My US trust provider is offering the service for $75/year:
https://www.valiair.com/registered-agent-service
Hopefully, with sufficient competition and given the low admin burden, prices will remain low.
I’d recommend waiting.
With at least 118,000 license holders wanting a solution, we are in to a perfect ‘Dutch auction’ scenario.
The market is probably not that big. Many of those certificates may not be valid anymore.
For example, I’m in that number with a piggy back certificate. However my licence number changed at one point and my certificate isn’t of use anymore as a result. The FAA have no way of knowing that though. So I’m still in those numbers. But I won’t be paying someone to be my representative for a useless certificate.
I can also imagine that many people got a piggy back certificate for a holiday trip. They probably won’t pay for this service until they actually need to use the certificate again.
Having said that if only 50% of those people need it, then there is still a nice market for someone.
There are probably a lot of upfront costs of getting set up. I think it will end up as something like:
$50 one off fee to set up (50*60K users = $3M of fee income for set up).
$5 per year “maintenance fee” (5*60K users = $300K passive income for someone).
$100 per letter delivery. Most people will never get a letter so won’t be put off by this. And if they do, the $100 fee is probably the least of their worries. Maybe the FAA send out 100 of these per year for this group? (100*100) = €10K. Not much but enough to cover emailing copies of a few letters.
There is a nice living there for someone, which they can probably do along side their day job. Once the initial setup is done (and there is $3M available to assist with that) there is very little work to be done afterwards.
But you’d need a cheap fee like that to capture most of the market in order to make it work. So cheap means you’ll get lots of business and nobody else wants to compete as it would cost them a lot to compete for what would end up being a small share of the market.
I think 100 USD is a strong perception of greed. I would do 20. Airmail is about 3 and ideally one would open it, scan it, and email the PDF to the person. 5 mins.
Maybe, but most people will never get a letter, so won’t be put off by that. It doesn’t contribute much to the income anyway.
Check wbardorf post.
75$ via valair trust.
Basically all included fee. They will scan and email it to you.
If you need original they will forward it to you.
How many on an active FAA license do not have a frequent or common US address mailings could be send to? Yes, I do have a FAA pilots license, but I also do frequent flying in the US and my relatives there will server perfectly as for a private pilot this can be any resident. Or maybe IACRA i.e. enables BFR filing for 61.75 licenses again, makes it mandatory and they get the pilots information back on actual?
Texan Registered Agent can offer this service for 35 USD per year.
https://www.texasregisteredagent.net
This includes free digitisation of all State and Federal mail. Any other mail is digitised or forwarded for a fee, although the first three items are free. The Airmen Certification Branch used to require certificate holders to specifically request concealment of addresses from public records but I believe this is now done by default when the address of record is outside the USA. It will be worth double checking that this remains the case once a US agent for service is nominated.
Good find! Thank you Qalupalik.
That is an amazing find!
