748: $2k+/mo Taking Pictures of Houses: The Life of a Loan Draw Inspector

19:50I don't want to be full-time again.

19:52Lou Shaver:Yeah, you got to be careful. How hard do I want to push this thing? That's exactly right. Any other of these inspector connector services or marketplaces that you like, that you found success with? I've reached out to a few others and it's kind of fell flat. There may be some regionally. There may be some banks that just have regular inspection companies that are doing this stuff. The ones that I've done the most work with, Built and Nationwide and Raise and Inspection Pros, have been kind of the four that have kept me pretty busy. I've also branched out and I jumped into something with short-term rentals.

20:25and tried to make that work. I think that's an area that could probably be pretty big if someone took the time to go mold their business bottle into that. And when I say short-term rentals, you know, usually we had a short-term rental. We were overseas. We rented our house out here in North Carolina. And we needed somebody to come change the water filters, the air filters, check on the condition of the house. The cleaners come in between guests. They come in, they clean, and they get out. There may be a manager that's working it, and they're just kind of, you know, moving cleaners around and make sure they're at the right spot.

20:58But I go in, I have a couple of places where I go in monthly to check to make sure the air conditioner, the HVAC filters have been changed, the water filters are changed, and there's no damage to the house. The windows and doors are all locking properly. That gets me a little higher premium because I spend an hour, hour and a half there doing that compared to 20 to 30 minutes on an inspection site doing an inspection for a draw inspection. But in this maintenance type inspection has been a pretty good, I mean, it gives the homeowner that, you know, lives far away some eyes and ears on their property.

21:33Lou Shaver:Yeah. Targeting an out-of-state or absentee landlord in that way where, right, the cleaners are there. And of course, if something goes wrong, the guests will let you know. But kind of being proactive about it, I guess you could charge kind of a monthly subscription, especially if you're already in the area. Look, it's going to be 200 bucks a month. I'll stop by. I'll do any of this low-level stuff, this routine maintenance, and I'll let you know if something bigger is maybe lurking on the horizon. I've been charging about$150 to go out there, but I'll spend an hour and a half usually. I use a platform called Tap Inspect, and I built a specific inspection for these type of inspections.

22:09I'll go out, I'll walk through the steps of that and take pictures and give a report on everything I see. Hey, the grass has been cut, the grass has not been cut. Maybe they need to have mulch put down. Maybe a window latch is not working right or something like that. And then I give them an overall assessment. Hey, this is the current condition of the house. If you need anything done, let me know. I'll try to help or get to the right people to get out there to help. And that's kind of a good relationship for the folks that I've done that with. It could be a lot bigger.

22:36Lou Shaver:This is side hustles on top of side hustles. How are you connecting with the short-term rental people? I went to a couple of Facebook pages and said, hey, does anybody need an inspector? And I also reached out to a local project manager with a real estate company and said, you know, she managed all their short-term rentals. And I said, hey, is there anybody that needs a maintenance checkup, you know, once a month or between guests? And so I had one of them take me up on it. And it was the initial one I did, and I underpriced myself. This was a seven-bedroom house on the lake. Yeah, it was huge.

23:07and I was expecting I'd walk in, pictures around the outside, pictures of the dock, pictures of their boat, pictures of the bedrooms, pictures of, you know, everything. And then, you know, I would carry a little Swiffer dust thing with me and if I saw something look dusty, I'd dust it or I'd change the filter, just trying to prep it so when their next guest got there, they'd have a good experience. But I way underpriced myself on that. And, oh, the other thing with that too is checking bedroom drawers and under the beds for things because people leave things. And it could be anything, firearms to underwear.

23:43I mean, it's just all over the map. So you got to check to make sure that those things have them left because that could be a heck of a liability for, you know, someone else coming into rent and their kid finds a firearm.

23:53Lou Shaver:Yeah, totally. Let's go back to the loan draw inspection stuff. And I'm curious if you have any stories about, well, you showed up and something was out of the ordinary or maybe it was a mistake on your part, something happened, you know, they didn't get the draw money. What can happen out there in the field? Sure. So one of the big things I would caution somebody that gets into this is to be aware and alert to your surroundings. You know, one for the liability that you could bring in yourself. If somebody just poured concrete and you get out there and walk across and put footprints in it, they are not going to be happy with you.

24:30So that's something to be aware of. floors that have just recently been refinished or finished. You know, usually they'll put up, I inspected one a few weeks ago, and there was a sign that said, do not walk on this floor until Monday, June 8th. And I said, I'm not walking on the floor on Monday, June 8th. I'm going to stay in here and take pictures and get the best I can, but I'm not going to go in to step on this floor and take a chance on getting a dust print on it or anything like that. Probably the funniest thing that happened to me was I was inspecting a house and I pulled up and I had already contacted the builder and a car pulls up and says, can I help you?

25:04And I said, yeah, I'm the drawn inspector. I'm here to conduct an inspection. And she said, I'm the homeowner. I said, well, great. Well, it's nice to meet you. We had a nice conversation. And she went on away. She left. I was the only person there. It was a Friday afternoon. And I've got my phone with me taking pictures. I stepped out the back door and most new construction, a lot of these bigger doors don't have handles on them yet. So this door, as I closed, the wind is blowing and it said, and clucked and latched. There's no knob on the outside. And so I'm about 12 to 14 feet off the ground, no handrails on the deck.

25:38The door is locked. There's nobody there. It's a Friday afternoon. And I'm like, shucks. And it's a remote place. So first thing I did is I sent my wife a text and said, okay, I just got locked on this back porch. I'm going to try to figure it out, but this is where I'm at. And so then I went back through my phone to the emails and I found her phone number and I called it and luckily she answered and I said, look, I'm really sorry to say this, but I am locked on your back porch. Could you mind coming back and letting me?

26:06Lou Shaver:How far away did you get? So fortunately she opened but a few miles away. She came back and we had a good laugh. She had the same exact thing done the week before and one of her neighbors had to come let her in. Oh geez. Okay. So that was a lesson learned. I either prop something in the doors. Don't let that door close behind you because if there's no way to get down, I could have been stuck for a little while longer. Right. Yeah. Be safe on those construction sites. Make sure you got a point of ingress and egress. What are you using tools in TechWise to help manage this flow of incoming leads and the booked jobs and the routes and everything else that goes into this?

26:42Lou Shaver:And maybe we can talk about invoicing and payments in a second too. So jobs come in by email. I accept them or they come in by their app, built as an app, and it'll come in. It'll send me an email as well and say, you know, these folks want an inspection at this location on this date. And so I'll go in and look at it and, you know, take through, put any comments in there I need to and get that on my schedule to do. Nationwide sends me an email. I'll go through, I'll accept that. And that gets into my queue. And then I'll sit down at the end of the evening while I go through Google Maps and kind of lay out and draw out my day for the next day.

27:17Some of The apps that I use, I use BuildsApp, of course, Raise, LandGorillas app. I use an app called ReGrid. ReGrid allows to track where I'm at. When I get to a house, a lot of times there's no house numbers on the house.

27:32Lou Shaver:Oh, sure. Half the time, there's not a job box on the house. That's where all the permits go. But if you get there and there's none of that, how do you know you are where you're supposed to be? So I'll use ReGrid. I'll pull it up. It'll tell me where I'm at. I'll click on the parcel and that parcel will tell me the address and the homeowner's name. And probably 90 to 95 % of the time it matches who I'm there to see. So I take a screenshot of that. That's my first photo in every submission to validate the homeowner and the address. Yeah, to prove I was here. Yeah, that's exactly right. The other part of that is your cell phone.

28:05I use a cell phone. I have an iPhone that I use and I've got the location settings turned on. so that when I take a picture, it takes the latitude and longitude and it embeds that into the data of that photo. The bank can check to make sure that I'm at the place I say I'm at taking those pictures. That's just another internal control for them to say, okay, here's the data. Lou Shaver said he was here. This is a picture of the house. These are the pictures of the interior, exterior, and each one is time-stamped and dated with a location so that they know that I am where I was supposed to be. I have a drone as far as equipment goes.

28:42I use that on occasion. Some of these mountain houses that I get on, the terrain is very steep. And so getting a good photograph of the backside of the house or the front side of the house, however it's laid out, can sometimes be difficult as you're walking around. You're like a goat. You know, you got to get out there and get a photo.

29:00Lou Shaver:Yeah, get it at a wide enough angle. Okay. That's exactly right. And that's really about it. I do have a Starlink Mini on my truck because cell signal where I go is sporadic. So I'll use that Starlink when I'm done with the job. When I first started, before I had the Starlink, I'd take pictures. I'd go back home. I'd sit down with that draw sheet that I'd done, you know, when I took my pictures and filled it out. And at night, I'd come home and I'd sit there for an hour and fill all the stuff back out, type it in, you know, upload the photos, submit it. but buying the Starlink was probably one of the best things I've done.

29:36That allowed me to do the inspection on site and submit it. And I don't have to come back home at night and sit down when it's time for me to sit down with my wife and enjoy the evening. I'm not sitting there for another hour doing inspections. I'm done for the day.

29:51Lou Shaver:Got it. Yeah. And you can upload as you're moving on to the next job site rather than having to batch them all at home. It sounds Sounds like a lot of these uploads are going to be through that portal or through that app where it's kind of dictated by the company that ordered the gig. That's correct. Yeah. So Built has an app that you can use or you can bring it back and you can plug it into their website. Nationwide requires you to upload the photos and fill out the information into their website. And I just take and grab it from the cell phone, copy it over and fill it up. Okay. And after you submit all your stuff and your inspection report, do they issue that payment automatically or do you have to stack them up and invoice at the end of the month?

30:32Lou Shaver:Or how does that piece of it work? So I don't have to invoice anything. It's an automatic piece built, I think, pays once a month. They log everything up and they send out a payment, I think, at the end of the month. I think Nationwide pays every two weeks. Land Grill will send you a hard check and so does Inspection Pros. They give me a hard check, too, for the job that is for them. So it just, it kind of varies through the platform, but every one of them have been great to work with. Yeah. For the, I think you said$65 average, how long are you on the site? I'm trying to get a sense of the hourly rate here, because if it's only a few bullet points, I'm checking the plumbing is installed or, you know, whatever the next phase of this thing is, it's got to be pretty fast.

31:16So I'm spending probably between 25 to 30 minutes at a site. It depends on the phase of the construction. I was at one two days ago that was in the very early stages. The ground had been excavated. The basement had been dug out. The footers had been dug but not filled yet. And so I'm taking five or six pictures of that place, and I was done in less than 10 minutes, probably closer to five.

31:40Lou Shaver:Sure. The earlier in the stage, perhaps the easier it is. Well, there's a hole in the ground. Check. Okay. Yeah. I factor in 30 minutes per job for every day. I spend more time behind a windshield than I do on the job site. Just because of the terrain and the area that I've chosen to cover, I could probably push further towards some of the bigger cities. But I kind of like this, you know, this mountainous area. And the windshield is not always my friend, but I spend a lot of time with it. That's OK. That's what we called it. Windshield time in my old job, driving around those same hills in North Carolina.

32:14Lou Shaver:And I wish I had some podcasts to listen to. That was before discovering the miracle of on-demand audio at that point. And so cost-wise, obviously, mileage, we can deduct that. At the top of the show, you mentioned having some insurance. This is kind of like an errors and omissions policy, or what kind of insurance do you carry? Lou's response, plus a breakdown of his monthly income, and who this side hustle might be best for, coming up right after this. You know that feeling when you finally finish a cleanup project you've been putting off? That's what switching to our partner, Gusto, feels like.

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34:38Lou Shaver:Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash side hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O.com slash side hustle. I carry a liability insurance. I probably should look at an errors and omissions just in case I messed something up, but I really think that the liability covers me pretty well. But errors and omissions is probably dirt cheap for what I do, and so it probably would be good to get that. But as far as expenses go, I've got this thing called the profitability matrix that I've kind of created just to kind of show what I'm earning versus what my expenses are.

35:17So if I average$4 ,100 in a month in income, I've got about$972 in expenses. That includes$780 in gas, 30 bucks in software 35 in insurance probably 50 bucks for my cell phone and 75 for the internet and then from that i've got deductions that include most of those same exact things plus my mileage yeah yeah so i really don't have a lot of overhead to to make this work yeah that's great i

35:44Lou Shaver:mean it's drive time and you were in your time and there it is yeah i'm listening to usually to a podcast, you know, Side Hustle Nation or, you know, some of the other ones that I like. Lou, with now a couple of years under your belt here, a year and a half, who do you think this is best for? And is it realistic or feasible to do it as a part-time gig as a non, not yet retired person? It probably depends on your full-time job. As a part-time gig, the people that come to my mind are firefighters, EMS folks that work those odd shifts that are on 24, off 48. Those folks, I mean, you know, first of all, their attention to detail and, you know, they're just, I think, focused, probably good.

36:26Veterans, I think a retired veteran, this, if I was to take and build this into this training piece, one of the recruiting places I would probably go is to a local veteran center for different counties and say, look, if you got somebody that's retired and they want to do this, this would be a great fit for them, detail oriented, not hard to learn. Who else? Photographers. If you got a photography business and you can get to learn to understand the fundamentals of construction, it's not that hard. You're not having to take a test to figure out what is this, what is that. I mean, you really just got to have a basic understanding of how this house is assembling.

37:01And so it's not terribly hard.

37:03Lou Shaver:Yeah. We're not talking professional level photography here. We're talking like iPhone pictures pointed at the walls and stuff, right? Yes. And you want to tell the story with those pictures. Sometimes when you get in a hurry, you find yourself running through just flashing everything. But you really want to keep in the back of your mind, hey, I'm telling the bank of story. They need to see this picture. You're their set of eyes. So make sure you take a picture that tells them something. It's interesting that you bring up photographers. That's like my wife's, well, she's a mechanical engineer.

37:27Lou Shaver:It's like, oh, this could be, this could work for you. This could be a little retirement gig. You get connected with the right folks to get in the door. And it really was not that hard to begin doing it. And it's really been lucrative. And I started out last year, I wanted to make$1 ,200 to$1 ,500 in a month. And now I've averaged$4 ,100 a month every month. I'm grateful for the opportunity. Yeah, you're capped by how much building is happening in your area. And there's probably a ceiling to how much you can realistically charge. Because if you want, my inspections are$200 because I do such an amazing job and I, you know, take it or leave it.

38:01Lou Shaver:I don't really need the work. But then people will be like, well, I'll just go hire the$70 guy instead. Right. So there's there's probably a ceiling. There's probably a capacity to how many you can realistically handle in a day. But if you're in an area with a lot of construction going on, this seems like there may not be that much competition happening. I mean, obviously, there must have been other people doing it in your area, but you were still able to find quite a bit of work. Did that impact her into the equation of like, oh, there's there's too much competition already doing it? So I thought about that at first and I said, well, if I don't try, you know, then I don't know and I'll give it a shot.

38:36And if I make a few, then that's great. I mean, I work usually two to three days a week, usually probably one full day and probably two half days or, you know, just depends on the how I configure things. I'm looking at my profitability matrix. It says I work 91 hours a month. So I took that and computed all my mileage, you know, and time and everything. That's not terrible. 20 hours a week. the most number of inspections I've done in a day. I think I've hit 16.

39:04Lou Shaver:Wow. That's a full day. That's a marathon day. That's a marathon day for me, but there are guys that tell me in the field that there were times where they'll hit a neighborhood that's got five or six houses going up, and there are people that have got many, many more than me. I heard one guy tell me 50, and I've heard others with some other numbers that I kind of wonder, how could you really do all that? But I think I'm probably at the low end of speed, just because geographically, I mean, if I was all working out of my town, that'd be one thing. But because I traveled about 200 miles a day, I would say probably 250 and 200 miles.

39:39Lou Shaver:Yeah. You're putting some work into that truck for sure. Has it all been residential or are you doing commercial stuff too, or other types of properties? Not done any commercial. My mentor, Steve, tells me that there's a lot of money in the commercial world. The inspections, you know, they get a lot more for them. There's a lot more work to that. as far as the paperwork that goes. I've not ventured into that. You asked a minute ago about who would be good for this. Home inspectors, home appraisers, I mean, they're going to spend four or five hours out there and they charge a significant amount more money for a home inspection.

40:10They could weave this into their day to go in between places and become a draw inspector. One of the companies I talked to trying to find people in areas where they don't have a lot of inspectors that had to rely on those folks and those folks charge a premium.

40:24Lou Shaver:Yeah, that's an important distinction to make between the draw inspector and then the home inspector who's spending four or five hours on the property and charging five,$600 for that. And, but it's like, could you fill in some gaps in your day? Or if you're a gig economy type of worker, you know, it's on again, off again. And it's like, okay, I could go over here in between jobs and make another 60, 70 bucks. And yeah, I'll kind of start to stack up several different income streams in that way. I think that may make sense as far as who might be a good fit for it. What surprised you the most? I mean, you've got to have seen some stuff out here.

41:02I had a grandfather come to me one time and says, are you the inspector? And I said, well, I'm the bank inspector. I'm doing a draw inspection. He said, I don't like this builder and what he's doing. I said, well, sir, you'll need to take that up with the builder or your grandson or whatever. But I don't get into any, you know, if they don't like what's going on or they're not happy with this or that, I stay out of that. It's just an area that I want to venture into and don't want to put any of my liability in there. I don't want to make myself responsible for, well, the inspector said you're doing a crappy job on this footer and you need to change it.

41:34And then, you know, that causes a problem.

41:37Lou Shaver:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't put this back on me. Like, I'm just here to document what I see. Oh, and a good point with that, too, is we cannot give credit for anything that's not installed. So if I show up and I see a stack of windows laying on the ground and the builder says, yeah, we'll put them in tomorrow. Can you give me credit for it? We can only give credit for things that are actually installed. So it's got to be screwed in, set in, set in place. Well, Lou, what's next for you? What's got you excited these days? I started looking at my longevity in this business at 62. I've got about two, three more years of doing this, but I really, I want to teach other folks how to do it and try to mentor like I've been mentored.

42:14So we begin to prepare a website and we've got our training modules almost complete to actually do something called drawinspectortraining.com. And what that's going to do is that's going to teach someone the fundamentals of this. I've got eight modules prepared, introduction to draws, banks and professional standards, ethics, construction fundamentals, platforms for the different applications, software, self-employment tips, and the basics of being a sole proprietor or S Corp or an LLC. I am a 1099 employee with all these companies. I'm the sole proprietor. I've got a good CPA. If anybody has to get into it, I would recommend that you find you a good accountant.

42:55It doesn't have to be a high-dollar accountant. I think that's the thing, the future for me. I'm not going to be climbing around these houses for the rest of my life. I'm going to try to set up something to train other people how to do it. Probably going to affect my own business. Somebody will probably be next door and say, hey, I want to do it. And so they learn how and they get in line and they price themselves competitively. And, you know, they may take some of my business. It may be. But again, sometimes it's about giving back, not about getting all the time.

43:19Lou Shaver:Well, I appreciate coming on and kind of the willingness to share behind the scenes of a new to me and I imagine new to many listeners type of side hustle. So very cool. It is drawinspectortraining.com. We'll link that up in the show notes. Lou, let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Gosh, Nick, I got to quote you. So I'm going back to episode 732. Don't delay because inspiration has an expiration. So I've done a lot of things in my life. Tried this, I've tried that. I've, you know, served my country and I've always had ideas about, let me try this, let me try that.

43:56A lot of times I've sat on them and just said, well, you know, I'll get to it. And inspiration can get rusty. So take action, do something with it. That's kind of been, you know, that quote from episode 732 kind of led me to push to do this inspector training that, look, I can sit down and say, wow, that's a good idea. But if I don't take action, then it's just going to float out there in the back of my head and someday it'll be gone and I won't help anybody or make a difference. So that's my tip of the day.

44:26Lou Shaver:I appreciate that. It's funny, that one comes up a few different times with, sometimes you'll hear the story, we recently had a woman who started this podcast and she was like, and ironically, it was a sleep podcast, but she was like, I'm up at two in the morning ordering a microphone because this idea, I knew it had to happen. And those are the ones that if you can't sleep, you know, you got to take action on it because it's like that inspiration may not be there in the morning. So I appreciate you sharing that. A couple of takeaways for me. Number one is kind of this relationship and reputation piece of once you get a gig, making sure you go not necessarily above and beyond, but that you do the job to the best of your ability and continue to get the next gig and the next gig.

45:06Lou Shaver:Because there's other fish in the sea. There's other options that companies have when they're hiring. And the second piece was being diligent about putting essentially your buy button where it's easy for customers to do business with you. in the case of this business, all of these different loan inspection, you know, marketplaces and apps where, where these transactions are happening. So not necessarily going and knocking on doors to the, to the credit union, although it may not, may not hurt, but there's kind of a built in deal flow. It sounds like for this type of business. So tapping into some of that.

45:38So Lou,

45:39Lou Shaver:again, drawinspectortraining.com. Again, we'll link that up. If you're wondering what to listen to next, take a little quiz at hustle.show. It'll build you a little personalized playlist of some of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers. It takes just a couple minutes. You can do it right from your phone, and then you'll be all set with another eight to 10 of our greatest hits episodes to help you achieve your income goals this year. Again, that's hustle.show. Big thanks to Lou for sharing his insights. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

46:13Lou Shaver:That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you find any value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Fire off that text message to somebody who you know would be a great fit for this gig. They may not have heard of it, so let them know. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen, and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.