A Business Idea

[Mantis]

As many here know I am, for my sins, a Chartered Surveyor.

I have enjoyed about 2 years off mainly thanks to a dodgy back but I an now considering business opportunities and have an idea that may have some prospects. I do not want to put too much information here but the details are:

I want to set up a business panelling and managing valuation instructions, the model works as follows.

A company or potentially an individual would send me an instruction to do a valuation, they would set out key areas they wanted timing etc and would give a fee range.

My business would receive the instruction and then get other Surveyors to bid for the job. The fee would start high and then be bid downwards to a point when the instruction would be made this could be an agreed time limit or a lower fee threshold. The business would recieve its revenue by taking a percentage of the agreed fee.

The database would have to handle 20,000 instructions a year. Management information would be needed to monitor and quality control the work. A system I have used Valuation exchange does this where it can monitor when the instruction was received, when the job was booked in, when the surveyor did the inspection and when the report was signed off. It required the instructed surveying company to log in to the server to update it at each stage and ultimately to complete the form online.

I would need to be able to randomly select a percentage for audit.

The question that I have is what sort of costs would be incurred setting up the web page what IT costs would be required like secure servers, backup etc and then for future maintenance/running costs?

Any IT views? I would be happy to give more info by way of PM

[Mike@TheWhippinpost]

Quite a lot (after you factor-in promotion and marketing).

I can't speak specifically for your industry because I don't know if your idea already exists in your sector, but I do know that in the domestic energy auditing field this idea has been attempted by 2 or 3 entities; and it was not exactly welcomed by practictioners who did not wish to get involved in a "bid-down" auctioning process.

Might be different for your sector, but you need the practitioners to get on-board; and then you somehow need to ensure they are reliable bla, blah, blah...

Last thing you want is to sign a 20,000 property contract and then have not enough bidders to fulfill the jobs.

Make sure you do good research is all I'm saying, but good luck.

[Tony]

Might be worth looking at something like Curtis Fitch to see if their isourcing software can help - apparently you can set it to do a variety of auction types - reverse auctions etc. Our purchasing department use it to source suppliers and also sell stuff for clients when they have excess stock.

Might save you reinventing the wheel for the tech side, leaving you free to focus on your business side. http://www.curtisfitch.com

Good luck mate!

[Mantis]

It would be a modest start, I have two sources of business I feel I could target. Firstly I would attempt to get the work on a non bid basis but if a customer was very price sensitive I could offer the facility.

I would look for 20,000 capability but not look to do that in one. I have a good market to target and it is not energy assessments or indeed normal lenders but the infrastructure would work the same.

[keri]

On the topic of IT costs - something like that would happily run in a shared hosting environment as it wouldn't be a heavy use system, the only thing against shared hosting is the fact that you would be sharing the DB with others a VPS could be the way forward, helping keep your costs down.
You wouldn't *need* a secure server but some people like it for peace of mind.

In my current job i write/maintain a system very similar to your needs, we handle leads from estate agents for HIPs and Conveyancing and pass them onto other people to do the work, they send us milestones back which we handle and display to the agents in their software and into their website for the punter to see - they get a nice view of the progression, and hold ups etc and we can generate stats and the like from the data.
This system has had 1 full developer and 2 or 3 part time developers on it for a couple of years and is still ever evolving, so the development costs for you would probably be the highest part of your setup.

[Mantis]

I think the timing is excellent for my targeted sector.

Traditionally it has been done by smaller practices who do the work for lower fees. I believe that the area is not too fee sensitive but needs to be quality sensitive.

Panel managing techniques and completion of pro forma forms should deliver quality improvements and cost savings. It has worked hugely for some big financial services companies it is just a filtering down of their practices.

Big lenders use standard phrases to make their computers do the underwriters job. Structural movement (Indeed flooding) phrase in the report provokes a automated response = man hours saved and cost saving.