Hi Joe: I like your idea about using a voice recorder. What kind of Voice recorder do you use, and where did you get it? We recently ordered the software package, and hope to be as effecient as possible right from the start. Thank you, Suzanne
I just did a million dollar home with more than $500,000 in contents. I should have told the owner that we would have to do a follow up visit because after we returned home and started editing the contents we found pictures that needed to be re-taken, items that we missed, and discriptions that we could not match to the contents.
Number one, we should have charged much more, but it is our first home in this very expensive colony. Hopefully, they will be pleased and we will get more business.
We spent 4 1/2 hours in the house and took over 730 pictures, yet some of the pictures are not good enough and some of the descriptions are vague. Unfortunately, the owner was not there, but two of her maids were there to help us.
However, she and he are going to have to get involved if they want a true comprehensive inventory. Hopefully, they will.
I struggled with this as well when I first started doing inventories in I think it was 2003. I started with pricing by the square foot, but it became a difficult task for the home owner figure out and understand and most of them said the house was smaller then it really was. So, I decided to try to simplify the process, which was changed several times over the years. I now base my inventories on the number of bedrooms. Rooms like a home office are counted as a bedroom for the benefit of pricing. I allow one hour per bedroom for the entire inventory and if the time goes over more then 30 minuets, I then charge an hourly rate. This system seems to work for me, but might not work for you.
In order to keep this reply short and not write a book, please check out my price list on weicor.com for additional information on how I'm pricing my service and if you have any questions, please contact me. There are many ways to do it, but this is very simple and easy for the home owner to understand and it seems to work for me, for now.
Great question, Matt! And one that we struggled with when we were starting up. Before I give you a rule of thumb based on our experience, I'd like to ask a few questions. So many different factors impact the time that goes into an inventory, it's difficult to give an absolute response.
1. Are you asking about a comprehensive inventory in which you photograph and catalogue each and every item in the home (including cabinet and closet contents)? Obviously, lesser inventories (i.e., an "express inventory" would take less time).
2. How are you capturing item details while on site? Are you using a voice recorder, notebook/clipboard, laptop/spreadsheet or laptop/application? We've found that a voice recorder speeds the onsite portion of the inventory process.
3. What back-end application are you using to process the inventory offsite? Depending on your response to this one, you could spend two hours or more offsite doing data processing for every one hour you spend on site. "Little things" like having a photo resizer and bulk photo import functions within the home inventory software package or online application you're using will make a big difference from a data processing perspective.
To give you a ballpark, in our experience if you were performing a comprehensive inventory on a 3,000 SF home using a voice recorder to gather onsite data along with your digital camera (no video) and you were using a desktop-based home inventory application with no resident features to speed data processing, you could spend up to 6 hours onsite and 10 to 15 hours offsite to complete the inventory. As you do more inventories, you can shave time off these numbers, but those are decent estimates if you're just starting up.
If could can provide some of those details, I can probably provide a better rule of thumb. Thanks
