A home inspection is a comprehensive and methodical process that only should be performed by trained and certified home inspectors with the right experience and using the right tools and technology. Even if one of the components of a home inspection is missing, the entire home inspection is deemed incomplete. It has come to our attention that there are fly-by-night operators that want to make a quick buck and offer so called home inspections to unsuspecting home buyers by luring them with low prices. Unfortunately many home buyers are falling prey to these pseudo inspectors. There are many downsides of getting such an inspection done and here are some of the few:
The whole purpose of getting a home inspection done is to find all the issues that can be found in a ready to occupy home. If an untrained person performs the inspection, there are significant chances that there will be issues that will not be called out. This could be either because of lack of experience or because the proper tools are not used or because the person checking does not have the skills. The consequence of this is that while the home buyer thinks he got an inspection, issues will start unravelling over time and the home buyer is left with spending time and money on getting issues fixed in the future that could easily have been caught by trained home inspectors. More importantly, if there are safety issues (like the ELCB not working) missed out during the inspection, this could be hazardous for the occupant of the house or his expensive equipment in the future.
A home inspection is a non-invasive process and the home has to be in the same exact condition at the end of the inspection as at the beginning of the inspection. Unfortunately this cannot be guaranteed when a pseudo home inspector performs an inspection. There are enough examples where such people have damaged tiles, walls or electrical circuits because they simply did not know what they were doing. The end result is that the home owner ends up spending a lot of money to unravel the damage.
There are checks, especially to do with electricity, that are part of a home inspection that, if done incorrectly, could be dangerous for the person performing the check. The last thing that a home buyer would want is to be liable for an injury that is caused to the pseudo home inspector during an inspection. Remember that none of these pseudo home inspectors would be carrying any liability insurance, meaning that the home buyer is liable for all damages including to the person performing the home inspection.
We’ve also seen that some of these pseudo home inspectors bloat up reports by filling the reports up with a lot of superfluous photographs. A case in point is to do with pictures of hollow tiles. If the inspectors starts taking one photo per hollow tile, the home inspection report starts bloating up. There is no point in submitting a 90 page report when 75 of the pages are just filled with individual photos of hollow tiles. A better way of capturing photos of hollow tiles is to just take a single photo of the floor and annotate it with the locations of the hollow tiles. This is how these pseudo home inspectors try to cover their shortcomings in one area by unnecessarily increasing the focus on another area. Keep an eye out for such reports.
One other fact that we’ve noticed is that sometimes these pseudo home inspectors call out issues that are not actual issues – just because they lack the knowledge to know the difference between what is an issue and what isn’t. Such false positives results in the builder not taking the home inspection report seriously or considering anything actionable thereby wasting the money spent on the home inspection.
Many of these fly by night inspectors do not value the sanctity of the data that is collected during the inspection especially the contact information. This results in this data being made freely available or sold to other spammers which is a scenario best avoided.
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why you should only get a trained expert to perform a home inspection. After all you should trust only an expert to check the quality of your most expensive asset. Never take a risk of letting a interiors guy/carpenter/plumber/electrician/mason perform the inspection. You will regret that decision and then might have to eventually get an inspection done by the real experts. Never be penny wise but pound foolish. Call us today to learn more.