Spent $2,400 marketing pre-listing inspections and booked three jobs

Adding a pre-listing inspection product looked easy on paper. Sellers want to know what's coming, they'd rather find the bad news themselves, and I already had the inspector relationship from the maintenance side of my business. A pre-listing inspection just means the seller pays for the condition report before the house goes on the market, instead of waiting for the buyer's inspector to find things.

So I spent about $2,400 over four months on local ads, a landing page, and printed one-pagers for open houses. Four months, three jobs. Roughly $1,300 in revenue against $2,400 out, plus forty hours I could have billed elsewhere.

What I got wrong. Sellers don't want a document. Several told me flat out that once a report exists they may have to hand it over, and disclosure requirements differ by state, so they were asking their agent and their agent was telling them not to create paper. I was selling information to the one party in the transaction who has the least appetite for it.

What I'd do differently: pitch listing agents, not sellers. The agent is the one who eats the retrade three weeks in when a buyer's inspector finds a failing furnace, and the agent has ten listings a year instead of one. Two of my three jobs came from a single agent anyway. I had the evidence in month two and kept running ads at strangers.