iMessage for home inspectors

Home inspection is a deadline business wearing a trade's clothing. The inspection itself takes three hours; the pressure comes from the fact that a contingency period is running and several people who are not your client are waiting on your report.

Know who your client is, and message accordingly

The buyer is your client. The agent is a coordinator. The seller is not your client at all. Running all three in one thread is how confidential findings end up in front of the wrong person.

The report is an email; the text is the signal

export const delivery = {
  onSite: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.company}: started at ${c.address}, about ${c.hours} hours. ` +
    `You're welcome to come by for the last half hour — walking the ` +
    `findings in person is worth more than reading them.`,
 
  // The report itself goes by email. This is the nudge.
  reportSent: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.company}: report's just gone to ${c.email} — ${c.pageCount} pages, ` +
    `${c.findingCount} items. Headline: ${c.headline}. ` +
    `Read the summary first, then call me. Nothing here is a dealbreaker ` +
    `on its own.`,
 
  deadline: (c: Ctx) =>
    `${c.company}: your inspection contingency ends ${c.deadline}. ` +
    `If you want anything re-checked or a specialist opinion on ` +
    `${c.majorItem}, we need to move on that in the next ${c.daysLeft} days.`,
};

That last one is genuine service. Buyers routinely let a contingency period lapse because nobody counted the days for them, and a single message can save them a very expensive mistake.

Managing the panic call

A first-time buyer reading a hundred-page report with forty findings concludes the house is falling down. Almost every report reads that way; the format is the problem, not the house.

The 'nothing here is a dealbreaker on its own' framing — sent with the report, not after the panicked call — pre-empts most of it. Then offer a call, because triaging forty items is not a text conversation.

The agent-relationship side of this is covered from the other direction in iMessage for real estate.