I’m a new inspector and have been surprised by how much time I am spending finishing up my report after I have performed the actual home inspection. Depending on the condition of the home I have spent as much as 2-3 hours back at the office finalizing the report. I was hoping to hear any suggestions on how to be most efficient with report writing to speed up my process. I am using Home Gauge software.
Thanks
Blake
I use ReportHost and have done reports onsite with a tablet. It worked great…if the tablet (el-cheapo) didn’t freeze most of the time.
I found that sometimes I will need to look things up and reference this and that anyways. I now still find it easy to do report at home. Give it time, you will become proficient. 20 minutes to half hour including looking things up is my norm. Others will give more ideas.
2-3 hours when starting out is pretty normal.
It does get easier with more experience.
I’m always thinking of new ways to reduce the time writing reports, but I always manage to fill that time with making my reports better. It’s an ongoing process.
True words.
After a few thousand reports, I’m still sometimes 1 1/2, sometimes 2.
An “easy” house with very few defects I can complete report in 45 minutes, but that is rare.
Problem is, when you’re experienced enough to shorten report time, then you’re experienced enough to find defects you didn’t find before, which will add to the report time. And, like Ian states, more time will be spent making reports better.
Good Luck!
All good advice above! I won’t add to it but will provide advice regarding your report formatting. Your sample report is very far out of TREC compliance. If you are creating your actual reports that way you need to heavily review your report software set-up and make proper adjustments. If a complaint is received and any of your reports are submitted to TREC there are many areas that you can receive a fine for and the fines are heavy and are not necessarily cumulative (you can be fined for each occurrence).
Report time is directly related to your template / narratives. When you don’t have a good template and have few narratives written, it will ALWAYS take more time since you will be taking time to add or write them for every report. The longer you are in the business and develop your template / narratives, the less time you will take. Now you could just do a lazy, check-box report with “Inspected”, “Not Inspected”, “Needs Repair”, or other such crap without informing the client about anything. Or you can take time to build your library of narratives in the order they are most used, and change your template to match the protocol of how you inspect. All that takes time, either from an initial set-up period or for each and every inspection you perform. Either way, it will take time, time that is best spent once as part of your professional report / inspecting development, or over and over and over again if you choose to write for each individual inspection.
Don’t consider the time you write reports as $0.00 income.
Your not paid to inspect the house. You are paid to Inspect and write a report.
#2 “should” take longer than looking at the house…
The report is the only tangible thing your clients gets for their $$$.
Agree with you 100% & very well said.
Emmanual,
thanks for the heads up! Yes when building my website I gave my designer a sample report just as a plug in and forgot to replace it with the standard TREC form. Definitely will update this, Thanks!
Since 2005, I have used my own software. All of the others just did not cut it, and all still do not. I do no work at home. My reports all get printed onsite. Most all 3 hours total. Reports get made while walking through the home, and get made as I do the inspection. Then, they are printed onsite. Three copies. One for the agent, one for the buyer, and one for me, for the client to sign. Why HI’s do work at home amazes me. Beer 30.
Didn’t you say you were stopping business this year?
Disclaimer: Total newbie, first post, don’t yet have my license (testing Wednesday), and have (of course) not conducted a professional report.
Having said that, when I started doing my first test inspection, I realized very quickly that conducting the inspection and writing the report would take a tremendous amount of time unless I found a way to streamline the process. So, I started looking around for reporting software, and stumbled across a system that streamlined both. I think I have found a solution that will work well for me at homehubzone.com. It is tablet (Android) based, but does not require an internet connection to do the inspection, only to publish the report. The thing that appeals most to me about it is the system allows you to inspect room-by-room, and pulls the report into systems for final presentation. It allows you to save often-used verbiage for use on future reports, and sports a lot of features that I like a lot. People behind it are great, too!
I’m very much sold on it. Anyone else have any experiences or opinions, pro or con, regarding HomeHubZone?
Thanks!
How do you afford the ink and paper to print 3 reports on every inspection?