How is your residential market doing?

katz

katz

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It is the pits here. I receive call after call, "tire kicking", and when they hear a repair quote, most decide to go to any local big box and purchase a new/refurb laptop or similar. Is anyone doing anything is the residential market at all?

Even issues like printers, buggy pc's, PC, not recognizing my phone/device, etc., it seems like they just live with the issue and not bother with ever getting it fixed. Either that, or most folks are just doing everything on their phones these days, which seem ridiculous to me, staring into a tiny screen, shopping, etc...
 
Most residential clients I find are getting way too used to the "don't fix it--replace it" mentality. Most people are using mobile devices. If you repair the stuff, great, I don't. Personally I really don't even want to touch that stuff. I neither have the time nor patience for mobile repair. I'll support the software and training, but that's about it.

I'm not sure what you support on your end, are you selling hardware as well? Can always offer something decent that the big box buggers can't offer.
 
I don't give quotes over the phone, we custom build, our clients know were not the cheapest place in town but they can always get service and its properly done. If i get a client that is price shopping i refer them to walmart or the other big box stores. I simply tell them we don't carry that quality.
I know we will end up servicing their walmart special. I haven't advertised in 10 plus years our clients do it for us. We are 85 % residential.
 
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I have a small display of box store laptops with the hinges ripped out of them, and I carry a bunch of business class refurb. I tell customers if they want flimsy crap like this, they can go to the box store. Or they can buy a quality business class refurb from me. Very few walk out the door. I have people bring in consumer grade laptops wanting to trade in or sell me, I send them packing and tell them I do not sell consumer grade laptops because they don't last and I don't want to ruin my reputation of selling quality machines.
 
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Residential work no longer exists, it's not possible to compete with a $400 WalMart special.

I have a small and loyal customer base that returns for custom builds, but when your builds last a decade those are few and far between. But I still do them, because I enjoy them.
 
katz said:
Is anyone doing anything is the residential market at all?/QUOTE]

Nope.
Got out of that like..a bit over almost 20 years ago. Saw the writing on that wall when Dell started getting pretty big online...and PCs dipped below $2,000.00 a pop back then. Aggressively focused on SMB clients..and jumped all in on the MSP angle...nice steady recurring revenue.
Click to expand...
 
Sky-Knight said:
Residential work no longer exists, it's not possible to compete with a $400 WalMart special.
Click to expand...

I hear that all of the time and it is not the case. We sell several a week of refurbished HP probook 6550b with 120 and 240 gb ssds for 379 and 429 respectively. that is over a $200 markup on the lower price one, even more on the 240gb model. Then most of these people pay $99 to transfer their data. We do something similar with Compaq pro 6300s we buy in bulk on ebay for about $100 a piece and upgrade them with SSDs

As to repairs, lots of people would rather spend $160 to $300 for a repair instead of spending $400 at walmart then spending additional money to recover their stuff.
 
pcpete said:
I hear that all of the time and it is not the case. We sell several a week of refurbished HP probook 6550b with 120 and 240 gb ssds for 379 and 429 respectively. that is over a $200 markup on the lower price one, even more on the 240gb model. Then most of these people pay $99 to transfer their data. We do something similar with Compaq pro 6300s we buy in bulk on ebay for about $100 a piece and upgrade them with SSDs

As to repairs, lots of people would rather spend $160 to $300 for a repair instead of spending $400 at walmart then spending additional money to recover their stuff.
Click to expand...

It depends on the person. Some people think that newer is ALWAYS better, so if they can't fix their 1 year old Walmart laptop for $100 or less, they would rather spend $400 for a new one. The key is to avoid clients like this. Your target client should be more concerned with getting their computer back ASAP and keeping their data safe than the cost of repair.

Some people are cheapwads, others are just poor. I just had a client come in and trade in 12 laptops. They were ALL purchased from Walmart over the last 3 years and they were ALL $300 or less (Celeron and AMD A4's mostly). They bought 2 i5 refurbished business grade laptops from me and I gave them about $150 for all 12 laptops. They have 4 people in their family and they've decided they're sick of replacing their computers every 6-12 months and suffering with performance so slow, they might as well be buying XP boxes with P4's in them. When they can afford it, they'll come back and buy 2 more of my refurbished units so they can all have their own computers. These poor people have no money. All 4 of them (mother, father, adult brother and sister) live in a 2 bedroom single wide mobile home in a mobile home park about an hour away from here. I gave them a break.
 
Sky-Knight said:
Residential work no longer exists, it's not possible to compete with a $400 WalMart special.

I have a small and loyal customer base that returns for custom builds, but when your builds last a decade those are few and far between. But I still do them, because I enjoy them.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that is about my experiences as well. I keep servicing the ones in my "circle", but new clients don't come on board too often. Plus, being a mobile tech, no storefront, it is a bit difficult to sell stock...
 
My residential market keeps plugging along, most folks around here have not upgraded in a number of years and are receptive to knowing its time to do something. The box stores are almost an hour away, so that helps.
 
I think this question vastly depends on the area. In my town, we're 1 of 2 repair shops, the other is a 1 man show who has more work than he can handle.

Close by, there is a Staples with Easy tech, (which I haven't heard good things, they are basically sales men disguised as techs, much like Geeksquad) The next closest shop is 30-45 minutes away.

We still have an OK amount of residential work, we usually keep a few computers in stock, so if their old dinosaur isn't worth fixing, we can move them over to a new or refurbished machine. We still get clients with a problem, and need the data out of a machine that no longer boots up.

That being said, the writing is definitely on the wall. A lot of the residential side of things are becoming more training than anything else, which is time consuming. A lot of people don't seem to want to pay our rates to do training (we only do training via remote or onsite).

We have around 300 users on our Manged anti virus platform, which still brings in some good recurring revenue. I could see us getting to the point where we only work with residential clients who are on this plan.

We're eventually going to go business only, and ideally, only work with clients on a contract. But we aren't quite there yet to totally dump residential. The way I see it, this will eventually work itself out, as our prices will stay the same, and will eventually become to expensive for most clients to want to deal with repair, but there will always be some sort of market for Data migration/recovery and training
 
July was very busy for me, I do 90% residential and I also sell refurbished Dell latitudes, HP Elitebooks, Lenovo Thinkpads on laptops, and Dell Optiplex desktops, All refurbished. I do build customer computers as well, but I don't sell that many and I do prefer selling the refurbished units.
I sell around 20 to 25 machines a month, most to customers that walk in with low end Walmart computers that were slow from day one
 
I been doing new system setups and project based work for the most part when it comes to Residential. I might do a Tune up here and there. I haven't done a Virus Removal in over a year now. I send out Renewals for AV and for the most part they have no problem renewing.

Residential hasn't died off for me, but the dynamics have definitely changed within the last 2 years.
 
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Residential market is doing fine here.
I don't sell anything except services & 100% residential. Mostly retired people.
Good turnover for July & August is looking fine :)
 
cypress said:
I been doing new system setups and project based work for the most part when it comes to Residential. I might do a Tune up here and there. I haven't done a Virus Removal in over a year now. I send out Renewals for AV and for the most part they have no problem renewing.

Residential hasn't died off for me, but the dynamics have definitely changed within the last 2 years.
Click to expand...
This ^^^ it is a vastly different eco system now.
 
I've just had my busiest month in years - however, I suspect that's partly because 2 mobile techs like me have recently had to stop working - so I have my usual customers, plus I'm picking up theirs too.
 
Here in Portugal, we got problems with nonresidential clients, small business never wants to pay for the job right away.
 
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