Being a home inspector is a difficult calling. We’re hired to provide important information to our home buying clients, while at the same time providing cover to our own backside, in an attempt to guard against misplaced anger and frivolous lawsuits. It’s almost like we’re two different people, each of whom have their own ideas and agenda. On the one …

As a practicing, professional home inspector since 2000, I like to think I’m somewhat qualified to make the following statement: we’ve ruined the current version of the home inspection industry. We find ourselves in the unfortunate position of being too cursory, too undervalued, too cutthroat, and too subservient to our overlords, to put a name on some of our most …

If it seems like there are more home inspectors out there than ever before, it’s because there are. Like almost every other industry we can think of, the competition for clients is more ferocious than ever, and it’s not going to get easier any time soon. It used to be that there were only a handful of dominant inspectors, and …

Being a home inspector is a difficult calling. We’re hired to provide important information to our home buying clients, while at the same time providing cover to our own backside, in an attempt to guard against misplaced anger and frivolous lawsuits. It’s almost like we’re two different people, each of whom have their own ideas and agenda. On the one …

There are literally tens of thousands of home inspectors out there. Maybe not all of them reside in our own backyard (although, sometimes it feels like they do), but there’s enough competition milling about to make it hard for us to be seen. And the reality of this situation is that if we’re not being seen, we’re not being called; …

One of the biggest problems facing the home inspection industry, same as most other industries, is that we put too much faith in the belief that our problems can be solved by intelligence alone. It may simply be a function of the smarter ones among us who are enamored with sitting around and thinking up ways for us to get …

Can you imagine what the home inspection industry was like in 1999? Everything was right there for the taking. You could register just about any home inspection-related website URL that you wanted. Whatever company name you could think of was there for the taking. Saw a territory that you wanted to work in? All you had to do was start …

Running your own business is not for the faint of heart. It seems like every day there’s some new thing to figure out, some irate person that needs calming, and some spontaneous fire that needs quelling. All too often, it seems like we’re going it alone, left to our own devices as it were; standing alone on the shore trying …

We all like to think that we’re our own boss, but in reality, we all have many different bosses the drive our schedule every day. We may have children that dictate when we’re able to use our vehicle to go somewhere. We might have spouses that dictate what we do with our evenings and weekends. But regardless of those built-in …

Most people don’t think much about the electrical wiring hidden inside their walls, that is, until something goes wrong. It’s in our best interest, as professional home inspectors, to make sure that our clients know what type of wiring is present inside the walls of their home and to educate them regarding the pros and cons of the different types …