It has been hard to find an easy way to compare funeral home prices and services by market for free online. That is changing dramatically with the introduction of Parting.com.
There are free resource listings which have been out there for a few years. Funeralwise.com has the Find a Funeral Home/Cemetery feature on its website. You can fill out their free Quick Plan arrangements form to get a cost estimate ranging from low to high based on funeral preferences.
You can find comprehensive listings and funeral home reviews in 25 states on Funerals360. For a price, you can get comparison reports on up to five local funeral homes.
EverestFuneral.com, a nationwide funeral planning concierge service, has up-to-date price lists for more than 22,000 funeral homes in the U.S. and Canada in their database. For $29, you can get a PriceFinder report, comparing prices for up to eight local funeral homes. Clients of Everest can get as many reports as they want at no extra charge.
But until the June, 2015 debut of Parting.com, there has been no comprehensive online collection of current price lists for U.S. funeral homes available for free to the public. Tyler Yamasaki, one of the founders of Parting.com, spoke with The Family Plot Blog about their free online service.
Often, online services related to funerals start because of a bad experience after a death in the family. What’s the story for Parting.com?
Tyler Yamasaki, co-founder, Parting.com
Earlier this year my grandmother passed and I was tasked with helping plan the funeral. That is when I quickly realized that the information online to compare my options were extremely limited and hard to find. It took me 4-5 days to compare and choose a funeral home because I had to find and call each one to find out more information.
We started Parting (http://www.Parting.com/) around June of 2015 to empower people with the information to find and choose the funeral service providers that could best serve their needs. With Parting, the process of finding and comparing funeral homes now takes 10 minutes.
How many funeral homes in how many states do you currently include in your site?
We have around 15,000 funeral homes and growing every day. We are in every state in the country.
How did you gather all those price lists?
Initially, we spent a lot of time calling, faxing, and emailing funeral homes to obtain the price lists on Parting.com. Now that we’ve gotten some visibility and funeral homes are getting customers through our website, the funeral homes themselves are sending us their price lists to add or update their pages.
Are the prices listed accurate? What if a funeral home in a particular market is missing?
Our team is constantly updating and keeping the prices accurate. We know we can’t be perfect, but we are working with funeral homes to make sure we are showing accurate information. If a funeral home is missing, we welcome them to send us an email at hello@parting.com so we can add them.
Why do you think this hasn’t been done before?
First, getting the price lists from funeral homes is a huge task that takes a lot of time and is difficult to do. Secondly, the funeral home industry hasn’t felt the need to provide something like this to the public yet. However, as the responsibility of planning funerals shifts towards the generation that has grown up with the internet, they are going to demand the transparency that they are accustomed to in all other aspects of their lives. Parting helps funeral homes provide the transparency families need to determine who to trust, especially when the family has no previous relationship or confidence in a provider.
Are you doing this strictly as a public service? Do you make money with Parting.com? If so, how?
Right now, everything we are doing is centered around helping families find the right providers. We do have plans to eventually to make money from Parting, but we are focusing on providing real value to families first. Working with funeral homes toward information accuracy and completeness is our first priority.
Next, since price isn’t the only factor that families use to make a decision, we are working with funeral homes to showcase qualities that may be harder to quantify. Finally, since planning a funeral isn’t a common occurrence, it’s important to us that we provide educational resources for our users that will help make an overwhelming process a little bit easier.
Anything else you’d like to say about Parting.com?
We recognize that funeral homes provide an invaluable service that you can’t replace. The industry is filled with caring individuals and Parting just makes it easier for those in need to find them. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback please don’t hesitate to email us at hello@parting.com.