I really dig the idea, but I wonder - how can you guarantee prices? Homes can differ tremendously. There's a reason plumbers ask to come on site.
For example front and center is a fixed price tankless heater, which is great. However if the customer has serious plumbing issues which have caused the existing (tank) water heater to fail (for the example corroded pipes), if you replace just the water heater without fixing the underlying issues it could cause the new tankless heater to fail by introducing sediment, etc. into the system.
In the software world this would be akin to asking a contractor to add a new feature to your site without seeing the existing codebase. Seems difficult.
Are y'all just amortizing the cost of these things across all customers or what?
Homes with majors issues like that have been extremely rare in our experience. When they come up, we've been able to catch them early (at least so far). In the future situation where we miss it, we have some back stops with our scope of work agreements. We would be okay eating losses in a lot of situations, to your point about taking a portfolio approach, and then updating our approach to avoid repeating those mistakes. This was something that worked well at Opendoor (buying/selling houses), where I previously worked.
We haven't met service professionals who have the capability to do that directly, but doing so delivers a much, much better homeowner experience.
For example front and center is a fixed price tankless heater, which is great. However if the customer has serious plumbing issues which have caused the existing (tank) water heater to fail (for the example corroded pipes), if you replace just the water heater without fixing the underlying issues it could cause the new tankless heater to fail by introducing sediment, etc. into the system.
In the software world this would be akin to asking a contractor to add a new feature to your site without seeing the existing codebase. Seems difficult.
Are y'all just amortizing the cost of these things across all customers or what?