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by Wally Conway,
Host
of the Home and Garden Show on WOKV
To paraphrase the late baseball great Roberto Clemente, "Home
Inspection has been very, very good to me". We here at HomePro
have had the professional pleasure of inspecting tens of thousands
of homes across Northeast Florida. During that time, we have learned
a thing or two about the best use of information discovered, disclosed,
and documented during the home inspection.
And yet another lesson was recently learned, or re-learned, as
luck would have it. I was a guest speaker at a local Realtor luncheon,
when an agent that I have known nearly a dozen years asked if she
could share a complaint with me about one of our HomePro inspectors.
Hearing complaints is not my favorite use of time, but is certainly
one of the most important!
 She
told me that she had been the listing agent on the recent sale of
a home that the buyer had our company inspect. She continued on
to say that the seller was amazed at how many items our inspector
had not reported! This nearly floored me! In addition to my concern
that one of my inspectors may have missed massive numbers of defects
in the home, I was most concerned for our client homebuyer who may
have just purchased a home with problems they were unaware of. Not
to mention, the non-disclosure by the seller of known defects was
also upsetting.
In researching the situation with the selling agent, it turned
out the homebuyer was unhappy that many additional problems had
surfaced with the home after moving in. At this point I was very
concerned, so I reviewed the original report and compared it to
the defects that the buyer was now unhappy with.
After reviewing the report line by line, and then comparing the
report to the present defects described by the buyer, they matched!
Each and every point that the buyer had an issue with was well documented
within the body of the inspection report.
How is it that our HomePro inspector could have discovered and
then correctly documented problems, and yet the buyer, seller, and
listing agent all believed the inspector had missed them?
After a few more phone calls and some sleuthing around, it turns
out that the homebuyer did not attend the inspection, nor did they
read the entire original inspection report. The document relied
upon by the buyer, seller, and listing agent in their evaluation
of the home turned out to be a repair request written by the selling
agent. This repair request represented less than 1/3 of the total
items described in the original report! We had done a fine job of
discovery, disclosure, and documentation, but the information never
got to all the parties.
Please, no matter what the interest level of the buyer seems to
be, ensure that they are present at the home inspection. Then take
the time to review the report with your customer the buyer. They
should ultimately participate with you in developing the repair
request for the seller, should one be appropriate. And when all
else fails, ask for the inspector's help to explain any portion
of the report that is unclear! Assistance is a part of what we all
should be doing to keep the transaction alive and the parties happy.
Copyright © Florida HomePro, Inc. and Wallace
J. Conway. All rights in all media reserved.
About the Author: Wally Conway is your weekly Host of the Home
and Garden Show on WOKV, and author of the book "Secrets of the Happy
Home Inspector", available at GoHomePro.com.
Wally's expertise and experience has been sought after by HGTV's "House
Detective", DIY Network's "Finders Fixers", the National Association
of REALTORS®, newspapers, and corporations. As a speaker, writer, and instructor,
Wally blends the right amount of up-to-date information with just the right
amount of humor, insight, motivation, and real-world application. Visit WallyConway.com
for more information!
Reproduction of this article: Permission is granted to use this article
in any media provided that the article is reproduced in its entirety as shown
above, with the authors resource box/bio included including links to http://www.gohomepro.com
and http://www.wallyconway.com
as the original publisher.
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