This unfortunately goes on in Many areas .
Some times they change and some times they go out of business but soon another comes along to fill the gap.
Thanks for the reminder Gilles
Really where did you find that price? oh Minimum that,s right i wouldnt get the lowest rate now days
LOL Bobby we have walked among you for a long time. I bet you have even used maple syrup . BTW the swamp people may be displaced Canuks;-)
How ever we My leaders are really interested in watching the events of Snake Handlers in the mountains .
Nathan
Your assumptions are not entirely correct about insurance as it relates to Canada. I know several inspectors who have had one claim on their E&O and their policy was cancelled. When those inspectors did find insurance the premiums where very high. $5-7K.
We need this information to be passed to the Panel.
But it needs to name names and companies. Otherwise it’s hearsay and will be discounted by the Insurance member on the panel as such.
Send the details to the email given by MCS and it might lend support to your cause.
I don’t understand what you are talking about. If the average policy cost is between $1500-2500 that is not even close to someone who has one claim and their policy costs shot up. We also don’t know how many inspections per year are being conducted.
I am not interested in your products which do not include E&O insurance because you are not licenced to offer insurance.
Someone could be doing a 100 inspections and paying $5K, while someone who does 200 could only be paying $2500.
Realtors pay on average around $250 per year for E&O.
Pity you seem to think $5K-$7K is not ‘nothing’ that is a lot of money again relevant to the number of inspections. Factor in premium and deductible for the year should you have an claim.
Your costs for roofing business again are based on a number of factors, nor have you provided any cost comparisons so how are we to know how much you paid for what coverage, nor how many claims you did or didn’t have.
I do agree with the realtor portion of the debate, an average REA will spend lots of hours showing, promoting, consulting to close a couple a month at best. They might make more per single transaction, but unless they have a team working under them and they get a piece of those too, I generally make more than realtors. Of course the big $ house can really give a boost, to the REA numbers too.
A busy REA selling 2, homes per month at $200k ea is killing it and making $140-$150. How many close at a rate of 2 per month (I can tell you not most of them)? I will probably not get to $140k this year, but I’ll pass 100.
Most decent full time REA’s close more like 1-1.5 per month.
My whole point about fees wasn’t “they get paid more than us” it was that they as an industry set aside any petty differences, banded together and said “THIS is what we are worth–take it or leave it”. I don’t know whether home inspectors are too independent, have too much ego or what but I would love to see all of us, regardless of affiliation agree that we take on too much liability for the fees that we “command” and start making changes rather than always trying to undercut the next guy.
I know the more seasoned guys don’t get into it, as they have a strong client base, but that’s also why we as an industry are easy to knock over–thousands of different viewpoints, no solidarity and no cohesion–one only has to peruse this very message board to see how nasty and juvenile some inspectors are to others…
BS… What do you think unionization is about? bunch of guys get together so they can play cards?
Since when did you and I become a “we” LOL you are a vendor, I am a home inspector–there is no “we”. Also you keep quoting $2,000–please provide a link where I can buy insurance for that amount–or even reasonable insurance rate with that as a deductible.
Stuart,
The E&O rates in the U.S. are considerably lower than here in Ontario. I’ve seen U.S. Rates as low as $1,500 per year for $250,000 per incident aggregate of $1,000,000.
We pay about double that. OntarioACHI are working WITH Insurance providers to come up with a broker of record that will substantially reduce our rates here in Ontario. We are nearing a final decision, and this will be in line with the CCHI program, which is not as stringent as the CMI so supports Inspectors who have not been in the industry as long.
It’s taken about 4 months of hard bargaining to get where we are and we expect to make an announcement soon. I’ll post here as soon as we’ve got some hard figures.
Yes they do, but look at the Telco industries in those countries, and their pricing structure, and tell me there’s no collusion between them. Look at the insurance market in those countries and compare the policies apples to apples and again swear there is no collusion between them.
Here in Canada the financial sector has got both the Government and the Population by the gonads.
- If the Government gets heavy handed with them, the price goes up and the population suffers.
- If the population gets their way, the government suffers financially and then the taxes go up so…the population suffers.
What works in the U.S. with a market of over 1000% of our size does not always translate to Canada.
You should be aware of that before pronouncing how spectacularly successful you could make people up here in the frozen North.
I wish you well other groups have tried this also .
The first one I was involved with was in 2003 .
The last one was in 2011.
There have been others in between and there has been lots of hope and promises .
Rates have just constantly increased
It is possible that you and I are discussing two different perspectives on liability; you may be discussing actual or realized liability based on recorded claims and/or cases in the home inspection industry while I am discussing the potential for liability based on the type of work we do compared to other real estate professionals.
That being said, liability is not based only on how much we pay for E&O, that idea is wrong. A home inspector would be foolish to think that purchasing an E&O policy somehow transfers “all” his liability to the insurance company as you stated before.
We verify the performance, condition and/or safety of more systems and components, which have the capacity to cause harm, damage or great expense, than any other party in the transaction. Where and how do the realtors or appraisers, termite inspectors, etc. stick their neck out in an equivalent fashion?
Our liability is much more intertwined with our performance and we get one 3-6 hour chance to get it right. My best insurance and the factor which keeps my liability low is my performance. A realtor can stink royally for weeks and not add a penny to their risk. An appraiser can value a home totally incorrectly and blame it on a lack of comparable properties, or they can hold up a loan process based on their own incorrect perceptions of issues and farm the responsibility of verifying those issues to, you know who, the home inspector.
Good contracts, disclaimers, limitations, SOPs, lawyers, inspections, reporting and E&O do not reduce the inspector’s potential for liability, they only prevent it from being realized. The liability is still very much there. If you strip bare all the parties to a real estate transaction of all protections and legal barriers, the inspector is the most vulnerable to legal action.
I think we have different opinions and levels of faith in insurers. I just doubt they will cover everything, and as you said, they are not charities. Claims lose money.
Anyway, I wasn’t speaking of specific amounts, only making a comparison of an inspector’s liability as compared to a realtor’s or an appraiser’s. I believe ours is greater and I believe risk should be compensated just like knowledge or experience.
A good example of this would be inspectors who remove limits of liability from their contracts. They should then immediately raise their prices because they are potentially taking on additional risk and have set themselves apart from their competition by doing so.
That may be, but I’ve yet to see anyone show what risk appraisers and realtors and other similar real estate professionals actually have. I could care less about the risk of insurers or mortgage bankers, by and large they are not individual proprietors who’s families are dependent upon their small business surviving.