Ep 045 - How HomeZada Helps Professional Create Smarter Homeowners

Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, where you'll discover strategies to save money, save time, and be better organized in managing your largest financial asset and biggest expense, your home. Your hosts, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson, who are co-founders of HomeZada, have been supporting homeowners for over 20 years. They are here to share with you their tips and suggestions, as well as interviews with industry experts, with the goal of helping you become a smarter homeowner. Now here's your hosts, John and Beth.

Hello there and welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I am Beth Dodson, one of your co-hosts, and with me is John Bedrosian. He's bringing up One of his mugs because he's catching up on his coffee this morning, and it says laugh. So laugh, laugh, laugh. And we like to do that a lot over here because sometimes you know life can give us curveballs, and we want to stay on top of things. But laughter is good for the soul. So that's just personal opinion. Today in our lovely podcast, we are going to talk about. Our professional community. Yes. The reason we're gonna talk about our professional community is 'cause there is a lot of them. And along with homeowners, we wanna help our professionals help their homeowner customers be successful and be a smarter homeowner as well. And most people don't know this, but we not only built HomeZada so that the homeowner can actually manage all their homes, but we also built HomeZada Professional very early on. Because many of our professionals reached out to us and said, I need a system like yours to help me help my customers. And with that said, John, I remember the days when we were building HomeZada Professional and we actually thought we had some time before we had to build it. But the calls were— were— I mean, we were getting calls ringing off the hook about all different kinds of professionals that were interested in working with us to help their customers. Firstly, I think we want to talk about is HomeZada Professional itself, and then we'll talk about the professionals that have reached out to us. So let's talk about HomeZada Professional and the way it operates and how it can support our partners at a high level.

Yeah, there Correct. So when we built HomeZada, our end user/customer is always the homeowner.

Yes.

The homeowner. And so we talk a lot about everything about your home in one place and manage all the data about your home. And so from a software perspective, we had to build all that and manage all that information. But then we also realized that there are a lot of, when Beth says the word professionals, There are a lot of people that service homeowners in other value-added ways, right? So there's, we'll get into this, but everybody from real estate to insurance to mortgage to home warranty to property managers, there's a lot of businesses that also perform either products or other services to those same sets of homeowners. And so yes, early on we started getting a lot of feedback from the market of, hey, I'm a customer, I'm a homeowner customer, I really love your product, how can I use this in my business? Because I have my homeowner customers that I have a relationship with that I've sold a product or a service to. Can I use HomeZada in a value-added way? So we had to start thinking about the different ways that all of these different professionals actually work. Which is both exciting and a little bit scary because in some respects, right, you think a homeowner sign up, it's their house, you have an address and everything's good. But then you think about all the different, what I call engagement points, like the real estate industry usually engages during the buying and selling phase of the journey. The insurance industry may be also at buying and selling, but also at renewal. The mortgage, you know, both lending industry, home improvement industry. Lots of these different industries engage different ways. And then all of those industries have these different layers to them, from agents to brokers to franchises to big companies to small companies. All of that created a level of opportunity for us to be able to provide great partner opportunities, but it made a bit of a challenge on the technology side for me of like, how do we build this so that everyone in that food chain can find value in it? So yes, we— one of the biggest ways is HomeZada Professional, which is essentially what we tell our marketplace is HomeZada, the core platform, has 2 different types of accounts. One account is for a homeowner who signs themselves up. We call it a homeowner account. The other sign-up is a professional account, and that is essentially designed for businesses that want to provide value to their homeowner customers in more of what I call a one-on-one personal service kind of methodology, where the professional knows perhaps the address of the home that just got bought, or they know the address because they've sold them an insurance policy, and they want, you know, various things from their branding in it and all these other kinds of things. And so Homes Auto Professional is actually used by lots of different types of professionals. And again, it's— I can't stress enough, it's, it's designed for people that want to create a and have a tighter relationship, specifically in what I call a one-to-one relationship over how a property is created by the professional and then given to each individual customer that the professional wants to give to.

Now, okay, so now that we've talked about this, and we're gonna talk about some other programs we have as well that suit professionals, but Homes out of Professional allows a lot of our professional customers, 'cause they are still customers, our professional partners/customers, engage with as many homeowners as they want in one location where they have one login and one password. So it's easy to manage all these different properties and all these different types of properties because if, you know, what I know of HomeZada Professional— haven't used it myself personally, but I've demoed it— is it provides our professionals 2 specific ways they can engage with their customers. They can give the gift of HomeZada with their branding in the system, and then basically they're giving a gift of Homes at a Premium for a year to their customers. Boom, that's the end of it. And they can track it and they can manage it with their different customers. The other way is for those professionals who want to enter in data on behalf of their customers almost as a service, or as a service, so that they can then perform that service with tools that are easy to use for the professional, but then transfer that information to the homeowner, and the homeowner can then take on the, the other responsibility of managing their home, whether it's through inventory, maintenance projects, etc. And that customer, meaning the partner customer professional, was able to enter in data on behalf of the customer to get that relationship started. And With regards to all of that, Professional also allows all of those partners to retain copies of that information until they're ready to delete it from their Professional account. And that is acting as a record of the work that they have done for their customers.

Yeah. Do you want me to drill into a little bit more about how it actually works?

I would love that.

Sure. So, the first part, the beauty of Homesota Professional is it's completely self-service, meaning you can come to homesota.com, hit sign up, choose Professional, and you create a username and a password and an account. The first thing that most people do is they will do exactly what you said. They'll upload their branding. Now, the branding also has 2 options. Some people want to provide branding for their company name. But other people, like for instance in the real estate, perhaps even in the insurance or mortgage, they want their individual personal brand as an individual because they're a real estate agent and we want— and they know that oftentimes their face is what creates retention. So you can set up your professional account branding 2 different ways: just your company logo or your individual name and your individual picture of your face as well as your company logo, because you're essentially getting branding on both of those 2 things. The, the sec— third thing, I guess, is it's all self-service in terms of how you actually pay for it. It's all done by credit card, so you enter in your credit card and it's pretty self-explanatory. It's $99 and you buy a property, and then you basically unlock your account. You can then create that property, like you said.

Mm-hmm.

And then you've got all those downstream choices over how you use it. And if you want, I can drill into more of those 3 different choices, or we could segue into a different segment of how you want to continue.

No, actually drill into those 3 different segments for real quick, because I think I highlighted them briefly, but actually drill into them a little bit more.

Okay, so it all starts with the premise of the pro has to create a property inside of their HomeZada Pro account. So the creation of a property is like, I call it like a 5-step process. Pretty simple. You get through it in less than a minute. First step is you enter in the name of the property. You have a choice over entering in the address or not. A lot of professionals will enter the address in because that's the part that you're personalizing the Homes Auto experience for the end customer, as well as a lot of the downstream homeowner AI tools become more valuable because we know the location and the address of the home. Then once the property is created, you're absolutely correct, there's actually 3 different ways that professionals work. One is you could say, I want to give this to my best customer who just did a deal with me. All you have to do is enter in your customer's name and you enter their email address and you hit the transfer button. And what ends up happening is Homesatta, your pro account, will create a copy of that property, digital. Think of it just like a binder. And you, you retain one binder for your records. The other copy of that binder you're actually giving to your customer. But in our metaphor, you're sending them an email saying, hey, Beth Dodson, I just gave you a subscription to Homesatta, click here. You create the user, the customer, consumer creates their own username and password. And now they're into Homesatta and they see your branding and they're using all the AI features and off they go. That's one way of doing it.

So that's basically getting your brand in front of the customer on a regular basis so they remember who you are and potentially send you referrals.

Correct. And the beauty of the branding— I forgot to mention this— is the branding is displayed at the main dashboard on every single login, no matter what device the user uses.

Beautiful.

So it can— whether the, the customer signs up with our mobile device, tablet, or desktop, or even alternates between devices, the branding is displayed at every single login. As well as another bonus branding aspect of it, HomeZada sends out automated email reminders to the customer, and those email reminders are oftentimes maintenance-related. Time to, you know, click here to click your gutters, or click here to see what maintenance tasks are due in the fall, and also in like a monthly statement. So the branding for the professionals also shows up in all of those automated emails. So I often tell professionals, you're getting probably about, depending on the number of emails per month because it varies, somewhere between 4 to 6 branding impressions in a value-added way Because the homeowner is using HomeZada and they're getting, they feel like the system really knows about their house and it's keeping them up to date. But the professional that's provided to them is getting that branding value, which is that whole retention of remembering who they are so that they can come back to you and do more business with you.

Yeah, that's amazing. So that's amazing. And also the branding is interactive, meaning you can click on things in the branding and it will lead you to websites and other places. So the connection is easy peasy. I love that. I do. I love that.

Absolutely. Their contact information, their email address, their landing page all gets configured as part of them creating their branding ad. So that was number one, the number one way of just creating the property, entering in the customer's email address, boom, you're done. The second thing is you kind of alluded to it, which is if the professional wants to personalize it even more, So you've created the property, but before you actually do a transfer, you could then go into the property. And let's say in this case you're a real estate agent. You already have the— a whole bunch of documents about the transactions. You've got the inspection report, you've got the sales agreement, you've got the negotiation, you've got closing documents, you have all these PDFs.

Photos.

You can preload all of those PDFs into the property. You could even go in and take photos of certain things and start to pre-populate some of the inventory. Maybe you even know that the customer bought this house and they plan on doing a kitchen remodel. You could actually create a kitchen remodel project for them to get them started. So you could tweak the maintenance calendar. There's lots of sort of things that you could do. And this also goes into the different types of partners because we have people that are like home inventory professionals. We can talk about this where they're literally creating an entire inventory. for the customer before they give it to them. So, they're essentially working on the property, and then once they're— once they've done that, then they do the same process. They hit transfer, but now their end customer's first-time experience is even better because more of the information that's specific to their home has already been pre-populated by the professional, which is that huge value-add that those types of professionals, if they want to provide that.

Mm-hmm.

is capable to them and their business.

That's like a standout service. Like, that just goes above and beyond. That's amazing.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not the inventor of this term, but people oftentimes use the term a white glove service. Like, this is super duper. You're, you're one of my best customers. I'm gonna go to your house, take photos. I'm gonna tweak all this stuff. I'm gonna essentially take HomeZada's great product and make it even better for you so that your first-time experience is like even less work for the end consumer to do.

Yes. Now, what's the third?

The third option is probably catered towards the businesses that have even a better, what I call, trusted relationship. Because the transfer is that whole copying one binder into 2. The third option is the sharing model where the same binder is being shared between the consumer and the professional. This oftentimes relates to people that are in the property management or estate management business.

Yeah, even maintenance contractors too.

There's a lot of home builders that are getting into the concierge home maintenance business as well. And essentially what that allows those types of professionals to do is you're essentially sharing the same data about the house so that your consumer customer has access to their property You have access to their property in Homes Auto Professional, and you're capable of sharing at it in the same time. So as an example, a lot of people may own vacation homes.

Yes.

And they have a vacation company. Well, the owner may not visit the vacation home all the time, but maybe they decide to go visit it and they see something is wrong or broken. The owner is taking photos of things that need to be fixed and repaired. But the property manager is using Homes Auto Professional and they see all these things. They're the ones that are going to schedule it to get fixed next week or next month or whatever the case may be, the severity of it. And it creates what I call that ongoing trusted relationship between a professional and the owner of a property because they're sharing the same inventory maintenance project and financial data.

Yes, no, it's, it really does streamline The process of communication between the homeowner of the property or the property owner of the property and the contractors that are being used or the professionals that are being used. Now, we talked briefly about these 3 scenarios and homes out of professional. One of the things that we glossed over but we want to really dig into a little bit more is— The types of professionals that we have. And I think we can actually pull up a screen, um, that will act— and we can actually walk through, of those 3 models, which ones would fit which category of professional depending on their business structure. Yes.

So I pulled that up while you were talking.

Yeah, you're on our website, you went to the professional page.

Yes, maybe I'll start at the top, right? Most people land on our homepage, Homesada, and again, most of that is catered to the end consumer.

The customer.

And homeowner. But across the top, we have these tabs and we have this professionals. So if you click on the professionals, these are not an all-inclusive list 'cause there's all kinds of professionals that we work with that aren't necessarily on here, but the bulk of them will either fit into the insurance industry, The mortgage industry, the real estate industry, property managers, even new home builders who are building net new homes or in the maintenance business, and this catch-all called service providers, which tends to be professional organizers, home inventory specialists, or other people that are providing services. So it is really kind of a comprehensive way of all these different types of businesses being able to leverage HomeZada and our Homeowner AI in the course of servicing their clients.

Now, one of the things that we face, John, is a lot of these industries, specifically the insurance, mortgage— and by the way, they're not in any particular order, by the way, of what's, uh, what we deal with more often than not. We deal with everybody individually, and we have a lot of partners in all of these categories and then some. But specifically insurance, mortgage, and real estate, it's an interesting dynamic with these industries. There's a lot of layers sometimes in these industries. There's sometimes corporations, there's sometimes brands, there are sometimes brokers or brokerages. Then there's also the people in the field. I'm just going to use that catch-all phrase, people in the field, because there's agents, there's, there's individual brokers, there's lenders, there's loan officers. There's all these different labels that we have in the field level.

Individuals.

I know HomeZada can work for all of these entities and all layers. And is there anything you want to add to what I just said? Because for me, I see it as every one of these layers has an ability to provide more value to their customers in a way that's intelligent and in a way that really works for the customer, the homeowner themselves, because sometimes the ongoing relationship, at least mine personally and some others, with these individual— these organizations or these industries hasn't really been helpful for me. It's been good. It's information. I get information. But I think there's an opportunity for these industries to go beyond And help the homeowner actually manage their homes?

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. I could drill into like 5 different areas based on that great kind of overview over what to talk about. But in general, I'll start with one, which is insurance, mortgage, and real estate. Those industries, we've done a lot of research on them. They're great at providing value at the time of transaction.

That's great.

Helping you buy or sell a home, helping you get a mortgage, helping you initially get the insurance. But those industries all struggle with how do I create a value-added relationship beyond the initial transaction? And that's where Homesada's best fit is, which is we're trying to be and are with the consumer homeowner throughout their entire journey of being a homeowner.

Yes.

Because it's seasonal, its maintenance is seasonal, its updates on the value of your home, it's tracking your projects, all that sort of journey then allows those professionals to sort of be present during that. And the ultimate value add for them is they want to be— they want to not be viewed as a commodity business just competing on price. They want to be viewed as a trusted advisor, and they want to be viewed as a trusted advisor beyond the sale. And create more value? Because at the end of the day, their business is a mix of new leads and new opportunities versus my existing customer base that I want to continue to service when they need my product or service next. So it's that we have that phrase customer engagement. How do I stay engaged with my existing customers in a cost-effective way that provides an immense amount of value that they're more likely to refer me to their friends and families because they remember me at the annual Christmas party or July 4th party. And when they decide to sell their house 2 years from now, or they want to get a home equity loan, or they have to renew their insurance policy, they're more likely to stay with me and/or come back to me for that particular service. And you're absolutely correct, there is a layer of complexity in all of these industries between the individual human, and that's usually either agent, broker, agent, or yeah, agent candidly. And then there's the brokerage, and then there's the overall franchise. Then there may be e-commerce marketplaces. Then there's ultimately carriers and big companies. And so there is this sort of natural food chain over lots of different people. Homes Auto Professional can be used by all of those, but right out of the gate, it's catered toward the individual human because of that self-service model. Our opportunities for working with brokerages and larger organizations— there's other configurations that we can do, but that requires us to engage in a discussion to understand how big their brokerage is, how many agents do they have, What are their goals and objectives? What's their sign-on process? It becomes more of a business-to-business sale versus a self-service individual human can still use it in, in that kind of way, which is kind of exciting for people that just want to provide, you know, a subscription to HomeZada and not have to go through this big fuss.

Yeah, which is also why this button that you're showing right now is Schedule a Demo. This is a really great time if someone is interested, they could schedule a demo with us. It will send us an email and we will find the right resource to schedule a demo. And a demo for us is actually us showing you the product as it is best suited for your needs, because a lot of partners have very specific, um, business ideas and very specific business configurations that require a demo that may not be presented on our website or out of the box. Or may not be on our YouTube channel with all the different videos that we have. So a demo means scheduling a demo with us. I will say this because I know it gets confusing. It does not mean you're getting a free demo of our product. It doesn't work that way. You schedule a demo with us and we will showcase and show you how the product operates. And what we mean by that is we will demo and show you via webinar how specific features work for your organization and focus on the things that matter most to you. Because if the other features don't matter to you, then we'll gloss over them really quickly or not show you them at all, and you can see them at a later date or see them on your own on our YouTube channel.

So we've talked about Professional allows businesses in a one-to-one relationship to work with HomeZada, but we also have a way to work in what's called a one-to-many relationship, and we refer to that as our affiliate program. And our affiliate program is geared towards lots of media companies that could be small individual bloggers who have an audience, to regional media companies, to even national opportunities. And these people are not looking to engage their customers in a one-to-one basis on creating a property and then sending them sort of a gift. They're looking at it as a digital marketing strategy of marketing by email or social campaigns or Various digital approaches to communicate the opportunity about what HomeZada is with their Homeowner AI, and they essentially have the opportunity to earn commissions on that.

Yeah, no, and this is a program that we've got different kinds of affiliates as well who are interested in working with us, and they are everything from, um, a small blogger to a large media company to even some of our partners. They will play a role in being a professional customer of ours and a professional partner where they buy, buy content or buy properties for their customers, and they will also offer affiliate marketing and affiliate program and introductions to HomeZada to their existing customer base?

Yeah, so this is why we talk about signing up for a demo, because depending on who wants to partner with us, if they are thinking about these different models, it becomes an opportunity for us to learn about their business and what their objectives are. And therefore, we can make the right recommendation strategy over what is the best way to work with Homesada to create the 3-way win. At the end of the day, the consumer homeowner has to win. They have to find value in Homesada. And then, what is the partner looking for in terms of how they want to engage their customers? And Homesada has different ways of working with them. So, we— going back to that first part when we had all these different partners coming to us over how to work, Yeah. I think we kind of, Did a pretty good job at trying to come up with different ways of working with these different partner opportunities. And so, yeah, we are excited about having these types of discussions with people.

No, I know. When it comes to our partners, so basically we're saying that there's a variety of professional partners and they are everything from the industries of insurance, mortgage, real estate, Home building.

Home warranty.

Home warranty, remodeling contractors, professional organizers, home inventory professionals, proof managers. I mean, I know I'm missing people. Maintenance contractors, estate planners, estate attorneys. I mean, yeah, there's like, it's so vast. I mean, we get pinged by so many different people. Think of as a homeowner that you are, you probably get pinged by a ton of people. It's, It's the same thing. We get so many different types of partners that reach out to us, and it's super exciting, and I'm excited, and I think we built something that can help as many of them as possible. And we do that either through Homesada Professional, and it's self-service, or you can request a demo, and we will show it— show you how Homesada works specifically for your organization and your industry and how you want to service your clients. And then the other thing that we offer is an affiliate program that a professional can participate in both, by the way. They don't have to choose one or the other, but the affiliate program allows you to market to your customers because you want to introduce them to a platform that can really help them manage their home. And that also has a lot of value to you as a professional because You're actually showcasing products that are innovative, forward-thinking, and actually help the customer manage one of their largest assets. And I think a lot of our professional partners don't always understand that. What are the tools that are available to really help homeowners manage their homes and also to provide branding that keeps them top, front and center if ever they need referrals, a reference, or even, um, connection for when they want to take another transaction with them again. So repeat business basically for our partners. So anything else you want to add to that, John?

Uh, I think you've done a great job summarizing it. I mean, the only thing I would say is it's still in line with our overall mission, right? It's everything about your home in one place. The name of our podcast, Be a Smarter Homeowner. Clearly, homeowners and consumers is who needs to find value in it. But there's this huge opportunity of people that also have the same value that we do, which is they want to make their customers better homeowners as well. So we built this whole different ways of working with them and are excited about those opportunities.

That's fantastic. So this is all about professionals and how you can use Homesada Professional and our affiliate program. And if you have any questions, please reach out to us at info@homesada.com. You can learn more about us at homesada.com, H-O-M-E-Z-A-D-A.com. And thank you so much for joining us for Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. If you find this relevant and you want to share it with other people, please do so. We want as many people To really help homeowners and make them the smartest they can be. And we want to thank you so much for listening to us and joining us, and we hope you're going to be a smarter homeowner. Until next time, have a great day.

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