Tacoma Home Inspector

Your inspector may or may not be required to have a minimun amount of insurance coverage.  Some states have licensing requirements while others do not.  Here in Washington, all inspectors are required to be licensed by the Washington State Department of Agriculture to be Structural Pest Inspectors (SPIs).  The minimum insurance requriement is $25,000.  If your state requires such coverage, make sure your inspector is not limiting his liability in his pre-inspection agreement to the price of the inspection.  This is common.  Limiting the liability, in Washington, to lower than $25,000 will result in an immediate suspension of the SPI license.

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

....perform any permit research for your clients?  I've been at inspections where there's an obvious addition that wasn't permitted.  A recent example was when I was walking on a garage roof and it felt soft, almost like it might give.  I immediately scurried down my ladder and went to check the framing.  My initial thought was that there might have been significant wood rot.  I entered the garage and realized that it was sheetrocked with no attic access.  However, there was an addition through the back door that acted as a shed or workshop.  I immediately looked up and found that the rafter's spans was about 15 ft with no additional support.  Clearly, this couldn't have been a permitted addition because that wouldn't have met the requirements for a roofing structure.   I'm not saying that you should, I'm just curious how many agents do.

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

I have a feature for agents that I work with and past clients called VidTips.  It's basically a video newsletter with helpful information about owning a home.  I thought about emailing the actual video, however, that leaves you with only two options.  Either you attach the video to the email, which would be a huge attachment, not to mention most people don't open attachments in fear of viruses, or you embed the player in the email and host the video on your server.  The problem with the second option is that all email programs aren't alike and one might open the video and one might not.  Here's the method I use.  I send my email with a jpg image of the player.  Make the picture a hyperlink to your website where the actual video is hosted.  When people click play, their internet browser opens and the video is set to auto-play on my website.  This also drives more traffic to my site and they might want to browse around once they're there.  Go ahead, try it out:

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

I've read a couple posts on this site, and a few others, about real estate agents getting sued by their client because a home inspector missed something substantial and it was the agent that referred the inspector to their client.  I've read that because of this many agents will adhere to the philosophy of referring a minimum of three inspectors/vendors to avoid this type of litigation.  First of all, if you think one of your inspectors might miss something, you probably shouldn't be referring him at all.  Secondly, you should find a good quality inspector that also has this in his pre-inspection agreement:

11.  HOLD HARMLESS AGREEMENT: CLIENT agrees to hold any and all real estate agents involved in the purchase of the property to be inspected harmless and keep them exonerated from all loss, damage, liability or expense occasioned or claimed by reasons of acts or neglects of the INSPECTOR or his employees or visitors or of independent contractors engaged or paid by INSPECTOR for the purpose of inspecting the subject home.

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

Hi everyone,

I don't intend on using my blog on Active Rain for advertising purposes exclusively but I'm a new member and I wanted everyone to be aware of my very different inspection business.  I'm so confident of my uniqueness that I'm willing to offer 50% off of an inspection if you can win this challenge:

www.takethischallenge.com

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

So I was at an inspection today for a very excited, first time homebuyer.  The inspection was going fine, nothing too major to note and the client was very personable and the agent is a good friend of mine so it was very low stress.  After explaining all the fun technical, maintenance, possible repair talk, I suited up to go in the crawl space.  This is by far the worst part of the inspection for me.  I don't mind the confined area or how dirty I always manage to get but I absolutely hate spiders.  Needless to say, I suit up appropriately, pull back the carpet in the coat closet, pull open the door, slither down in and crawl about 15 feet in to find this:

Were the kids choosing to play in the crawl space or.......

All I could think of were horror flicks that I had seen.  Didn't make for a fun crawl space inspection when your mind is in a creepy state.

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Certified Tacoma Home Inspector

"Move in Certified" is a great marketing tool that all sellers should take advantage of.  Give prospective buyers the trust and confidence they deserve by listing a home as "certified" from a third-party, un-biased point of view.  Also, give them the convenience of being able to view the pre-listing inspection report in the comfort of their own home on the internet.  Furthermore, the "Move in Certified" yard signs set your listing apart from the others and attract potenial buyers.  There are many other benefits of having a "certified" listing.  Contact me anytime for more information or to schedule an inspection. 

"Be sure to check out my other blog entries. You can get your 10 daily comments in right here, right now! Simply scroll through the blog entries in the widget just under my picture at the upper right."

Certified Tacoma Home Inspector