One Number for Every Home Repair: How 1.800.REPAIRS Is Changing Property Maintenance

Kerry Lauricella (00:00)
Until AI can come out and change my water heater, we gotta stick to those basics. I don’t see that happening. That’s why we have a tremendous amount of young people that’s reaching out to us asking, “What should we do? Should I go to college? Should I go do this?” We’re telling them that the day of a college degree, just because you get a degree, means you instantly get a job because of AI—that is over.

Joseph Crooms (01:56)
Hey everyone. Welcome to Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Joseph Crooms. Today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with. His name is Kerry Lauricella. Is that correct, Kerry?

Kerry Lauricella (02:11)
That’s cool.

Joseph Crooms (02:13)
Kerry Lauricella. I got that. So thank you. It is a pleasure to have you on the show. Kerry, why don’t you say hello to everyone in your own way, form, and fashion?

Kerry Lauricella (02:24)
Hello America. My name’s Kerry. I’m the CEO of 1.800.REPAIRS, America’s repair number. We’re revolutionizing the service industry.

Joseph Crooms (02:34)
Love it. I love it. So, Kerry, I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you are approaching business and your niche in support of, I believe, a lot of real estate, but I’m going to find out how you do that. So let’s dive right into it. So, first of all, for people who are not familiar with your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days, and what markets are you operating in?

Kerry Lauricella (03:00)
Our business started in New Orleans, Louisiana, as builders. And to shore up our building business, we wanted to get more service and repair work to keep our subcontractors busy. Those types of jobs could be somebody who just needs a water heater installed, or maybe to change their electrical panel, or to replace their front door. So what we did was, we said, “Well, let’s—” Back then, they had this thing called the phone book.

You’re too young to remember, but that was the only way people in America could find a plumber. But at least back then, whoever had the full-page ad would win. People need a plumber, they go open up the phone book, go to the biggest ad, they call. Well, things have gotten confusing. Now, if you need a plumber, you have to go on a computer, search online. Half of the websites aren’t even real. They’re

fictitious websites. You don’t know if the companies are legitimate, if they’re insured, if they’re licensed. So what we did, we took common sense, good old-fashioned common sense, and we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if when people needed repairs, they could just call 1.800.REPAIRS?” That’s it. And so we started with promoting that on a simple bus bench in front of our office:

“Need home repairs? Call 1.800.REPAIRS.” And we started getting jobs. Boom, boom, boom, boom, until one day someone stole the bus bench. The bus bench was gone. And we didn’t know what to do, because that was the only place where we had the phone number. But this was what occurred, which made it so exciting. For months after that bench was long gone,

we kept getting phone calls, because people remembered 800 REPAIRS. So fast-forward till today, and now we put 1.800.REPAIRS on, let’s say, a job site sign or a billboard. Guess what it says? “Need home repairs? Call 1.800.REPAIRS.” And so where everyone else is spending a fortune trying to build a brand—

no matter what they spend, let’s say they do a radio ad or television ad, they can say, “Call A1 Heating and Air. We’re great. Look, we got our dog in the commercial, and we got the kids and all this.” No one can remember their phone number. So what does the client have to do? Go on their computer, start searching. When they search for air conditioning in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or San Jose,

they find all of your competitors. So in a way, your ads—you’re indirectly promoting all of your competitors.

With 800 REPAIRS, you and your listeners and your viewers have heard it one time. I can assure you, not one of your viewers is going to have to go to Google to look up 1.800.REPAIRS. So that is what we’re

taking out. It’s working successfully in a market. And now we’ve—because the technology has caught up with us, now when people call 1.800.REPAIRS, our IVR, our phone routing system, simply says, “Where are you calling from? What is your zip code?” So if you’re calling from zip code 12345, it won’t ring to our office here in New Orleans.

It will ring directly to that service provider in that community. So we’re granting them that same firepower, that steroid for advertising, that secret weapon that nobody else has, and we’re granting it to them. So it’s very, very exciting. And I’m telling you, Google—

these search engine companies, they are so outrageous with their pricing, and you never really know what you’re gonna get. If you really want a good joke, call Google and ask them, “How much does it cost to advertise?” You’re not gonna get a straight answer. They might tell you it’s $5,000 or it’s $10,000. And ask one common-sense question: “How many calls am I gonna get?”

You know what they’ll tell you? “We can’t tell you that.” Or, “We’re gonna give you so many impressions.” I don’t give a damn about impressions. You know what I want?

Phone calls, good old-fashioned humans that have a heartbeat and a breath that will call and say, “I need work done around my house. Can you help me?” And we want humans to answer the phone. You get good old-fashioned common sense. So—

Joseph Crooms (08:37)
Kerry, let me ask you this. You talk about that you started out in the building. Are you still into building homes also?

Kerry Lauricella (08:43)
We have a residential division; we have a commercial division where we build banks—we build out banks; we have a residential where we deal with rental properties. We have over 2,000 rental properties that we work on and that we maintain. We own our own rental properties, and we know from doing it for 25 years, we used to calculate:

If you have 12 months of rent, we’d always figure one month rent to just do ongoing maintenance for your properties. The nightmare is that, let’s say you own a double or a fourplex, maybe you inherited it from your parents, and you can’t really afford a property management company because you just can’t. We do 800 REPAIRS, and by the way, we own 1-800repairs.com.

So we’re offering something to people that own rental properties called a home checklist. So they can just tell their tenants, “If you need things done, rather than driving me crazy as the owner of the property, just go to 1.800.REPAIRS, fill out the home checklist, tell us what you need.” That will come directly to our office or to that service provider in the area, and they’ll give you estimates for every single thing that that tenant is asking

for, for free. And every one of our contractors is licensed, insured, and will give you a written guarantee for any new installs. So to answer your question, do we know the real estate business? Probably better than most in the Gulf Coast. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’re offering a service for people that own residential and commercial real estate as a—

In a sense, we act as your property management firm, but you don’t have to pay us 10%. We do it for free.

Joseph Crooms (10:32)
How much book of business do you have, Kerry, on the residential versus commercial?

Kerry Lauricella (10:39)
We do more in volume like single-ticket items in commercial nationally. Like a commercial project for us may be a million dollars or half a million dollars. We do banks—we do several of the major national banks to change. Residential, the average ticket may be $750. It could be, “We just bought this house

and the front door is sticking,” or we get a tremendous amount of people that are gonna sell their house. And all—every American that’s ever went to sell their house, they need to know this: Potential buyers have the edge right now. It’s a buyer’s market right now, and if they’re a little clever,

they’re gonna try to nitpick that seller. “Well, the doorknob doesn’t work, the handrail is a little loose, the steps have a little creak, that light fixture, the ceiling fan’s not working.” And the average homeowner that’s trying to sell a place, they’ll panic and they’ll just knock $10,000 off the price. Well, guess what? We allow the seller to go through a home checklist and say—

they can do it themselves. Just take their cell phone, walk around the house, say, “Well, light fixtures,” bam, take a picture. “This doorknob,” bam, take a picture. List everything that’s wrong, hit submit. We’ll give them a detailed written estimate for everything wrong, and it might total $4,200. Now they can either have that work done, or now they’ll have written estimates for all of this. And then when they get the nitpicking buyer,

and they say, “Well, look at all these piddly things that are wrong,” he goes, “Well, you know what? Yeah, you’re right. Here are written estimates from local, licensed, and insured contractors for $4,200. I’ll take that off the selling price.” End of story. And that does not exist anywhere in America. We designed that software.

Joseph Crooms (12:40)
Kerry, do you have say on—so the seller sells this place, gets another place, do they carry you over with them? Do they have like a—do you have like a monthly plan or subscription on the residential side that can stay with you guys?

Kerry Lauricella (12:57)
As my grandpa said, a good meal always finds work. And when we’ve—we’ve been doing this—I’m 65 years old; I’ve been doing it since I was 18. And I’ve never really had to push, because we’ll do one job, people will see it, we put drop cloths down, we don’t make a mess, we do a good job. We might spend a little extra time, but we do it right.

And it’s common for us to get on a street and do 15 houses on one street. We call it the Jones syndrome. “They sure are good,” or “They do what they say.” You know what our secret weapon is? We show up. Just simple things: Just show up. And to answer your question, we don’t charge

like a warranty fee or a fixed monthly fee, although we have people every day asking to pay that for us. We offer what we call VIP concierge service for free. We’re just asking, pay us for the services that we render. We’re old-school business people: We do service, pay us.

Joseph Crooms (14:08)
Yeah,

what about on the commercial side?

Kerry Lauricella (14:11)
Commercial, they really love us because we’ll be working on a bank, or we’ll be doing—like right now, we have a bank in what they call Metairie, Louisiana. It’s a very busy branch. And we’re working on that branch during office hours, during banking hours. So that’s critical that that entrance is neat, that it’s clean, they don’t have garbage piled up. So when we leave a job site,

that job site is in pristine condition. We do everything in our power to not be seen, and we do as much of the work as we can off-hours. So the commercial clients have been spoiled because they just—they know we cater to that, and we’ll continue to do so.

Joseph Crooms (14:56)
Kerry, what is your total book of business monthly on volume? How—what type of volume are you doing?

Kerry Lauricella (15:03)
We’re doing, I would say right now, over a million dollars.

Joseph Crooms (15:07)
I got you. So okay, so let me ask you this. What caught my attention is your good old-fashioned work ethic, and that’s not really easy in this environment. How has AI helped your business? Or do you—

Kerry Lauricella (15:22)
I mean, you have to be with the times. You can’t be—like I don’t carry a beeper anymore, for example, okay? We don’t use payphones. But some things you have to stick to the basics, like answering the phone. You gotta be careful because the—I call the computer people will tell you, “It’s a new world you live in.

People don’t want to speak to a human.” Those idiots, excuse me, have never been in the service business. They don’t have a wife sitting at home with two crying babies because the air conditioning is out. They want someone on the phone. They want it fixed. And from an old-school standpoint, when something’s broken,

you want to speak to someone right then and there. Now, yes, we have the technology where you can request service online, you can fill out a form. It instantaneously comes to us and to our service providers, and our customers get an instantaneous response. Our phone system is state-of-the-art, where you can just say, “Here’s my zip code,” and the call will instantly ring right to a service provider.

But we are intertwining common sense with AI and technology. We’re gonna continue customer service. It’s critical. Now, if I wanted to go buy maybe a part or something from Amazon, that’s a different world. But in the service industry,

until AI can come out and change my water heater, we gotta stick to those basics. And I don’t see that happening. That’s why we have a tremendous amount of young people that’s reaching out to us asking, “What should we do? Should I go to college? Should I go do this?” We’re telling them that the day of a college degree, just because you get a degree, means you instantly get a job because of AI—that is over.

Over. My son’s an attorney.

The paralegal world is turned upside down right now because of AI. You can look at a brief that’s 40 pages long or a ruling, and it’ll take a paralegal a week to figure it out. Now you just copy it, scan it, and in 32 seconds you get a crystal-clear description of what that brief is. So we are telling people and our interns, if you will:

Learn a trade. Learn how to fix air conditioning, because AI ain’t gonna fix that. They’re not gonna change that compressor; they’re not gonna change that water heater. And if you’re not afraid of the W-word, which we joke about, you can go very far today. But once again, use AI as part of that and use the old-fashioned W-word. You can be

very, very—we’ve been extremely successful, but we were brought up swinging the hammer for a living. Don’t scare us.

Joseph Crooms (18:29)
You said that you have property—you also own a property management business as well for certain aspects of your business. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Kerry Lauricella (18:41)
Yeah, we have companies that have real estate companies. We have several of the major Realtors that have clients, and that’s not the giant property management groups that have 200 properties of their own. These are Realtors that have clients that own two fourplexes or a single property, and they’re on the bubble that they cannot afford a full-time property manager. So we offer that service

primarily to real estate agents. And we do it for free. So if you’re a Realtor, once again old-school, as a Realtor, I make money when that house sells. I’m making 3%, 6% if I get the listing, 3% if I share it, 1.5% because you have to share it with the brokerage. But I don’t get paid if that house don’t sell. So I want it not only to sell, I want it to sell for the most amount possible. And the way that occurs is if

you can get fair market value, meaning everything that should be fixed on that house is fixed. Curb appeal. If the house looks like junk, they’re gonna nitpick you to death. You could lose $50,000 on a $200,000 house over $5,000 worth of work that the average buyer or the average seller, they just don’t know. So

we’re providing that service as part of 1.800.REPAIRS.

Joseph Crooms (20:06)
Now I know a lot of people listening are very early in their journey, looking to level up. I think they’d benefit from hearing this: When it comes to building these types of relationships, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Kerry Lauricella (20:19)
I think it’s understanding your customer and putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. I think that’s the biggest thing. Like if I bought this house, what would I do? Now I’m in a good spot, because I know what I’m looking at. I can look at a house—just because, my old saying is, that the gutters are falling off the house, where do I buy it? How much do you want? Because those are your best deals—the ones that kind of look good and they painted over rotten wood,

that’s the ones you gotta look out for. So what we’re doing is we’re taking everything that we’ve successfully done, we’re packaging all of this system together. And that’s where we’re allowing businesses or Realtors or roofers or HVAC companies—we’ll call it the 800 REPAIRS license agreement—where just like we’re making money here in New Orleans, we can give that license agreement.

License package to, could be just a roofer in Birmingham. Well, now not only does he get calls for roofing, roof inspections, roof changeouts—sometimes you go to buy a house, the roof’s gotta—it may be six years old, they gotta change it. They will also get calls for HVAC, plumbing, remodeling, and those they can sub those jobs out, or just pass them through to their buddies, and they mirror what we do.

So now we’re showing—we have Realtors that are calling us asking to go into the service referral business, which is what we do. Every time we refer a job out to a plumber, we may not send an estimator out to do a $750 water heater changeout. We’ll just give it to the plumber, and they’ll typically pay us some sort of a referral fee or something. In a

contracting world, it’s typically 20%. But sometimes it’s less because we’re just passing the job to those contractors. But it’s a very good business, and it’s a solid business. It’s not get-rich-quick. Once again, you’re not scared of the W-word, and you’re willing to answer the phone, it’s worked for us.

Just recreate what works. Simple.

Joseph Crooms (22:34)
You can’t fake relationships, as everything in this is really important in your space. We’re running out of time. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you would like to explain a little more to us before we tell people how to get in touch with you, Kerry?

Kerry Lauricella (22:48)
Thing

is that no matter where they are in America, if you’re a Realtor and you’re looking to maybe move a house quicker, call 1.800.REPAIRS. Even if we don’t have anyone, we’ll find someone. What we’ll never do is we will never lie to you. If we don’t have a roofer in a market that’s insured, we’ll just tell you the truth. But if you’re looking to diversify your business and expand and make more money—

not some get-rich-quick show we see at two in the morning—people can call 1.800.REPAIRS, and we can have that call ring straight to your office. And you can have what we have. And we’re doing it—we don’t get any percent. The average contractor, if you will, licensee, will pay us about $100 a month, and we’ll make them the exclusive for their zip code. Simple.

You’re the 800 REPAIRS licensee in that area. That’s it. So all you have to do is go to 1-800repairs.com, and you can see what our customers say. And if you go to—there’s a button right on top says “Be a Service Provider,” and you’ll see how to get your own license.

Joseph Crooms (23:57)
Thank you so much for that. Before we wrap up, if someone wanted to reach out to you, maybe collaborate, learn more about what you’re doing, especially if they want to service a provider’s license, what’s the best way to reach you?

Kerry Lauricella (24:51)
1.800.REPAIRS.

Joseph Crooms (24:53)
Do they ask for you?

Kerry Lauricella (24:54)
They’ll ask for me. When you call 1.800.REPAIRS, someone’s gonna answer. You can also go to 1800repairs.com and fill out the contact.

Joseph Crooms (25:06)
Sounds good. Kerry, thank you so very much for being here. So informative and innovative, what you’re doing. So I appreciate your time, your story, your perspective, the good old work ethics, and your giving services for free, helping communities, helping businesspeople, helping just so much of America. And thank you so very much. And once again, Kerry, thank you for being here with me today.

Kerry Lauricella (25:32)
Thank you for inviting us. Thank you.

Joseph Crooms (25:35)
So for those of you tuning in, I know you got some value from this. Make sure you subscribe. We got more conversations coming from operators just like Kerry from 1.800.REPAIRS, who’s out there building real businesses. He is so right—I can’t get that number out of my mind now. So we’ll see you on the next episode of Real Estate Pros Podcast. Kerry, tell everyone I’ll see you later when you call

1.800.REPAIRS. Kerry, tell them why you’ll talk to them later.

Kerry Lauricella (26:07)
¡Adios! Thank you, Joe.