The biggest problem for this industry is Main Home Inspection Pricing!

General Inspection Topics General Inspection Discussion
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Here is an article I wrote on my website. Cost of a Home Inspection, 2018
Let’s start with, The Cost of a Home Inspection Montreal and all things being equal.
All habitable spaces require structure, systems and components meeting or surpassing the National Building Code Counsel, and provincial building code norms. There is no getting around that.
That said, and all things equal, Square Footage is the driving force behind The Cost of an Home Inspection Montreal, but there are other Costs of a Home Inspection factors at play as well, like age.

Costs of a Home Inspection.
Size/ Square Footage.
A: Condo/Apparent homes.
B: Single or Multi level homes. Bungalows, Split level & 2.5 story homes.
C: Multi family units. Duplex, Triplex, Fourplex, etc…
Age: Typically / Usually Per-1950 homes & Century Homes demand a higher dollar value due to the property components, in operations, maybe vintage / obsolete / hazardous and the homes structure is not typical.

The Cost of a Home Inspection.
Experience / Expertise / Equipment.
Experience: The knowledge of or skill of something, actions gained through involvement in or the exposure to events through firsthand involvement.
Expertise: a particular expert skill/s, skillset/s or knowledge to within a particular field.
Equipment: Tools, equipment and technologies. A process of supplying someone or something with items necessary for a particular purpose.

The Cost of a Home Inspection.
Time and Effectiveness.
While some small homes & condominiums can be inspected in 1.5 to 3 hours, older, larger homes take more time averaging anywhere from 4 or 5 hours.
Manors and estates are another topic altogether. Typically the buyers are seasoned and not as concerned about costs. They want the best.
Cut Rates Cost of a Home Inspection usually / typically indicates 2 or even 3 home inspections are performed in one day. They are not average. Unfortunately, they can be typical.
A thorough home inspection can take 8 to 10+ hours to complete from the beginning to end, when the report is completed. Cut Rate home inspections are condensed, with each total amount of time being about 2 to 2.5 hours including a delivered report. I have been told by an Montreal Real Estate Agent. Robert, there is a well known Montreal condo inspector, his reference, not mine, that takes 20 minutes to inspect a 1 bedroom condominium.

When it comes to The Cost of a Home Inspection, home inspectors know the value of their service and therefore charge accordingly. For those reasons alone, The Cost of a Home Inspection is fluid.

The Cost Home Inspection Montreal is Intrinsic.
1: If The Cost of a Home Inspection turns up little wrong, The Cost of a Home Inspection Montreal proved inexpensive peace of mind combined with a document that can be referred to continually to maintain the home for many years to come.
2: If The Cost of a Home Inspection finds serious problems and concerns, The Cost of a Home Inspection could end up saving you many multiples of thousands or become a means to continue along your real estate journey.

The Cost of a Home Inspection.
The Cost of a Home Inspection Montreal, in 2018, can range anywhere from under < $300 to over >$1000.00 dollars.

At the end of the day what is The Cost of a Home Inspection?
The home inspector’s combined talent.
The home inspector’s effort.
The home inspector’s findings.
What you are willing to accept.

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Because our industry is completely controlled by another - real estate agents. Until that changes, nothing will change.

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Great questions and thank you for sharing!

Here in Texas the realtor association is a Goliath lobby and their interests are heard. Furthermore the state agency that regulates HI is basically a consumer complaint organization.

I would like to see us professional licensed HI get paid a percentage of the sale. Paid at closing. No sale no commission.

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Thank you for sharing!

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After reading all of this I am pretty sure I am charging too little, I just went of off thumbtacks advice for what to charge.

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I really don’t care what others are charging. I charge for what I feel I am worth and that is a lot! I do not post prices but charge based on the type of house, age, size, basement or not, crawlspace or not etc. I would prefer to do 1 quality inspection in a day, than 2 or more for the same price as that one.
Best of luck to all of you!

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This is going a lot of different directions. I’m going to try to respond to the on topic stuff since I created this mess, lol.

Roy - that’s a great quote - except for the last 5 words "for an inconceivably low fee.” This really describes the lack of consumer knowledge about the importance of the HI, the vast knowledge and training required to do this well, and being able to differentiate between great home inspectors who really care about their clients and the cheap guys.

Alan, I have often had the same thought, why didn’t I do this 20 years ago? I do think my 20 years in construction was super valuable and teaches you a lot more than HI does in terms of being able to understand and determine the cause of some of the major issues we see. As a residential home improvement contractor I inspected many homes as part of the estimating process, and then we worked on many of them which gave me even more knowledge. All good experience in my opinion.

Josh F., you hit it on the head though: “Because our industry is completely controlled by another - real estate agents. Until that changes, nothing will change.” This is a BIG part of the problem.
When I attended the InterNACHI conference in AC, NJ 2 years ago, there was a lot of talk from the presenters, including Nick G., who were saying that we were going to take control of OUR industry and get it back from REA’s. I was excited (and pretty green then) because even then as a brand new inspector I knew this was a problem already. I came out to Colorado for this years conference in June and NOT A WORD was mentioned about this. Lots of vendors were there encouraging the opposite too.
I wonder what happened in between?

What I DID hear at this Colorado conference was a lot of talk about how the big inspection factory companies like US Inspect and Amerispec and others were going to buy all of us small inspection firms up. I think there may be some reality to this threat if we don’t start to differentiate ourselves from them. The big firms are pushing every day to narrow the scope of home inspection, do as little as they can for their buyers, as much as they can to make things easy for their clients (REA’s), and make it easy to train 20 year old kids who know nothing about home inspection how to do them the quick and dirty way. They do this because it’s cheap! And they can pay these kids $20 an hour to do them, make the REA’s happy because they never really find anything, and make a hefty profit in the process. And do them for lower pricing because they do quantitative business instead of qualitative business, and there inspection time is half of ours.

There is also the reality that almost every market in this country is saturated with home inspectors. That is something they don’t want new people to know. Because it’s in the best interest of the powers that be, the vendors, the schools, and the REA’s for the market to be saturated. If only a handful of good quality inspectors can control a market area, the tables are turned and we have the advantage, can raise our prices, etc. So by constantly selling the myth that this is an easy, get rich quick scheme, they win by flooding the market with newbies who spend money investing in new training, equipment, and every other nickel and dime fee they can think of. But most won’t be successful. It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme.

I think we need a way to concisely communicate this information to potential buyers. It’s a lot of info and people are inherently lazy and don’t want to read more than one paragraph, even though they are making the biggest purchase of their lives, so it’s a difficult task to condense the points we are making here into some soundbite.

Glad we are having this discussion though, and hopefully we can effect some real changes.

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Only 1 click on my link?
Please share SEO involvement: :grinning:

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Ok I’ll put my 2 cents in here and that’s about all it’s worth.
Our biggest problem I think is representation. As professionals we are under recognized and under appreciated.
We have no one in our corner to lobby for us. Realtors have the National Association of Realtors and you can bet they are listened to. So where is our National Association of Inspectors? Or something along those lines. Nick tries but honestly most times it feels like he is stuck when it comes to promoting our interests. For years NACHI had been a friend and an enemy. An enemy because by promoting the amount of inspectors in the market it has become oversaturated. NACHIs success has become its failure.
I just paid $420 to have a p trap repaired under a kitchen sink. A licensed plumber thinks no more about billing that then blinking. Why? Because he can. He’s not charging for the time or tools. He’s charging for the knowledge.
In reality home inspectors as a group should be doing the same. $420 for a ptrap install, $1500 for a complete inspection of a property.
We inspectors are a group of independent minded self motivated people and until we learn to work as one organization I think there is a good chance the industry will change and big business will take control. And, it’s that tie to Realtors that will facilitate it.
I’m out in 4 or 5 yrs. You younger guys and gals need to take a good look at this and see if the future is what you think it will be.
Like I said 2 cents worth.

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Might want to fix the spelling error on your website with the word starting.

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I personally think the biggest reason of not having representation is because of ourselves. We, are doing nothing to get any sort of representation. I 100% agree with you on Nick and NACHI. He does phenomenal work getting us the education and resources we can use BUT he does it in a way where he tries to make everyone and their uncle and cousin an inspector, saturating the market. I posted something around this topic a few months back about an inspector “union” and didn’t get the responses of inspectors wanting representation. Yeah anyone can join a union, but unions can also not hire, have a hiring freeze, limit it’s members, require more rigorous training to become a journeyman inspector. All doing the part to bring our value up to par. I think we are the problem.

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Todd, I totally agree. We have to get control of this industry through some sort of real lobby representation at the national and state level. We are the ones who are out here doing this and taking the risks every day. The price point of $1,000 to $1,500 IS realistic if we can make everyone understand the amount of work, training, and costs required to do a great job for buyers. I’m only two years into this and I plan on being in this industry for the long haul. I’m willing to start this movement and carry it through into the future for us and the next generation of inspectors. It’s not going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile is. I think there are a lot of avenues where lobbying could improve things for inspectors nationwide. I think the price point conversation is at the top of that list, but I think this could be beneficial for other areas like collective bargaining agreements with lead generation services, health care and other benefits, all kinds of things we can do to improve our situation.

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as long as HIs are part of a free market, you will always have low-ballers. Not everyone perceives liability or profit the same way. Many risk takers are out there… many of them come and go. How do you stop that and at the same time have reasonable enough entry into the field for new comers? People lie and make things up all the time, even with better consumer education you won’t eliminate it.

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I’m all for raising price! Who wouldn’t be.
I always gradually raise price.
Great post! Great info everyone shared!

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Shoot! Just today on my inspection. Had two doors that were locked that the realtor did not have keys to get into for outside storage buildings. They called a locksmith that was there within 35 minutes and charged $99 to pop open each door.

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I believe the answer is this question “what is the spending tolerance of the public”.

In 1965 $5.00 went a long way high school Friday night. $10 was feeling prime. $20 was “wow”. As the years passed $20 went to $50 and today that $10 is now $50 to $80. Two movie tickets, a so so dinner and a go kart ride can push $100. That number catches my attention but young kids don’t seem to flinch. Speaking for myself, the price of anything is what I am used to or willing to accept.

$250 for a 20 minute roof inspection has about the same perception of value to purchasers as does a $300 4 hour home inspection. Try to charge $600 for the inspection and it is suddenly an expense people question because they are not used to it.

After much thought I have come to believe that home inspection offers far more product and service than the public is willing to pay for. The product has become over produced. The following inspections all make $150 an hour with 50 times less effort. A roof inspection, $150. A pool inspection, $150, An engineering report $400 (1 1/2 hours), A termite inspection, $125 etc.

I do not think it is about the time and product produced but rather just the price. Most people will spend $250 for a 45 minute 1 page report then $500 for a 40 page report.

The magic is to find what $$ the consumer tolerates and then offer a service that takes 1 hour to provide it.

A person we all know once told me that the original $289 fee to join InterNACHI was a number that few people psychologically had a problem with. “Oh $289? Here is a check”. Trying to sell them on $300 resulted in less takers.

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The problem isn’t low prices. A much bigger problem is incompetent inspectors. Just a few minutes ago, I read a post In this forum where a so-called inspector asked whether a furnace is gas or electric. That is what we are competing against.

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If everyone was equal, there would be no “better inspector” to hire.

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Well said, George. Hopefully, the new licensing in our State of Ohio may help, but as I replied in the post you mentioned, to think “hands-on” training is sufficient is ridiculous.

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Fox guarding the hen house. It should be under OBBS. Maybe OCILB.
AND we have to compete with unlicensed home inspectors until April.

What agent in their right mind would recommend an unlicensed home inspector?

ASHI tried to get their SOP adopted as law. That failed. I do not recall anyone from I-N commenting. I commented and I commented a lot. Why because I wanted my voice heard.

God for bid that you get called before the OHIB because the SOP is leaning toward ASHI rules and that will be how you will be judged. May I suggest that some members here attend the 2 meetings about the SOP yet to be hell? I am supposed to be notified about them but again someone here should be paying attention to what is happening or we all will be following ASHI rules.

FYI