MT207 Unit 3 Market Research Summary Example

From 410 Properties to 15,300 Cleanings a Year: A Unit 3 Market Research Summary for a Dryer Vent Service

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT207: Starting a Business

Unit 3 Market Research Summary

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Clearline Vent Care, the property counts, call results and every figure are composite and illustrative; bracketed figures stand where public records and the founder's own calls would supply the numbers; the sources cited are real.

Apartment Communities

The county assessor's records list about [410] multifamily properties within a forty-minute drive of the founder's home in north Spokane. Three groups come out first. Properties with fewer than fifty units are removed, because a contract minimum of forty units makes them a poor fit for the apartment price. Senior communities and student housing with shared laundry rooms are removed, because their vents are few and short. Two properties under renovation are removed for this year.

The removals matter for pricing as much as for counting. Small properties would each need their own trip for a handful of units, which a forty-unit minimum cannot cover, and shared laundry rooms usually vent through a few short ducts that a maintenance worker can clear without help. The communities that remain are the ones where a long run inside a wall serves every unit, which is exactly where residents and maintenance staff cannot see the problem.

That leaves about [168] communities with roughly [19,600] units that have in-unit washers and dryers. Industry practice and manufacturer guidance generally call for an annual vent cleaning, but not every community follows it. Assuming that about [60] percent of communities would clean every unit once a year, the apartment segment produces about [11,760] cleanings annually.

Single-Family Homes

The American Community Survey's five-year estimates give about [118,000] owner-occupied single-family homes in the same drive area (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). Most homeowners never hire anyone to clean a dryer vent. Those who do usually call after a warning sign, such as a load that needs two cycles, a burning smell or a hot dryer top, and many first try a kit from a hardware store. The professional share therefore depends on how often warning signs appear and on whether the homeowner trusts a do-it-yourself kit to reach a long run through a wall or roof. Assuming [3] percent book a professional cleaning in a given year, a figure the founder's calls and competitor interviews can refine later, the home segment produces about [3,540] cleanings a year.

Market Value

At a price of about [$42] per apartment unit and [$119] per home, the apartment segment is worth about [$494,000] a year and the home segment about [$421,000], for a reachable market of roughly [$915,000]. The founder does not need most of it. The Unit 5 break-even works out to about forty-one home cleanings a month, or far fewer if apartment contracts sign.

The total is a ceiling on what is reachable, not a forecast of sales. Barringer and Ireland (2019) distinguish the total market from the share a new firm can realistically capture, and this summary stops at the reachable market on purpose.

Primary Research

The founder called [22] property managers and maintenance directors in October, using the same five questions each time. The answers, tallied, were as follows.

Fourteen of the twenty-two said their community's dryer vents had not been cleaned in the past two years. Nine said their current vendor's lead time was longer than six weeks, and four had no vendor at all. Eleven said they would look at a written proposal. Five said vendor budgets for the coming year are set by the property owner in November, which makes October and early November the window for proposals. Two mentioned that their insurer had asked about dryer vent maintenance after a claim elsewhere in the portfolio.

The calls also showed who decides. In nine of the eleven communities open to a proposal, the maintenance director chooses the vendor but the property owner approves the annual budget line, so a proposal has to persuade two people with different concerns: the director wants reliable scheduling, and the owner wants a defensible cost and fewer insurance questions.

The calls changed one assumption. Several managers said they would prefer to clean one building at a time on a rotating schedule rather than the whole community at once, so that residents are not all disturbed in the same week. That favors annual contracts with visits spread across the year, which suits a one-van business.

Fourteen of twenty-two managers could not remember the last time their vents were cleaned.

Why the Problem Is Real

Federal fire data attribute about a third of home dryer fires to a failure to clean (U.S. Fire Administration, 2012), and the managers' answers suggest that a large share of local vents go uncleaned for years. The combination of a known risk, insurer interest and long lead times is what makes this a market rather than a product looking for buyers.

Limitations

Four limits apply. The assessor's list records units, not dryers, so the count of in-unit dryers rests on property websites and may be off by several hundred. The annual cleaning share of 60 percent is a guess that the calls only partly support. The homeowner share of 3 percent has no local evidence behind it yet. And twenty-two calls are too few to treat as a survey; they are a check, not a sample. A second round of calls in the spring, once a few contracts are signed, would test the apartment assumption against real behavior.

References

Barringer, B. R., & Ireland, R. D. (2019). Entrepreneurship: Successfully launching new ventures (6th ed.). Pearson.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). American Community Survey 5-year estimates. https://data.census.gov/

U.S. Fire Administration. (2012). Clothes dryer fires in residential buildings (2008-2010) (Topical Fire Report Series, Vol. 13, Issue 7). Federal Emergency Management Agency.