Elementary, My Dear Watson!

Around the first of the year, one of my home inspector training Law and Disorder Seminar graduates alerted me to a television show that had recently begun airing on HGTV. Coincidentally, I had actually been vaguely aware of the show from the torrent of threads appearing on home inspection message boards whose general consensus seemed to be that the show’s host was unfairly singling out home inspectors for special abuse for the crime of not having discovered defects that he was only able to discover through invasive and destructive investigation, a technique that, I hope it goes without saying, is way-hay-hay beyond the scope of a home inspection.

I didn’t pay the message board kvetching any mind but my friend seemed to think that this show would be an inestimable boon to my practice because it was basically telling viewers that if they were unhappy with their home, their home inspector was most likely the responsible party.

By then the show had been on for a while and since I had not noticed any meaningful uptick in the number of crackpot claims that home inspectors were asking me to neutralize, I figured that people were not taking the gratuitous criticism for anything beyond entertainment. But then the strangest thing happened. Shortly thereafter, I had lunch with a friend who is a very successful financial planner – a total layman – who was a fan of the show and he thought that it would be bad for my practice because it cast home inspectors in such a bad light.

So I figured that I had better watch the show to see how bad or good it actually was going to be for home inspectors. And while I generally like watching shows that feature people doing things that no one would ever seriously consider asking me to do like, say, drive an eighteen-wheeler hundreds of miles over a narrow temporary road hewn entirely out of ice, I found this show to be quite boring and actually unwatchable. Nevertheless, I soldiered on through three episodes and my bottom line conclusion is that I do not think that the show will have much, if any, effect on the number of claims that are made against home inspectors.

Why? For one reason, the vast majority of home owners are quite capable of their very own accord of coming to the same erroneous conclusion as this show’s host. Secondly, their friendly real estate agent, if asked, can be reliably counted upon to suggest as much. Third, it is a mortal certainty that the helpful contractor that they engage to rectify the issue will be more than happy to scapegoat the inspector.

How do I know that? Because that is the scenario that obtains approximately one-hundred percent of the time.

But please keep this in mind: no amount of false consensus will transmute an otherwise unmeritorious claim into a meritorious one.