Terry Nicoludis, ALMEGA Inspection Services
www.almegainspections.com

My business is very much tied to real estate market trends. One can easily see that the roller coaster of that industry in some ways is similar to the overall market instability.

In the summer of 2007, the first wave of Adjusted Rate Mortgages started to mature, and with that many people found thier homes unaffordable. As foreclosures mounted, lending started to dry up, and eventually that filtered down to less homes being sold, which meant less homes to be inspected, which meant less income for my business. ALMEGA Inspections went from 15 to 20 inspections a week to two to five inspections per week in the three months following the first wave of foreclosures in our market (July of 2007 seemed to be the trigger date.)

So what did we do? First, we trimmed all unnecessary expenses. We always bought gas in South Carolina, even if it meant going out of our way a few miles. All advertising and marketing was scrutinized, and if it didn’t produce two times the revenue spent, it was axed.

We also realized that this downward turn in real estate pricing was producing an investor friendly market. I started attending real estate investor networking meetings and advertised my business there. This garnered two to three more inspections a month. I also started to learn a lot about that business, and got into an education program with mentoring, to develop my own real estate investment portfolio. We took non-performing investments and turned them into cash flow properties.

One of our investments is a rental cabin in the Smoky Mountains. We discovered that the real estate market there was robust and started to market the inspection business in the western counties of North Carolina. The cabin is not rented on Monday-Wednesday, so those are the days we scheduled inspections there.

Today, we find that the market in Charlotte is rebounding. Prices have dropped, and that has made buyers active again, which means that business is picking up, along with the new business that we have developed in these trying times.

The best strategy is:

1. Don’t panic

2. Identify what works

3. Network with diverse groups to find new business.