Building Your Business with CCPIA #12: Special Guest Christian Adams, Co-Founder of Repair Pricer

CCPIA (00:01:39)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Building Your Business with the Certified Commercial Property Inspectors Association.

CCPIA (00:02:08)
This episode, today we’re going to talk to Christian Adams, the co-founder of Repair Pricer. So with that, I’d like to introduce Christian Adams. I’d like to welcome Christian Adams with us from Repair Pricer. Welcome, Christian!

Christian Adams (00:02:45)
Thanks, Rob, appreciate you guys having us here.

CCPIA (00:02:45)
Oh, my absolute pleasure! I guess before we get too far along, I’d like to have you introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background.

Christian Adams (00:02:45)
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Christian Adams. I’m one of the co-founders, real estate broker. I was an agent and a broker for my own, since for almost 20 years, primarily in the Texas markets, focusing on the residential side more than commercial. But I had teams up to 150 agents working with me across Texas. Scaled that company for a number of years. In that background and real estate, real estate brokerage is really kind of what drove Repair Pricer to come into existence.

CCPIA (00:09:12)
Interesting. So you saw kind of a need in the marketplace to help consumers identify some of their immediate or long-term costs, and decided that was a way that you could fill a niche without having to be directly in the sales portion.

Christian Adams (00:09:19)
Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. So it’s definitely a need — I’d say a lot of it was driven more so as a broker, and as like a lead agent, you tend to review all your contracts, or you should be, newer agents and any agents really, because when you’re a broker you cover that, you know, insurance-wise. Putting something in that contract that’s not correct — you need to be aware of it so you can correct it before it gets signed off on by the client. And one thing I saw was that our agents came from sales backgrounds, corporate backgrounds, even hospitality, that kind of thing. Great salespeople, very honest, very forthright, great salespeople, but they didn’t have a construction background.

So one of my guys, Darren — I won’t say his last name — he put a contract amendment across my desk for a water heater. It said $400 for a new water heater, and I said, “Where did you get this number? How did you come up with $400?” He said, “I went on HomeDepot.com, and that’s how much it costs.” I’m like, “Maybe for the time.” So what I started doing is really getting into it with a huge volume of deals. But I couldn’t personally ever see the pricing for every amendment, so I actually brought in Rob Ty, who was our co-founder — one of the founders. He was a real estate developer in Dallas, a builder, he’s a certified master inspector as well, coincidentally, and I had him and his team start running mini repair price reports for us internally. We’d send those over, get like a spreadsheet back, and we were doing that ourselves in-house.

Then what happens — other agents kind of found out about this, and it got quite popular, and it wasn’t feasible for Rob and his folks to do this for free, so they started charging for them. And then I kind of looked at the legalities of it, and I was like, I can’t be charging agents from outside my brokerage through our brokerage for these reports — like, we can’t be doing that. So we set up Repair Pricer. I’ll see, initially just in the Dallas market, and then from there, we’ve — possible, we now — we’ve processed over a million reports. We operate in every single state. We integrate with almost every single inspection software platform.

But I think the key here is we built it initially for agents, but it does help consumers. And that’s where, on the commercial side, it’s interesting — I consider our commercial cost security reports are actually for the consumer, for the buyer. But a commercial buyer is very different to a residential buyer — 100% different.

CCPIA (00:11:11)
I’m right now on the road, I’m in a lovely hotel room, as I am every other week this time of year, and that’s probably the toughest thing I have when I have a new student with me, or somebody entering into the commercial world. These are two distinctly different consumers — the buyer of a residential versus the buyer of a commercial building don’t have the same needs, the same wants, the same expectations. And is that something you had to take into mind as you’ve ventured into that as well, right?

Christian Adams (00:11:44)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I sold over 1,200 homes personally, okay, but again, primarily on the residential side. I was dealing with people who are like, “I don’t like the paint,” and let me talk about the schools, and maybe the landscaping needs something — any two things you can easily remedy. But you’re dealing with an emotional response to a property — that’s what it comes down to. Whereas when you’re selling commercial property — and I did sell a small amount of lease, some too — it’s a financial decision. It is a financial decision. Often they have a huge amount of money tied up in these places. They need to know that this property is going to perform, it’s going to make the money to be part of a portfolio, maybe it’s part of a 1031 exchange, moving money around to keep things rolling. It is purely a financial decision. And that’s, I think, where our product is almost more important, right? It’s really useful for agents, but for a commercial investor, they need the information, right? They need that information to go and make that decision and say, “Yeah, well, I know I’m paying 3.5 million for the property, but what’s my five-year cost to maintain it?”

CCPIA (00:14:51)
Sure. And that’s why I’ve asked you to be here today — as part of our COMSOP, our Commercial Standards of Practice, in Section 7, which we lay out the report style. We do not have to provide cost to cure, or cost aggregations, or cost to repair as part of our standard service. But for our members, and those using the COMSOP, it’s certainly something they can provide. And that’s usually that next question — how? And that’s where you’re transitioning your product from a million satisfied consumers on the residential side, and potentially another million satisfied consumers on the commercial side. Can you talk a little bit about that transition that you’ve undertaken?

Christian Adams (00:15:33)
Yeah, yeah, we’re not complete, and this is why I value this relationship so much, because we want CCPIA feedback — 100%, already work with a lot of members, but we’re constantly trying to iterate. So let’s imagine the taxonomy — we would attack so many, for residential homes, of approximately 2,000 items. But some of those don’t translate over to the commercial world and vice versa, right? Like, we’re not going to repave the parking lot for a three-bedroom residential home, it doesn’t make sense — we might do the driveway. And it’s just different language that’s used. So part of that is rebuilding the taxonomy, right? However we get our taxonomy — we built ours over the years from ingesting reports. So the more reports we get, the bigger our taxonomy gets, the accuracy gets better as well.

And that’s another thing — if you think about the commercial reports for Repair Pricer, they’re actually more similar to our early days’ repair price reports. So we went out to build the product — it obviously didn’t exist, no one had taken this challenge, and so it was very hard for us to build this taxonomy and pricing set for all of these items and defects. So we did it manually, we hit the phones — the majority of our commercial inspection reports, we actually hit the phones. And that’s why it takes a little bit longer. So residential reports take 24 hours, commercial reports take 48 hours — and that’s guaranteed. But it’s because oftentimes, in areas where we haven’t done a huge amount, we are actually polling contractors in real time, we’re talking them through things, and then we take that information, we record it, maybe extend the taxonomy, we update our pricing, right? So that’s one side of what we’re doing to kind of drive change.

The other is the format — should it look the same, should it look different, should it go beyond just “these are the things that need fixing and here’s what it’s gonna cost today”? This is really what we’re taking into at this point. And I know Rob Ty’s heading to Dallas to meet with some of you folks in April.

CCPIA (00:19:04)
Oh yeah, yeah, we we are — going to have a class in April that you’ve graciously offered to help us with, with a lunch one of those days.

Christian Adams (00:19:06)
Yes, yeah. Well, luckily Rob’s about 25 miles away, so it’s not so much a challenge for him to get there. But yeah, we want, again, we want a lot of participation from your members — just to see, “here’s what we have today, what else would you like to see, what can we do.” And to your point earlier — no, inspectors don’t have to do this, and we say, “Yeah, you shouldn’t have to do it, but you should have a way that enables your client to get the information.” Guide us with what you would like to see.

CCPIA (00:21:34)
I agree 100%. And that’s where, circling back to when you talked about the differences — we often talk about the “Big 3” when we go through our classes, and those are the three most expensive items of a building, and those are often never identified the same way by some — those are the parking lot or parking area, the HVAC, and the roof. I mean, when you stand back and look at a building, and where your service comes in so valuably is when you can say your 35,000 square foot roof could be a million dollars for a roof — and that’s, like, for somebody just entering into this side of the inspection profession, daunting. And on the residential side, yeah, you talked about — yeah, we can do aggregation on a new parking lot, a new driveway. Home inspectors don’t often think about the driveway other than a throwaway item in front of the house.

Christian Adams (00:22:41)
A parking area is a critical item to a commercial building. A poor parking lot — a live one — prohibits patrons from coming into their parking lot safely, and I’m not gonna give them money if I gotta get my car banged up.

CCPIA (00:22:47)
Yeah, as that’s the first impression. So you’re absolutely right, and it is tough to come up with those numbers.

Christian Adams (00:23:03)
Yeah, yeah, I think what’s a good point you’re making there is, when we’re seeing this too — a lot of people we’re seeing here have been in the residential inspection business, are making a transition, adding services on the commercial front, because they realize there is an opportunity there, and there is some crossover. And I think what’s key, though, again, is — as we found out — on the commercial side, don’t worry about “blowing up the deal,” right? Your customers need this information to make the decision. They may look at that million-dollar roof as a capital expansion, sure, and they’re okay to make it, but it’s going to be factored into their investment approach, right? And the negotiations — they’re happy to take the ammunition and go back to the seller and say, “Have you seen your roof? When did you last walk it?” Right? Because we just did today. And to a point with the HVAC, especially on a flat-roof building — yeah, we’ve got 32 A/C units on that roof, so I’m gonna have to pull those off, and while I’m doing that, you know, I might as well replace them, because why am I gonna remove those to replace the roof without replacing the A/C units? And again, it becomes a cost that they have to know about. These are the differences that the seller may not even have thought about, right, but it’s an important part of the process.

CCPIA (00:24:14)
And there’s a good chance they’re gonna do a cost segregation study on all those and amortize them over a very short period of time versus a 30-year period of time and get a better tax benefit. And it just keeps expounding, where — yeah, you’re absolutely right, you do not have to be afraid of the number, because at the end of the day, that commercial client’s intelligent.

Christian Adams (00:24:38)
And they’re not looking at a number as a finite number, they’re looking at it as an opportunity. What is the impact of me buying this building, what is the financial impact of me — what if I’m gonna rent it, right, like what is my monthly rent, I know my tax burden at the moment, I know my interest on it — but the unknown is, what is it going to cost me to keep in this condition, keep that parking lot with the lights lit at night so we can get evening business and nobody’s tripping up on the sidewalk, and all these things that they think about. They just need to know that information — like you said, yeah, you don’t have to have it, but it’s ultimately what they want and they’ll need.

CCPIA (00:25:23)
So your 48-hour turnaround’s impressive — I’ll have to say, on the commercial side, even if I was doing a cost study for myself and calling people, I often don’t get a hold of people that quick a time. So you’re creating these tables obviously in-house, and so when you’re doing a repair price for a building, are you taking into consideration localities, or are you using a pretty widespread number?

Christian Adams (00:25:55)
No, we always try and go zip-code specific. Okay, now in very rural areas that could be tough — sometimes we’ll have to go to a major metro and then track out. So yeah, if you’re like in the middle of Wisconsin, a little nowhere, we’re gonna probably call into a major city — what do you charge, what’s your trip fee, what’s the turnaround, you know, that kind of stuff. Even West Texas — actually, honestly, when you go down in the valley in Texas, we know we’re actually probably gonna use people from major cities, and they’re gonna go out there, right, and they’re gonna go on the job for 2 or 3 days and then complete it and come back. So we do try and get it post-specific.

Accuracy is really important — it’s tough for us to put a number on how accurate it is, though, because we see contract-to-bids off by 20%. So we try and go in the median. Everything we quote on special and commercial is going to be for a licensed technician, if that’s required in that area, right? So we’re going to be towards the top — could you find someone to do it cheaper? 100%. But again, if you’re buying a property for 5 million, I don’t want the “lipstick on a pig” guy — I want it done right. I don’t mind spending a bit more, because I’m gonna own this property as an investment that is part of a portfolio or a trust, I want to know that it’s been done right. But yeah, we try to get as accurate as possible.

And you know, there are some things sometimes we can’t bid — okay, water penetration is really tough, right? Like, we could see the roof — simple condition, what if the roof’s in simple condition and there’s also evidence of staining and things interior, we can’t access an area — so sometimes we will pull something out and we’ll actually say, like, “Repair Pricer is not right for you, you need someone to come pull that wall open, basically.” So yeah, something — but we will pull that out, we will specifically say, “this is what we see is going on, we don’t feel confident that we can bid this remotely.” And in some cases, like for an engineer, we’ll actually quote — we track local pricing for engineers, structural movement — we’ll say, “An engineer in your area, we’re typically charged $1,800 to analyze that building. This is what we recommend you do, and it’s your course of action.”

CCPIA (00:29:14)
So that’s interesting. Well, ’cause you’re only as smart as the data that’s given to you. And so, again, within the COMSOP, we don’t predicate a specific reporting system, and some inspectors might use one of the on-the-market software providers that’s very well recognized, and some might use a simple Word document. Are you able to take any of those?

Christian Adams (00:29:44)
Yeah. And I — what do you need from the inspector, let me ask you that. So I mean, it should be junk in, junk out, right? We get a bad report on the commercial side — I will say we don’t typically see that on residential, surprisingly, Rob — is limited, terrible, no pictures, right, like we can’t really do our job. But, you know, how the system works — so everything is human-reviewed. But as we scale, we had to lean on AI to translate reports, and what I mean by that is we use something called natural language processing. So we read the report using AI as a human — we translate it and then present that information to our reviewers. So imagine you’ve got your original comment, okay, you’ve got what we think — we’ve identified that, and the severity, the suggested price, and the pictures — and that goes to our reviewer. So what it means is our reviewer doesn’t have to pull through a 230-page PDF, right — they’ve got it, and they can look at it individually, they can look at it together. So it doesn’t really matter the format. We’re the only company in the world that can do that with inspection reports, right — that we can actually take any report, on any platform, extract it, pass it, match it, identify, and do that within about a minute. And that’s why that 48-hour turnaround — because we’ve got a list already built, and they categorize the items as well by contractor. So we know when we’ve run through that, “oh, this is an HVAC contractor, cool, I’m gonna call and get everything on this.” We’re not coming back later to kind of categorize it — whereas an inspection report is typically not done that way, it’s not built for contractors, right, so it takes a little bit longer.

But that’s why we built it that way, because, like, we’re not an inspection company, but basically like the nicest general contractor who’s going to give you bids, right, and then not expect to get any work. So the more information, the better — right, if there are windows that have failed, we’d like to know how many windows, right — quantities, really. But you don’t have to, because again, with commercial it’s really manual — we’ll look at pictures, we’ll look at satellite images, we’ll look at street view, we’ll use Eagle View and things like that occasionally to get roof pitches and figure it out. But yeah, the more information the better — we say don’t change your reporting style if you’re happy with it.

CCPIA (00:31:16)
Sure, sure — so did a good job.

Christian Adams (00:31:16)
Well, we might tell you if you’re not — we don’t tend to do that on commercial, on the residential we reject reports.

CCPIA (00:31:22)
Okay. Good, good. That’s valid. So let’s think of HVAC for a moment — you mentioned rooftop, and boy, it’s not uncommon to see a dozen, two dozen, four dozen rooftop units. I was just looking out the window here at my hotel, over at a convention center, and in my one view I’ve got 22 boxcars on the roof. So when you’re doing your repair pricing on those, I gotta assume that you’re calculating the crane as well.

Christian Adams (00:31:56)
Yeah, we’ll calculate everything — these are people that have done this for a living, looking at this, right, we know what it’s gonna take. Now, that’s a really good point — let’s say there was only one of those boxcars on the roof, so that kind of stuff, as well as trip charges, equipment, all of that goes into it. And that’s why I say we have a good picture — yeah, we can see, and if you haven’t counted, we’ll try and count as well, we’re trying to satellite-count too. So yeah, but the more information the better.

CCPIA (00:32:26)
That’s outstanding. I wanna — if I can try to make technology work for us, I’m gonna try to pull up here your sample…

[Screen-share demonstration of a sample commercial Repair Pricer report]

Christian Adams (00:33:04)
This — well, I think this is one I brought up with you, and — perfect, yup, yup. So this is one thing I’m talking about, like the format for commercials are a little bit different, but we want to take it beyond this, for those of you familiar with the residential Repair Pricer, but it looks really similar. So we have a cover page with a more commercial look to it, we reference the address, we basically specify a timestamp on it, just so people know — we have a support team that runs 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and if you have any changes to report, if you have more information — if we’ve counted 12 of those units and it’s actually 22, you can send that back and we’ll update and recalculate things. There’s actually a support link at the bottom of the report you can use. So that date stamp is important, you know, for when the last one was published.

But, like I said, we categorize it by contractor and type. So, for instance, here you’ll see, majority — this one was $120K in HVAC, it would be something similar to what we’re talking about, right — roofing contract in this case, if this is roof-mounted — and we’ll go down, so it ranks it by who you should really be talking to, down to, you know, tiny, tiny items. And then it essentially gives you the cost for the whole report. Now, when you were talking about the crane and things earlier, this is where this comes in, and we do have an explainer here — and, by the way, it’s not called the “whole home estimate” anymore, we’ve been updating this — around this, this is a slightly older one. But essentially, the “whole property report” here essentially figures out, well, if you actually had a GC out here and they were fixing everything at one time rather than the individual items, this would be your cost. But what’s interesting — if you went through and, if you’re really bored and added up all these items individually, it’s going to be higher than that, because if you pulled out an electrician to come and do one splice, right, they’re going to charge you a couple hundred bucks. If you start adding in other items, the cost goes down, because they’re already on-site and they’re doing a panel replacement and other things like that. So that’s how we figure all that out — into the trip charges and equipment costs and things like that.

But basically, yeah, it’s all categorized by the contractor type — HVAC, roofing — and it goes through these individual items. And essentially, you’ll see here where it says “further action required” — these are the ones where we’re like, “okay, we couldn’t quite figure this out, we might need some more information.” So it’s saying here, like my example, “evidence of previous moisture intrusion was observed in the electrical room,” but we couldn’t see on the report where that’s coming from. So our recommendation is basically, you need a crawl-space lead specialist to come in, identify this, and in this part of town, that’s what you’re projected to pay for a service like that.

Just so you know, as well — again, if nobody’s familiar with our system, we have a platform called Resolve. It’s free, there’s no monthly management costs, all of your reports live in there in perpetuity, but you can actually download these reports in a CSV form as well. And for commercial investors, they really like that, because they’ll often use like cap-table projection software when they ingest them — so we let them do that, they can just bring it into their software, they can edit it, play with it, mess with it. But people can always download it as a PDF, which is what I showed you. They can also interact with things in real time here, and, like, take things off — I mean, typically this is mainly built for negotiation, for residential people, but yeah, most of our investors on the commercial side download it as a spreadsheet into other software for offers and things like that.

CCPIA (00:39:10)
I think that’s great. I mean, I can think of — what was it, five, seven years ago — most of the brokerage agencies in Florida were asking for something like this for residential, so that they had a chance to create their letters to the sellers, or letters of negotiation, based on data like this. And so having this on the commercial side would certainly be a benefit, even if you were doing it not just for in-house.

Christian Adams (00:39:37)
Yeah, yeah, that’s what it was built [for]. But, like I said, the system is really built — we’re just working towards, we are using it commercial, we’ve done thousands, right, but not the 1-million-plus, not yet. We’ve seen a significant increase in commercial reports this year already, so — it’s, we’re 50 years behind the residential world.

CCPIA (00:48:00)
And so it’s taking us a while to get the inertia to get this industry well recognized — that’s for darn sure.

Christian Adams (00:48:09)
Yeah, but the conferences — those of you who go to like InternationalRI, and all of the conferences — like I go once we have an IB, every time I talk to somebody that does commercial, I never get the same objections or questions that I do from the residential side. It’s really like, “how long does it take, how much does it cost, what does it look like, why do I need it?” — the need is understood.

CCPIA (00:26:50)
Sure, sure. If you wanna pop off that screen, that’d be perfect. So…

Christian Adams (00:28:43)
So you said any PDF report you can handle, as long as there’s good photos, well-written descriptions, and a clear objective of the defect — then you guys can play from there?

CCPIA (00:28:47)
Yeah, correct.

CCPIA (00:28:59)
And you feel that in the world of accuracy, when you guys are hitting that hyper — that high 90th percentile probably every time — except for those issues that you can’t delineate because they’re either poorly written or not enough information.

Christian Adams (00:29:14)
Yeah, yeah, and even then, when we’re recommending an action, the pricing we give of the recommended action is pretty accurate too, if it’s for the engineer or the crawl-space expert — so we get that information as well, we don’t leave them hanging.

CCPIA (00:29:27)
Good, excellent! So, I guess it’s — you’ll get a little infomercial time here — what is the cost per report for our members?

Christian Adams (00:29:38)
For CCPIA members, so initially upfront, we give you free onboarding and free software setup — okay, that’s normally $199 — and then you get 50% off your first two reports to come and try us out. And then after that, on a small multi-family — our pricing varies, by the way — small multi-family up to like 4 units, I think it is now $100, and then up to 20 units is $125, and then larger properties — big apartment complexes, full commercial, office, restaurants, larger industrial buildings, things like that — is $200 at the moment. Now I will say, as we improve the product, that pricing may go up slightly. But I will tell you this as well — when I told you we’ve got a hundred-and-some inspectors across the US that use us, most inspectors are doubling their money at the moment.

CCPIA (00:34:35)
Oh, yeah.

Christian Adams (00:34:35)
Selling them for $400, and they’re getting billed $200 without lifting a finger, essentially — then it takes 30 seconds to get an order, we handle delivery, we handle support, we handle everything. So yeah, caveat to that — pricing may change, but only as we essentially extend the service and look at what else we can add and improve.

CCPIA (00:31:06)
It’s funny when you say they’re doubling their money — it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. I tell a story in my class of an inspection I did on a house of worship, and my fee was only $5,500,

Christian Adams (00:31:17)
but my cost to cure was $3,500.

CCPIA (00:31:18)
Yeah — because it was just in that bad a shape, and that was the matriculations I was going to have to go through to get my numbers. And if I can take and use a service like yours that’s gonna cost me $200 — or even if it was $400 — it’s still a bargain on my time, because I’m going to work letting you guys do the numbers, and I can charge whatever I want to charge for it and hand them a third-party-verified, accurate report. That’s invaluable to me.

Christian Adams (00:31:59)
Yeah, yeah. And also, I think when you think about the value to the client, right — let’s say that report we looked at just now is $211,000 —

CCPIA (00:32:03)
what are they gonna negotiate — 130, maybe?

Christian Adams (00:32:07)
So you just got $130,000 for 500 bucks.

CCPIA (00:32:07)
Yeah, no, no — so I think it’s fabulous, I think what you guys are doing — I know you and I talked a couple, three or four years ago, maybe a little bit longer than that, about this product, and I think it’s great, I think it’s evolved into something wonderful, Christian, and I think you guys need to be very proud of it. I am looking forward to being able to partner with you guys to offer an awesome benefit to our members, and B, help you provide — and even if you could say more superior than what you’re already at —

Christian Adams (00:32:50)
An even more superior product, you know — count me in, I’m here to help you.

CCPIA (00:33:00)
Yeah, we really appreciate it.

Christian Adams (00:33:03)
Support from you guys, CCPIA and International, [helped] get to this point — it literally is the movement of the members putting their reports to our system that just got us here, right? And that’s what we’ll keep improving — the product and keep improving the accuracy. We do have a landing page for you guys as well, forward slash CCPIA, and that’s got more details on the program there. And like I said, yeah, we look forward to being in Dallas in April — I will unfortunately not be there, but yeah, any ideas anybody has, really appreciate them. I think anybody who’s worked with us over the years will know that we really do listen to feedback, and we build off it — that’s what drives the change.

CCPIA (00:33:42)
That’s terrific, Christian. I wanna thank you so much for spending a couple of moments today with me. And I know for our members, I think they’re gonna see the links that we have at the bottom of this page, and I’m sure that you’re gonna get hit up with some new patrons. And I will continue to carry your flag for you, Christian.

Christian Adams (00:34:07)
Cool, I really appreciate it, Rob. Thank you. Be safe. Thanks so much.