Some things are so fundamental that they shouldn’t require any explanation. The guy should have been asking himself from the start how today’s standards are in any way relevant to a house from an earlier era.
Furthermore, we are there to inspect the condition of the home, not to critique or criticize the way things were done in the past. There are, of course, some exceptions. If, for example, a particular material were found to have a failure rate that increases with age, that would be worth mentioning if the material in question were likely to fail in the foreseeable future. Things such as single strand aluminum branch circuit wiring is another notable exception because we have learned over time that the failure rates are unacceptably high.
Whether we like it or not, there are times when an inspector has to actually think. It seems that many inspectors are moving in the direction of wanting a set answer to cover every situation and most of those answers are meaningless. They provide no real value to the customer.
A good home inspector should have sufficient knowledge and understanding of construction spanning not less than 200 years and how homes age. Then, they need to have the skill to put everything into proper perspective for the customer. What possible value would saying “This 50 year old house was not built to 2023 standards” have? Duh! Of course it wasn’t! The World is changing fast. Even the dumbest home buyer understands that something built 50 years ago wouldn’t have been built to 2023 standards. Telling them that is condescending at best.
When we did our monthly Buyer/Seller workshops, one of the most common comments I heard from both buyers and sellers about home inspectors is that inspectors talked down to them.
During my presentation, I would ask everyone, by a show of hands, who had had an experience with a home inspection, either as a buyer or a seller. I would then ask them to raise their hand if they would characterize the experience as positive. I then asked for a show of hands if they thought it was negative.
We did close to 100 of our seminars. We typically had between 50 and 100 participants. We did a few special larger events. Each event included a social hour (or two) after the main event. That’s when I learned the most. There were times when I felt like I was the punching bag for the entire home inspection community. People would really unload on me, one on one. It was obvious that their frustration with their inspectors had festered over time.
More than a few people were quick to point out to me that while the home inspector was being condescending toward them the inspectors very often couldn’t compose a proper English sentence.
We did our seminars for a lot of people over a span of a lot of years. When I first started asking participants to characterize their home inspection experiences, the clear majority said that they were favorable. Towards the end, the number of attendees who characterized the experience as being negative had grown considerably, to the point where they were overwhelmingly the majority.
Time after time, I heard the same complaints about inspectors. Inspectors being condescending, either in person or in their reports, was one of the complaints I heard most often. The other was the reports themselves. Their again, in the early days, there weren’t so many complaints. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard a complaint about reports for the first couple years we did the seminars. As time went on, the complaints about reports grew at an alarming rate. The complaints about inspectors in general also began to grow at an alarming rate.
I’m on the verge of retirement and turn down more jobs than I accept, so I am not directly affected much by bad inspectors. I will, however, continue to teach and publish software for the foreseeable future.
One of the things I tell inspectors that I help is to treat every customer with respect and dignity. Putting things like comments about standards being different today are like saying to the customer “I think that you’re so damned stupid that I better spell out for you what almost every breathing human being already knows”. I think I might have had a buyer put it to me that way once in one of our seminars.
It needs to stop!
