Hi my name is Matt and I am a new home inspector. I have a real estate agent that is also a property manager looking for me to inspect his rental properties on an annual basis however he does not want a full home inspection, he wants a good overview of the property to reveal potential issues. He said he would like a simple, more maintenance specific report essentially.
He will not be interested in certain items (e.g where the shutoff locations are, if its public or private water). So because of this my report will have a lot of items required in the standards of practice.
Do I still get him to sign a contract each time or is it better that this is just a simple ancillary service? Am I overthinking this or am I setting myself up for problems by doing a maintenance inspection?
If that is all he wants excluded, then take $5.00-$10.00 off the price of the inspection.
The reality is, he wants a full inspection with a la carte pricing. He will also want discount pricing based on doing inspections for all of his properties. There is always a line of excuses on why you end up only doing a small percentage of them. During the inspections, you will repeatedly hear “I know that we excluded you looking at the ________, but you are here, and it will literally take you 30 seconds to look at it.” Or “I know we agreed to look at the roof from the ground, but I see you have your ladder here. It will literally take us longer to argue about it than it would just to get onto the roof.” The same thing for the attic. If you say anything about it, you will get the response of, “I was hoping to FINALLY find an inspector that isn’t going to nickel and dime me to death.” This is usually followed up with the “help me out on this one and I will make it up to you on the next.”, Spolier alert, it never happens.
Why am I so cynical? I had the same exact opportunity as you did when I was first starting out.
Yes, but you need to have a maintenance inspection agreement.
There are multiple ways to go about it, here are a few.
You can set up a master agreement that both parties sign, then work off of a work order type sheet per address. Some master agreement can be multiple year just discuss it with your client.
You can make sure all addresses are listed on the master agreement.
Very important to be specific about your scope of work, and stick to it, this is not a home inspection.
I thought I saw a NACHI written agreement template for these once upon a time but couldn’t find a link. Maybe @bgromicko1 could help you with that. He talks about this type of work often in some of his webinars…
You can always set up any agreement however you see fit, after all it’s your business, provided of course that it jives with local laws. Just be sure you and the client are in complete understanding of each other. If you are concerned about the SOP, then be sure to have exceptions and limitations in your agreement that clearly states what will NOT be inspected. … If this agent understands contracts at all, then they will be fine with it… As Tony put it,
Besides the Home Maintenance SOP is slightly different than for other inspections. . . .
Thanks for all the replies. It definitely gets me thinking about this harder.
I agree though if it’s stated properly that certain things will not be inspected and that this is not a home inspection, then I can’t see how it wouldn’t be much different then offering an ancillary service with its own agreement and scope.