These days it’s all about data. We have been approached by some reserve study software companies that wanted to “partner” with us for. They’d offer us “free” software and we offer them access to our customers data… What did they want to do with the data in a reserve study? Well, they wanted to sell it to Vendors who will pay a significant amount to know when, approximate costs and who to target with the marketing efforts when it comes to large projects.
Example: A community that has several buildings and projected roofing project estimated to occur in the several years may be looking at a roofing project(s) in the hundreds of thousands of dollar range. This would be excellent information for the software company to sell and the Vendor to buy. Unfortunately, it is the Community which gets the short end of the stick in this scenario. Rinse and repeat a few thousand times and the data ends up being quite a profitable business – so is this company in the software business or marketing business, I would say the latter and who is their real customer you or the Vendors they are selling this data to, I would also say the latter.
We also have seen a higher tick in partnerships between reserve study companies and Vendors. These partnerships have mostly been justified by stating that this helps the reserve study company get more accurate overall numbers in a reserve study, and to some degree I think this is true. However, all good, fabrications and bending of reality is based on some level of truth.
We are constantly being approached by Vendors who want to “work with us” hoping to get a foot in the door to a meeting or introduction. If it works out, they frequently state we would earn a commission for this effort (one company offered me personally $10,000 for each introduction and closing of a project with them). These are often projects that cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and there are often big commissions attached to them.
For a variety of factors keeping your data private is in your best interest; independent advice and more competitive estimates and bids are two of the big ones (I’ll tackle this topic another time). How your data is being stored, who will have access to it, and is the company you are working with (reserve study, software or both) is an important part of the overall decisions of what reserve study company to use and what reserve study software to use.
