The “greed” accusation is bugging me. We can’t do what we do without money. I’ll give you a current example. On just this one government contract: InterNACHI® Is Awarded Multi-Million-Dollar Government Contract to Inspect Homes in Florida. we had to front more than 2 million dollars in cash. We pay InterNACHI members the day they do the inspections by direct deposit into our members’ bank accounts, but the state pays us about 100 days later for every one we do. That means we have to continuously front a couple million bucks to keep paying our members instantly. That money had to be made in the past to be able to do it. And it’s why the state is now giving us work from other contracts that we didn’t even bid on. Ask our program manager Michell Shishilla. Her husband John is FABI’s president. We need millions of dollars for programs like this, and luckily, our past efforts generated the funding to do them. Some of y’all pick on me for being focused on finance, but where would we be if we weren’t financially flush? We’d have two broke-ass associations in the industry.
Reminder from a year ago, and it isn’t getting any better out there anytime soon…
Those inspections aren’t gone, they are backed up in the pipeline. Remember, all real estate has to sell. People move, they get deployed, they start families, they need less room, they run into financial trouble, they die… whatever.
This slow down is because I was right and the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were wrong. Inflation wasn’t “transitory” just as I said it wasn’t.
The inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve having to inflate our money supply to cover all of the government’s over-spending.
Then to attempt to tame the inflation they cause, they raised interest rates.
That caused mortgage rates to rise which did two horrible things for inspectors:
- It caused homes to be less affordable which means fewer buyers.
- It cause sellers with existing low-interest mortgages to want to keep them which means fewer sellers.
That’s a double whammy. But fear not, because that is all just pipeline clog. Eventually it all pours out.
Like I said… totally ‘out of touch’ with reality!
Those inspections are GONE! They are history, and will never return until MAYBE the next time those properties go on the market! Even then, there is no guarantee they will, or be allowed to be, inspected!
The average inspector doesn’t give a shit about all the excuses you make. All they care about is making a living to take care of their families. Period!
Well said.
Market conditions changed many ties during my career. It was up to me to make adjustments to meet those changes. . I didn’t look to others to tell me what those changes needed to be or to make those needed changes for me.
And, I was able to do just that and have a rewarding career. 
Others can too!
I just don’t agree. Even my own son, Nikolai, has a vacant house that he wants to sell in Colorado as it is far from where he lives in Washington. But he can’t. He can’t because he has a 3 percent mortgage. Homes like his are stuck in the pipeline until eventually they have to go onto the market. And by then, they’ll all be older and even more in need of an inspection. All these homes aren’t selling because everyone is waiting.
Guilty as charged: www.nachi.org/conglomerate. Wait till you see what we have coming and being announced at the convention next month.
We’ll see, but history does not say they are gone. Just postponed.
How about 2008? Recession. Home buying plummeted. '08 was a tough year. 2009 not much better. We ate a little hamburger and lots of beans. Technically, the recession ended in 2009 but 2010-2011 had little improvement in home sales. Lot’s of buyers passing on doing inspections cause they were so cash poor. October/November 2012, I could feel a change in the attitude of folks and 2013 was a rocket launch. I worked seven months doing 12-14 inspections a week without taking a single day off until Thanksgiving. Did two inspections on July 4th. Pent up demand was unleashed with the lowering of interest rates and improvement in the economy.
How about the beginning of the pandemic? In March, I did maybe 10 inspections and April, did 5. Then the Colorado governor lifted the restrictions. May, back to 10 and June we had lift off. I did 49 in August. 2020 was my best year ever. It is kind of like plugging a water hose. Pull the plug and it gushes.
We’ll see but history says, we have a plug in the water hose. It may not be until the sleepy old man and his puppeteers have left the big white house that the plug is pulled, but I bet we all get wet when it happens.
I’m going to disagree that Nick is oblivious to this. What I see and hear from him, is that he gets it. Without trying to put words in his mouth, I read him as an advocate for teaching someone how to fish instead of handing them a fish.
Success is more of an attitude than working hard. Lots of guys and gals work their asses off into failure. Success requires working smart. Wild success is usually working smart and hard at the same time. I’ve had the good fortune to have some wildly successful good friends. Unfortunately, working smart is not contagious, because I’ve never been great at working smart. So, I still work hard at working moderately smart.
I really disagree with that one. ASHI doesn’t do shit except take their members money and spend most of it foolishly. I was an active Realtor for 20 years and didn’t see squat from ASHI. They were the first and kinda like Xerox with photocopying or Kleenix with snot tissues, they got identified with home inspecting. It is hard to overcome that kind of name recognition and I will strongly disagree that Nick hasn’t done a ton of work at putting InterNACHIs name out there.
When I was a REMAX agent there was a cacophony of grumbling that Coldwell Banker and Century 21 were promoting their names more than Remax. The owner of Remax caved to the pressure and bought a ton of airtime with great commercials. I never knew of an agent who thought they got a single transaction from those ads. Today, Remax is in decline. Individual and small agencies dominant real estate.
The best promoter of your business is yourself. InterNACHI can’t make you successful. But InterNACHI offers more tools for success than most HIs ever avail themselves of. A long time NACHI member and buddy, likes to say that I came from the dark side into InterNACHI. I say, “Maybe true, but now that I am in the light, I can see that it is way better here and I am all in!”
And my parting words, many years ago, another buddy remarked to me that I was one of the few people around who can genuinely celebrate the success of others without envy or resentment. I don’t know if I am that perfect, but it may be why some of my best friends are very successful and way more successful than me.
Fellas, when I see some of you guys trying to jump all over Nick for this or that, it sounds more like resentment than offering constructive criticism. Hey, just sayin’, lookin’ to anyone else for success or reasons for failure is nearly always looking at the wrong person. If I piss some of you off with that, then I’ll get over it. I still respect all of you and like most of you even when we disagree.
Nah he needs to get them on their knees so he can bone them good! 
Sure is a lot of sour grapes. It’s a wonder they stick around? 'Course complainers do what they do best - complain!
That is absolutely NOT the case in Minnesota. We have a very low inventory, and houses are still selling in under three days which forces the NO INSPECTION or AS IS ONLY sales!
In the last month, I have had about 6 calls that wanted an inspection… NEXT DAY!
To test my theory, I told two of them I could get to them in 2 days.
NOPE! They either went to someone else or went with no inspection at all.
Again… just because a house is for sale, DOES NOT mean it will get inspected. This is a key point you refuse to acknowledge, and the key reason why everyone feels you drop the ball on marketing Internachi to the Industry!
JJ is spot on here. The total number of houses selling in a market is almost irrelevant, how many houses get inspected when they’re sold is.
For the last couple years in this tight housing market more and more sell with zero contingencies. A very large share of our inspections in the last year have been “information only”, the home sales contract not negotiable to void let alone get repairs or credits from the sellers. We’ve also seen an uptick in post closing inspections where the buyer wants to find out “what they bought” after moving in.
Home inspectors are out there pushing the gettheminspected hashtags and similar to home buyers, trying to push back against the REs telling them to wave everything in their offers. But it would be nice to see an industry trade group pushing that message too…
And to top it all off, we had to deal with our local MLS getting hacked. Fun times for sure. 
EVERYONE doesn’t FEEL that way…that’s for sure. SMH
Earlier this year, I attended my first ASHI regional conference in Ohio as a presenter. Over 80 people attended the event learning how to do our job better. However, one thing was missing and it was marketing piece. Without it, a lot of inspectors will not make it until the economic uptick. How can any inspector survive these time without others knowing your good work? So next month, I will be attending my first InterNACHI convention and I can wait to see the difference between the two.
Rather than promoting them, NACHI purposefully and wisely disclaims them (see item 6). NACHI has never certified an inspector’s skills or expertise but only his membership, his having met the required standards for that membership, and (in certain instances) the number of his inspections.
Far from promoting an inspector to real estate agents, NACHI (for a fee) allows the participating inspector to promote that NACHI will buy the house he inspects from the damaged homebuyer if the inspector screws up his inspection. Rather than promoting the skills of the inspector, the inspector promotes the willingness of NACHI to bail him out if his underperformance results in damage to his customer (under a litany of qualifying conditions).
Love him or hate him, Nick Gromicko is a marketing genius. This thread, like every one of his posts, is a study in how to always … always … be marketing in everything you put before the public.
Do some of his ideas fail? Absolutely. Do some of his ideas explode in the face of risk takers who join in some of them? Of course, but in 20 years I have only known him once to fail to make it good for someone who was harmed. Is there often more hyperbole than substance? Count on it. Does anything that Nick promotes guarantee success to a home inspector? Absolutely not … but being the marketer he is, Nick will take the opportunity I just provided him to further market by telling me I am wrong and why.
NACHI was inspired from Nick’s animosity toward ASHI, and it still shows; but good things for home inspectors have resulted which, in the end, is the only reason the two associations continue to exist … mainly as hosts that allow parasitic vendors to feed off their membership.
When ASHI was at the top in the first days of the new millennium, their complaint against the NACHI start-up was how its members existed only in cyberspace. They paid a fee, took entry tests online, took courses online, and took tests online without proctors. This concept was new back then, and many state licensing requirements for CE refused to accept online courses and unproctored tests. Over twenty years, times changed and online training and unproctored testing became the norm in many circles as well as this one.
Nick was ahead of the times on that one, and ASHI’s most powerful argument against NACHI became its weakest. ASHI lost its upper hand on this point, no longer had the edge or an argument as to why their inspectors were more credible, never recovered, and has been losing ground since.
[To add to the above paragraph, this elevation of a home inspector through ASHI membership was before home inspectors were licensed in more than a couple of states. Before licensing, being a member of ASHI was generally accepted by the real estate industry as being the only solid credential to distinguish a “good” home inspector from a “bad” home inspector. The second way that ASHI killed themselves was by pushing for licensing in every state whereby the state license became the only qualifying credential and making all licensed home inspectors equally qualified in the minds of referring agents and the consumer. State licensing and the increased credibility of online training and testing are the things that contributed most to ASHI’s decline.]
The bottom line is this: NACHI and Nick Gromicko are all about marketing NACHI. Neither could exist without marketing NACHI. This is Nick’s genius and when you look behind the curtain of hyperbole for something else you won’t find it.
I am one of the presenters there. Look forward to seeing you.
Looking forward to meeting you Lou and learning something new…
Well we are small potatoes but we are on track to equal our best year.
A lot of new faces along with some familiar ones. The biggest hurdle that we face is that our really good producing RAs become “listing” agents and we have to groom a new “buyers” agent.
We’ve been around long enough that the old agents recommend us to the new guys and that keeps us on an even keel for the most part.
We don’t depend solely on HIs for our income as we are remodeling contractors as well but we, my son and I, do enough inspections for one of us to make a living strictly from that.
I realize that this post has nothing to do with the OP but it seemed relevant to the direction the thread is going.
