FAQs
- What advice would you give a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?
Anyone seeking a Home Inspector should do several things prior to actually contacting potential providers. First, check with the licensing agency that licenses your inspector and read over the Standards of Practice to find out what your home inspection should entail. Second, have information about the home ready such as the square footage, number of floors, if the house is built with a crawl space below and if the utilities will be on and third, the apprimate date and time desired for the inspection. If you are seeking an inspector "cold", that is with no references or other referrals, use a trusted source or site like Service Magic, Thumbtack, Angies List or others to get a list of potential candidates. With the information at hand and the knowledge you have gained about what is supposed to be done, you are ready to call your contacts. -- Do not call and simply ask for a price quote. If you do, he will already know your just looking for the cheapest price and really are not interested in the product you will recieve. If he is a quality inspector, you will most likely NOT get the cheapest price. You do, in most cases, get what you pay for. -- Give the inspector the information he will need concerning the property and ask him what is covered in the inspection and if there are any special services that are performed above what is required. For example, Thermal Imaging may be included but is not required by the SOP's. -- Ask him how long the on site inspection will take. Be wary of inspections of 1hr to 1 1/2 hours duration unless the property is very small, such as a small condo. -- Get his quote for the service and ask him how long it will take for the report to be delivered to you. -- Finally, ask for a Sample Report to review. One of the best ways to compare potential candidates and get a feel for his work is through his delivered product, the Inspection Report. Look for things like the presentation; is it a check off list or comprised of simple one line call outs or is it in a narrative form which takes longer to prepare and is generally more descriptive, Is it clear and understandable to you, are the pictures included of good clear quality pointing out the deficiencies. If you do the above with each contact, you will end up with the means to effectively evaluate each candidate based on Price, Service and Product.
- What questions should customers think through before talking to professionals about their project?
What I would like customers to know about me is that I do this service because I like to and not because I need to. What I would like customers to know about this profession is that the service we perform is a Professional service, much like a plumber, electrician, carpenter, roofer or any other professional entity. While each of the above is expected to be proficient in their particular area, Inspectors are required to be knowledgeable in all of these with regard to code standards, installations and functionality. Generally, most expect that employing a professional for any of the above services will likely be expensive and one should realize that hiring an inspector may probably be more than what might be expected as well. What most people do not know is that the actual inspection is only part of the process and usually incurs the least amount of time while the report preparation is the most time consuming since pictures must be organized and annotated, inserted into the report and preparing the narrative in a manner that is understandable and clear to the customer can oftentimes be quite challanging.