Uber-style report rating system for building, pest and strata reports

GUEST OBSERVER

Before You Bid allows you to search for a property and buy your independent building and pest, strata report and contract review without picking up your phone.

The website was created after the personal experience of spending thousands of dollars without getting close to buying a property.

I was concerned not just with the cost of these reports, but also the quality. People don’t want to allow others to buy their reports because there is nothing in it for them. That is why we set-up a cash back model so that everyone pays the best possible price.

We have also set up an Uber-style rating system so our customers can give direct feedback on their reports and we can feed that through our service providers to continually improve the quality.

Service providers can apply to Before You Bid to be on their panel and have their qualifications and insurances checked. In one instance there was an inspector who had a builder’s license number on their website and it was fake. We take those worries out of the consumers’ hands. 

And how do they address the independence issue?

We found in the ACT that the agents have a tendency to pick report inspectors who write favourable reports. We have contacted a number of inspectors who admitted that their agent-instructed reports were not as thorough as their buyer ones. We don’t think they are worth the paper they are written on and that buyers deserve better. That is why we don’t allow agents or vendors to have any influence over our panel of report writers and don’t accept any money from them for advertising. We are exclusively buy-side focused.

With our share cost model interested parties can pay as little as $149 for an independent building and pest inspection and $79 for an independent strata report or contract review. We consider this an innovative solution to a market failure.

Rhys Rogers is co-founder and chief executive officer of Before You Bid and can be contacted here.