I have heard a few tales of woe lately from agents around the Bay Area about homes that have sold only to fall out of escrow due to what was found during the inspection process.

Many of the homes that appeared to be in excellent condition had thousands of dollars worth of deferred maintenance that wasn’t discovered until the buyer’s home inspector gave the house a thorough going over.

Over course this triggered another round of negotiations and in some case the buyers exercised their right to walk away from the transaction leaving a frustrated seller with huge repair bills to clear up.

My immediate reaction was to have no sympathy for the seller, after all, every home requires some preventative maintenance and if the seller fails to do that, then a day of reckoning comes when they go to sell.

But, as was pointed out to me by more than one listing agent recently, often times the sellers just don’t know what to do to prevent those huge remediation bills.  A point that I hadn’t considered.  That reminded me that I had heard of a free web service for homeowners called Homespot.  The service offers a homeowner a way to record and organize home information; choose and prioritize projects and home maintenance tasks; schedule automated maintenance reminders; plan the weekend; create project specific shopping lists and find deals for products online.

I thought that you could tell your farm areas about this and give the owners a chance to take better care of their most valuable asset.  But, while I was researching the site for this article I saw a link that asked if I was a real estate professional, so I clicked it and was taken to Homespot AgentPro.

While Homespot is free for sellers, Homespot AgentPro is a subscription service that you can purchase on a monthly or annual plan that will give you the following benefits:

Subscribing to HomeSpot AgentPro allows you to offer a free HomeSpot home maintenance service to an unlimited number of your valuable clients.

Whenever your clients use the free HomeSpot service, they’ll see your picture, brand, contact information and social media links. Your clients will also receive newsletters and maintenance reminders with your information prominently displayed.

This sounds like a pretty good deal to me…you get to help your prospective clients take better care of their homes and you get to stay top of mind while doing so.  All for $8.95 a month or $74.95 a year. 

It would be nice if all homeowners were on such a system.  And if they were maybe those horrible inspection reports would be a thing of the past.

Go check it out and see if it makes sense for you.   And no, I am not being compensated to write this.  The owners of Homespot will find out about this article about the same time as you do!