Where Should The Home Buyer Place Their Trust?!?
Tomacor completed an inspection last week for a client who was steered away from our service eight years ago by her agent. She ended up purchasing a home full of termites and plumbing problems. It was nothing $20,000-$30,000 couldn’t fix!. As past chairman of the Committee for Ethical Practices and Procedures of the American Society of Home Inspectors, I have seen the trust home buyers place in the hands of their inspectors eroded away as the true intent of most inspections reveals itself. The sad truth is, home inspectors regularly down play significant deficiencies or fail to point them out at all for fear of loosing referrals from real estate agents!
Another common practice in the industry is the failure to group minor problems together when seeing them in this light suggests the failure of an entire building system (bad wires here, bad wires there, and frayed wires over there means redo all the wiring doesn’t it?).
Since 1976 the first national organization for home inspectors called ASHI was formed. ASHI members subscribe to a code of ethics in which all inspectors must disclose whether or not they have an ongoing financial interest or business relationship with third parties such as real estate agents to all of their clients. Unfortunately, this disclosure never takes place, yet available statistics through ASHI illustrate that more than 60% of all home inspections come from real estate agents’ referrals.
I’ve heard multitudes of home buyers repeatedly complain about the apparent ignorance of their inspector, yet when that inspector was met in a classroom setting he would meet or exceed the rigorous testing of a specific knowledge base required for ASHI membership. What gives?
Home inspectors are conflicted. They are in dual agency. They get paid by the buyer but must keep the agent happy for their source of referral. A simple test for home inspector credibility is to ask him/her to provide budget figures for all significant deficiencies noted in the report. Most inspectors will refuse, claiming they don’t want the liability for inaccurate figures, yet nearly all of them come from trades where they act as contractors and quote budget figures daily. If you find an independent inspector that quotes budget figures, you can be assured that that inspector has your best interest in mind!