. For people with more than 5, we encourage them to contact us so we can give them a quote based on the number of properties they want to manage.

It is a monthly charge of $9.95 or an annual charge of $99.00 that allows you to manage up to 5 properties. You can have as many projects as you want within a property. You can also try the system for Free for the first 30 days.

HomeZada is a new online app that manages rehab projects. You can track your budgets, cash flows, costs, important project photos and documents, and any online or offline product research you do for your rehabs. You can also have multiple properties within one account. Check out the features and a 90 second video here:

http://www.homezada.com/home-improvement.html

hello @Justin Williams

I felt the same you do about needing better tools to manage homes from my own personal experience. my previous company I started did commercial construction project management software, which is overkill for a home. FULL DISCLOSURE: so i decided to start a new software company to help homeowners manage their homes with a solution in the cloud for projects, maintenance, and inventory.

We are early in the software development process and may not have everything you are looking for, but we do have some decent stuff. You can find the name of the company by clicking on my profile, as I am trying to balance answering your question with a good response, but not violate the rules of the forums by "selling". We appreciate any good, bad or ugly feedback you might have.

@Steve K.
Don't know if your questions was directed to my post above, but the answer is no, low bid alone should not determine who gets the job. You should develop a mutliple sets of criteria to rank and choose who to contract with based on these criteria. For example...

1. Check to make sure their quote includes the whole scope you want. Sometimes they are low because they missed something you want [accidentally or on purpose]
2. When can they start? Is time important to you on when the project is finished?
3. Rank the quality of their work based on references, site visits, previous projects that are similar to the one you want them to do.
4. Did they meet all of your pre-qualifications like Steve Babiak mentioned above.
5. Did they agree to your payment terms? You might get a low bidder demanding more payment upfront and no retention, versus someone slightly higher but agrees to your payment terms.
6. During this process, you are also building a professional relationship. Which contractor will you mesh well with, especially when difficult situations arise in the future. Does your communication style work with theirs.

Contracts are about two things. The economics of a deal, and the control provisions like payment terms, termination rights, etc.

Great article that simplifies it quickly and it is very pertinent for today. A question for the future is , will there ever be a tipping point of too many different social media platforms? Perhaps we are in the early days of the laws of tech jungle. How many operating systems make up 90% of the PC market? [probably two] How many browsers make up 90% of the PC market? [probably 4] how many smart phone operating systems make up 90% of the market [probably three] Will the social marketing market continue to add more social media sites, or will the market declare 2 or 3 winners.