Ask anyone in the Industry about their options for submitting work orders and they will tell you there are none. For property preservation there is Verisk — who owns Property Preservation Wizard and Pruvan. Additionally, Verisk controls all bidding software for the Industry. And for inspections there is InspectorADE — it is the only inspection software that has been granted access to all NAMFS Prime Vendors. Think about that, in a multi-billion dollar industry, only one option for software. More on point, though, once control was seized, both software providers increased their pricing. The bigger problem, though, stems from the abusive practices coming from the customer service — or lack thereof in many cases. Take InspectorADE, for example. The inability to monitor when their system is up or down does not exist other than showing up at a site to find that it is down. This, coupled with the inability to reach customer service other than Pacific Time — that excludes over TWO HUNDRED MILLION AMERICANS. Imagine, you head into New York City at 7am to perform Rush Inspections only to find that InspectorADE is down. You have to wait, in congestion traffic after paying massive tolls on the GW Bridge, a minimum of three hours to even send an email. It is a plain and simple stranglehold.
When you address InspectorADE’s charging of 32 cents per inspection, at an estimated a million inspection orders per month — factoring in the double billing of firms whom must access the order via their separate accounts in combination with an average of 4 different inspections per property — that is a whopping THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS a month and THREE MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS a year. This does not even include the commercial real estate inspections in which there is an estimated $1 Trillion worth of assets tanking, right now.
Hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into InspectorADE, over the years, and zero responsibility to the consumer. It is not simply InspectorADE, though. Verisk joins InspectorADE in their unfair advantage over competitors attempting to enter the space and refusing to provide portability options. With soon to be filed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaints against both parties, it should be interesting to see the outcome. You may follow all CFPB complaints, filed against offenders, and their outcomes, here.
Editor’s Note: We corrected the $32 Million per month to $320,000 per month and the $384 Million per year to $3.84 Million.
