It seems like every time the real estate market is doing great, everyone wants in on the action. There are so many newbies in real estate and its related industries (like home inspection), it seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting four new Realtors, three new home inspectors, and a new title company attorney or two! With …
Asking Questions
He cannot see the forest for the trees.Attributed to Sir Thomas More, 1533 It’s an old saying that we’ve all likely heard before, and it’s an apt way to describe the mindset of the average home inspector. All too often, we find ourselves so overwhelmed by the daily grind that we have little time left over for big-picture thinking. So, …
Use It or Lose It
Unless one of us happens to be the luckiest inspector in the world, bad things are going to happen to us during our real estate career. There is no way around it; we deal with humans as part of our job, and humans are notoriously fickle (some more than others). This means that, given enough interactions, at some point or …
What Is Their Mindset?
As professional home inspectors, our main job is to identify, interpret, and explain the physical condition of the house that our clients are thinking about purchasing. We supply them with a report that is intended to provide them with enough information to make a sound decision regarding their purchase. While the main portion of our job is fairly straightforward (documenting …
Integration
As I am back in college, working on my master’s degree, I have been doing a lot of writing. Thankfully, the class I’m currently taking, Interdisciplinary Studies, aligns almost perfectly with my job as an inspector. This allows me to draw on my inspection experience, using it as source material for the many writing assignments that come with a college-level …
Self-Inflicted Wounds
Self-inflicted wounds. I recently wrote a post about this very topic. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized that there was still much to be said about a problem that many of us, no matter our industry, suffer from. If we’re being honest with ourselves, the more we think about it, the more we come to …
What the Hell is Interdisciplinarity?
As some of you may know, I’ve been back in college now for several years, taking one course each semester in an effort to increase my knowledge and keep my old brain engaged to (hopefully) ward off the gradual mental decline that comes with age. I earned my bachelor’s degree last year (2025) and I am currently working on my …
Getting Better Home Inspection Clients
Get better clients. If we stop to think about it, this simple three-word sentence should be the ultimate goal for anyone running a small business. Better clients offer many different benefits for the small business owner. Better clients are easier to deal with in our business. Better clients force us to produce a better product. But, arguably the most important …
Why Should I Change?
Working in your own business can be a very rewarding experience. Unfortunately, those rewards also carry along with them some difficult lessons. One of the most confusing lessons that businesspeople learn is that in order to keep our businesses where we want them to be, we have to figure out how to change in order to stay where we are. …
This Post is Open to Interpretation
Interpret. It’s a strange looking word with a straight-forward meaning. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “(deciding) what the intended meaning of something is.” Every word that we provide to our paying clients, what we say, what we email and text, and what we write in our inspection reports is going to be interpreted. And interpreting what we mean …