Driving it home to your buyer…
Since I’ve been a home inspector for 20 years, I am naturally interested whenever I hear a story from a home buyer about their home inspection service. When their story is negative, (in other words they move into their home and find a negative condition they didn’t know about) I dig in to help them if I can. I ask to see their home inspection report. I find either one of two things: either the home inspector was negligent and didn’t report an obvious deficiency in the home, or they did report it but it was buried within pages and pages of what I call “boiler plate” text.
An example of the former is a new home buyer who moved in and discovered a water leak in their basement. Within minutes I traced it to a chimney with missing mortar and falling bricks. The water was entering the chimney and manifesting in the basement. In this instance, I found no mention of the chimney deficiencies in the home inspector’s report.
An example of the latter is another new home buyer who moved in and also discovered a water leak in their basement. This time I asked to see their home inspection report and indeed, I found this condition buried within pages and pages of “boiler plate” text. In this case, since the condition was mentioned the home inspector was “off the hook” – I guess he feels he had done his job. But the truth is that the condition he described never reached the awareness of the home buyer. Now, you could say that the home buyer didn’t read his report. But this report was nearly 60 pages long and it was nearly impossible to pull out the important points from the boiler plate text.
This is my point. Many home inspectors consider that their job is done when they perform an inspection and deliver their report. They often treat the “walk-through” with the buyer to be an inconvenience. After-all, isn’t their job done? Well, in my opinion, the job isn’t done until all the material points made in the report make it from the inspectors head all the way over to the head of the home buyer. It is best for us to think of our service not as just an inspection, but rather as an inspector that makes observations about a home, then provides a consultation with the home buyer until they understand.