Hi you all I’m Vincent and looking to find a home inspector in North Florida nice enough to take me to a home inspection and show me the ropes. Ill be on time and can do anything needed. I’ve been in the commercial side of HVACR my whole life and I have my CPI and state license in home inspection too show I’m serious and not hear to waste your time. Thanks for any support or advise!
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Vincent, you may want to contact some CMIs or CPIs within 40 to 50 miles, or closer, to your area and communicate with them. Maybe one, or more, will help you. Some inspectors feel as though they are training their competition by ride-alongs or mentoring or hiring and some are into it just for the $.
Here is the link for CMIs: Find a Certified Master Inspector®
And the link for CPIs: Find Certified Home Inspectors Near You - InterNACHI®
And Mentors: Home Inspector Mentoring - InterNACHI® and InterNACHI® - International Association of Certified Home Inspectors
Also, you may want to take advantage of your Education Team at education@internachi.org for specific questions e.g. 15 Steps to Become a Successful Home Inspector - InterNACHI® and InterNACHI® Master Class for Home Inspectors . And there is the new training cards app Chris Morrell, InterNACHI’s CEO, offers: New training app for home inspectors
And there is the Helpful How-To Videos - InterNACHI® and https://www.youtube.com/c/internachi for many other things.
And, New Zero-Deductible E&O Insurance information
And, read the forum for much information.
P.S. Welcome back to our forum. Enjoy!
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How North in North Florida are you?
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I live in St Augustine and willing to drive to meet up. This is my ph#904-776-2887 call me anytime
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Vincent,
It was good to get a date settled. I’ll see you on Saturday at 9am at that property.
If you have a ladder you will use, bring it. I have mine, but practicing with your own gear is useful, you figure out the limitations fairly quickly.
The home will be vacant unless a realtor or the HO stops by, so we will have time to crawl all over it.
If you don’t have all the testing gear, that’s ok, bring what you have. I’ve got everything we will need and backups to that stuff as well.
This is a pre-listing inspection. It’s for sale right now but only by the home owner who isn’t motivated to close until January because she wants to push the capital gains into next year. She and her partner went over the property extensively, so there may not be much wrong with the place. The history as far as I know is that a long term tenant moved out some months ago, and they have gone through the entire home since then. They painted, replaced appliances, etc. She wanted to forestall any bombshells and so asked me to go over the place and here we are 
See you then.
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So Vincent came along with me today on a pre-listing inspection.
The home was in pretty good shape, so no real show stoppers.
It was good to meet you Vincent! Great attitude, I hope you do well. If I get a dog of a home a little closer to you, I’ll reach out.
Here’s us poorly imitating Bert from a roof
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Thank you sir, next fixer upper you get i like to tag along.
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IMO, these homes are interesting. Defects on crappy homes are glaring, however average homes can put your defect discernment skills to the test.
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The final list was 17 items that need attention. The home had new appliances and the homeowner had gone over everything prior as they are getting ready to sell. I know the owner and she has half a dozen other rentals, so I knew the place wouldn’t be a disaster.
New appliances to me means there’s almost 100% chance they didn’t install the anti-tip on the stove, so that was a “freebie” heh. First thing I check when they tell me the stove is new, and this one was missing. heh.
While I’ve had a couple dogs, most of the homes in The Villages, are generally in pretty good shape. People move to The Villages when they are retired or about to retire and they come here for the lifestyle which doesn’t include extensive modification. They buy what the home they want, add some furniture and head off to the square for fine dining and dancing.
The Villages builds solid homes where everything works and doesn’t leak. This is not to say there aren’t issues, of course there are, but for the most part, even the older homes are solid. They’ve certainly had the practice, I think it’s at least 80,000 homes built by the developer and more every day.
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Sounds like great place to inspect. Fifty plus year old homes on basement/crawl is all too common in my area. Helping Vincent was an A+ act. He’s lucky to be able to tag along with someone who cares.
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I think it is and considering all the competition, I’m not alone in that thinking.
There aren’t that many manufactured homes, so the number of gnarly crawls is limited.
I think my oldest home so far was 1972 and it was outside The Villages, so atypical.
Thanks. I would have liked to come along with someone on my first inspection but sorta ran into the same wall Vincent did. Granted I’m not a seasoned veteran at this, but I’ve done pretty good this year.
I’m not threatened by competition, I figure if someone eclipses me, maybe they’ll hire me because they’re so busy! If not, there’s always another toilet ring that needs replaced. 
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Nice of you to let Vincent tag along with you Mark!
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Mark,
You help promote and improve the home inspection industry by helping the newer guys. We don’t want bad inspectors out there giving the profession a bad name. Like you said, don’t be afraid of competition since they may be an employee or employer in the future. One thing is for sure, you have made a friend.
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Thanks Bert, I try. I’ve had a couple others that fell through, Vincent is engaged, I think he’ll do well.
You also learn when you’re with someone and Vincent has an HVAC background in commercial stuff. He brought his probe type thermometer. While I’ve used those years ago when I did residential HVAC(mostly boilers) and dealing with chillers in industrial, I just used a point and shoot type reader to measure temp fall(inlet to outlet) in my home inspections until now. I bought one of those Klein probe and laser type readers because in some instances, it’ll be better, so thanks Vincent
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On a ride-a-long you might see 25 defects. Why not see 1,500 defects in the same amount of time? You’ll get a century of defect recognition experience in a day or so at the Florida HOH: hoh.nachi.org That’s what it’s for.
One can learn much more than just about defects on a ride-a-long.
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HOH is great I’m sure, and very educational. But yeah, nothing like the real thing.
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HoH, a great training tool, but only one of several important skills required. Effective report writing that communicates well, starting at the property through the finished report is another skill equally as important to learn. The new inspector should focus on how that process works during a ride-along; more so than the process of simply identifying defects. I still do and expect to be constantly evaluating my communication effectiveness. Then there is running a profitable business and marketing it.
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I see no reason not to do both. Do everything, as much as you can. I really want to Grok inspections, just like I learned my previous career. I want a level of casual competence that only comes with time and exposure to a massive amount of information.
I’ve been trying to figure out a time to get over to the HOH in Florida, but since it’s about 4 hours away, it’s a bit of a bigger trip.
I visited the HoH in Boulder during the InterNachi conference June 2019. Also visited the HoH in Bloomsburg Pa a week before it opened. I saw a variety of construction defects, just like I see every day on the job.
Let me tell you about my friend Brian. I “met” him on this forum at the Christmas party 2021. He was a brand new InterNACHI member with 24 years of construction experience but new to owning a business, so I offered to meet him for breakfast and an inspection. That one ride-along lead to another and another and 20 more. He was hungry for learning about my process. He knew all about how to build a house but he learned about how to present a summary to clients, how to answer a call and book that job, . Fast forward 24 months and he is now my best employee, and a real friend.
The HoH has its place but it is no substitute for a ride-along, no substitute for dealing with realtors and clients in real-time, an no substitute for a friendly peer to be a resource to rely on.
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