Alan Grosheider, Blue222 Founder, and Eric Craig, Blue222 CEO, talk about why we’re so excited about building a marketplace and efficiency SaaS for real estate inspections.
Transcript
Alan:
Hi everybody, my name is Alan Grosheider. I’m the founder of Blue222 and this is Eric Craig, our CEO.
Blue222 is a company that provides marketplace technology for real estate inspectors of all types. Appraisers, environmental inspectors, building inspectors. And we are building a marketplace to try to go after the 92 billion dollars that we can estimate of real estate inspections that take place around the world each year.
And the thing that got me started on this, I started a company years ago called ESA1. It was an environmental inspection company. It ended up being a venture-backed national company.
And I got to really learn what was going on in the marketplace and found that most of the market still operates with emails and phone calls. And I know it still does today. So, if you’re going to purchase a home, you get to a point where you’ve signed a contract and a realtor hands you a sheet of paper with a list of approved home inspectors and appraisers and pest inspectors.
And you have to pick up the phone and start calling. And I started wondering, well, why can I click a button on my phone and a car shows up in five minutes to take me to the airport? But I have to wait for days for people to call me back to get these inspections moving. And the same thing happens on the commercial side.
That’s where I’ve been more involved business-wise. It’s just all emails and phone calls and spreadsheets that are used to manage this work. So, we built Blue222 to make that process much easier.
A single person can manage hundreds of projects per month, bidding, scheduling, all communication with vendors. And our long-term goal is to get to a point where, as I mentioned, you can sign to purchase your home and then all the inspections just get scheduled automatically. That’s where we’re moving.
And I met Eric through some Purdue functions over the last year. And now he is our CEO. Eric has a background with some big marketplace companies.
So he’s bringing a lot of the larger scale mentality and experience to Blue222. And I’ll let him talk about his background.
Eric:
Yeah, thanks, Alan. And I’ll say hello to everybody out there who’s watching and listening. As Alan said, we met through Purdue and pretty quickly, I think, came to figure out on both sides that there were a lot of things that we both had passion for.
We both have passion for technology, solving problems in business. And certainly, that’s what Alan has built in Blue222, is a technology solution that solves problems in the real estate inspection process. And there are problems.
I look back as we started getting together, I look back at some of my own experiences and it made me cringe a little bit, thinking about some of the time that I spent trying to find the right person for an inspection service that was required for home purchase of mine. And then trying to schedule, trying to find bids, feeling like did I get the right price? All those pieces that went into it. So I related to the problem pretty quickly.
But what really caught my attention was the scalability aspect within the space. Real estate clients can span banks, lenders, brokers, realtors. There’s multiple different services that apply across both residential and commercial.
And I describe this more as a network than it is anything else in terms of what fits between. But what Blue222 does is it solves the problems in the process through technology. And because of both sides of this being multi-dimensional, there’s an online marketplace there that has great scalability potential.
And so, we continued to talk. We figured out a path that made sense for us to blend our experiences together and drive Blue222 forward. And now we’re on mission together to go and solve this problem and build a modern marketplace for real estate inspections.
Alan:
So, Eric, talk about your background a little bit. Eric has built some huge marketplaces that really apply to what we’re doing here.
Eric:
Yeah, I was pretty lucky over time just to be in the position where I saw several large technology startups grow and scale in the online marketplace space and with Orbitz pretty early on was part of the team that was learning both sides of the hotel space and what was needed on the supplier side to really connect with consumers and what consumers were looking for on the supply side and how do we go and make all those connections and build that marketplace.
And then from there I got a chance to do similar things at Groupon and build out both the travel product there and then help continue to build the local business marketplace. So a lot of great experiences that I can point to and draw from to apply in the space. And I think that’s a big selling point for me in terms of why I made the decision to join.
Alan:
So I’m super excited to have our combined experience. I’ve definitely been more on the startup side building companies that do millions of dollars a year in sales and Eric has been a part of companies that grew to multi-billion per year in sales. So the combination there of the early stage and knowledge of the real estate inspection market with knowledge of how to scale large marketplaces is just amazing.
We’re both super excited about this. We are raising capital right now through a Reg D 506c. So accredited investors, if you’re interested in being a part in investing and helping us grow, we will put a link in the comments for this video and take you to a landing page where you can learn how you can invest right now.
Also, if you are interested in working with us to help build out some marketplace functionality for your company or to use our software to manage your vendors, let us know and it’s very easy for us to start working with you to get set up. But we’re really excited to build this giant marketplace and solutions that help the entire four trillion dollars a year in real estate transactions that happen around the world.