Written in Partnership with Amir Bakian
If you’ve never waded through the muck of flipping a house, you might think the most grueling part of the renovation is gutting a property, sticking to a budget, or sifting through designs.
Flipping veterans will tell you that compared to the true challenges of flipping a home, these tasks are rudimentary. The real headache in this painstaking process is communication: hiring contractors, coordinating between all the parties involved, dealing with estimates, and keeping everyone on schedule. These are all tasks that should be easy, yet never end up being quite so simple.
And that’s just on the side of the flipper – if it’s difficult for the customer to communicate with their contractors, just imagine how difficult it is for contractors to communicate with the dozens, or sometimes hundreds of subcontractor relationships it takes to complete a single project.
Despite how much we rely on the flow of technology in almost every other industry, field service management has yet to catch up. Or rather, technology developers have yet to offer up a solution made specifically for communication in this industry – until now.
Contractor+ is an all-in-one mobile solution for contractors that powers efficient field service and contractor communication. The app’s roadmap gives contractors a collaborative foundation to run their businesses, so whether you’re working with a handyman, plumber, electrician, cleaner, lawn technician, or general contractor, Contractor+ helps coordinate the logistics of each project from start to finish in one easy-to-navigate platform.
“It only took a few years of working in property management to come to the conclusion this industry is in desperate need of a technology overhaul,” said Justin Smith, Founder, and CEO of Contractor+. “I launched my app to help the many talented contractors out there to unite their teams, impress their clients, and boost their creative offerings, and I hope the benefits of that efficiency trickle down to anyone within the world of real estate – flippers included.”
To get a better understanding of the logistical challenges facing flippers and the people they work with, Smith recently interviewed Pace Morby and Jamil Damji, co-hosts of A&E’s Triple Digit Flip. Like Smith, they see a massive communication gap between customers, contractors, subcontractors, and everyone else involved in the renovation ecosystem.
“One of the funny things about the contracting business, is that probably 90% of contractors are basically running ponzi schemes. They’re using deposits and money from their current jobs to pay for their previous jobs. They don’t know how to manage cash flow. They really don’t know how to run a business,” said Jamil Damji, in this interviewwith Justin Smith.
Here are three ways Contractor+ can enhance the flipping process:
No More Scattered Paperwork
When you embark on a flipping journey, you’ll quickly accumulate what feels like a mountain of paperwork. Billing information, contracts, estimates, invoices, payments, photos, notes, shopping lists, and just about everything else that goes into your project is traditionally printed out in physical form, and it’s up to you and your field workers to ensure everyone has what they need. While some digitized solutions exist, few contractors or subcontractors use the same standardized system.
When you or your general contractor makes the switch to Contractor+, everything will instead become centralized into one shareable solution. You’ll be able to create a dashboard for each client, project, and team.
Instead of scrambling for lost documents, you can upload any type of paperwork, file it away, and pull it up when you need it. Invoices and their corresponding payments can be sent from the app itself, as well as lawyer-drafted contracts and e-signatures.
“I was Open Door’s first contractor in Pheonix, AZ. And the funny thing is, as a technology company, Open Door was bragging about how good they were at technology. But the biggest issue that we had was that we couldn’t connect, we had like 17 different ways of communicating, everything felt fragmented,” said Pace Morby in this interview with Justin Smith at the Tykes Summit.
For each stage of the flip, Contractor+ will track your documents, organize your paperwork, and ensure you never lose a key file again. Everything is centralized and straight-forward.
Centralized Scheduling
Nothing quite stings like the pain of mixing up subcontractor schedules in the middle of a flip – especially with a tight budget, client expectations, and money on the line.
If you’re a contractor, odds are you’re juggling multiple active jobs and more than one team of employees. If you’re a client, you likely don’t have time to waste on even the slightest scheduling hiccup.
Contractor+ features a digital calendar to help users visualize every task that goes into a flip. When inspections, estimates, installations, and more are locked in on the schedule, it’s easier for your team to plan ahead, stay on track, and optimize for the best use of their time.
Because the calendar is connected to your Team Dashboard, you won’t have to make a dozen or so calls when a scheduling change inevitably happens – instead, a push notification can be sent out to everyone affected by the adjustment.
With so many different people involved in a single flip, scheduling will always be a hurdle. But with Contractor+, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page and working toward the same goal.
“When you become really successful and you do something at the highest level, it’s impossible for people not to take notice. It just naturally takes place,” said Jamil Damji
Integrations With Your Go-To Platform
Even if you’re the only person on your flipping team with Contractor+, the app features enough integrations to find a platform with common ground.
Contractor+ is already integrated with industry-leading solutions like The Home Depot, Chase, NEXT, CompanyCam, and Thumbtack. If you use Stripe, Square, Paypal, Coinbase, Quickbooks, Google Calendar, iCal, Zapier, or a dozen other applications, you’ll also be able to connect your accounts to Contractor+.
No matter who you end up working with throughout a flip or whatever system they have in place, odds are Contractor+ will be able to strengthen and streamline the process. They’re even helping contractors get business startup funding and equipment financing to grow their businesses.
“Few aspects of our industry are straightforward, especially house flipping,” said Justin Smith. “But if there’s one thing that reliably improves field service work for everyone involved, it’s communication. I’m thrilled to see how Contractor+ is already helping flippers do what they do best, but this is only the start – the more we learn about our customers and their needs, the more we’ll be able to evolve, adjust our offerings, and vastly improve technology standards across the board, and as Jamil somewhat jokingly said, maybe even help contractors run their business properly and avoid ponzi schemes.”
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