Revolution’s Preferred Vendor Program
Revolution is frequently contacted by a LOT of vendors looking to be on our vendor list. There are far more vendors in our market than we could ever work with, even with our large portfolio of rental properties. For that reason, we have to rank vendors and give preference to those vendors who provide the best all-around combination of quality of work, speed to completion, and price. Every quarter we review each vendor to determine which are providing us and our landlord clients the best service, and those vendors are given priority for assignment of new work. Generally, this means that the top 3 vendors get all of the work.
We have had some vendors ask us if it’s possible to get ALL of our work. Traditionally, this was not something that we did, as we did not want to find ourselves in a corner with only one vendor handling everything, and no established relationships with other vendors of the same type. However, this was a common enough request that we wanted to find a way to make this possible for our best vendors.
What we came up with is our Preferred Vendor Program. In order to be considered for the program, a vendor must score at GREATER than 100%. That means the vendor needs to provide better quality work than most vendors, at a faster speed than most vendors, and at a better price than most vendors. It’s not easy. Only the best vendors we work with qualify for it, and the program is by invite-only. We need to work with a vendor for at least 3 months to get an accurate read on their quality, speed, and price, and if they make the cut, we will make them an offer to be a preferred vendor, meaning that they will get all of our work in that category (electrical, plumbing, rehab, etc.).
If you make the cut, you’ll receive an offer from us by email with an application to fill out and a Preferred Vendor Agreement to sign. That agreement requires that you maintain the same level of service that got you to qualify for the program in the first place, or you’ll be removed from the program. It also requires you to rebate 10% of the invoice amount to us on a monthly basis. We’ve seen some vendors try to “game” this by increasing their prices to cover that cost. Careful! If you try to do that, you’ll likely be disqualified from the program after the first quarter, because your pricing will no longer make the cut for being better than most vendors. You have to maintain that same quality, speed, and pricing to stay in the program. Obviously we understand that inflation exists, so pricing will go up inevitably over time, but we’ll be comparing you to other similar vendors to make our determination as to whether your pricing is better than most or not. The best thing to do is to simply not play games with the prices. You’re paying the rebate in exchange for us giving you ALL of our work in your category, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in new revenue for your company. That’s well worth a 10% rebate for most vendors!
To get things started, just sign up to be a vendor with Revolution, and do your best work at your best price!