Still Waiting

A lot of home inspectors are surprised, nay, astonished when I tell them that I almost never see a home inspection claim that is legitimate. But it is true. It will be five years this Thanksgiving Day since I started squashing these ridiculous claims. Almost 300 claims later, I have still seen only 3 claims that had any merit.

And since I launched this website, they are coming out of the woodwork. Claims, that is. Not legitimate ones. Last week, I took a five-day trip out west to visit my good friend, Nick Gromicko, and speak to inspectors attending the Fall Conference of the American Institute of Inspectors.

While I was away, I was besieged by a legion of inspectors being hassled by former clients with truly ridiculous claims. There were several claims for inspections that had been performed more than two years ago. This I know is true: it is categorically impossible for a claim for an inspection that took place more than two years ago to have any merit.

Absolutely impossible!

One of the claims that I had to respond to was for a mold remediation company. The company had been brought in by an insurance company to remediate mold issues that arose in the kitchen and bathroom of a house secondary to some water leakage. The company followed established remediation protocols and successfully removed the contamination from the treated areas.

The only problem was that there was mold contamination throughout the house. Basically everywhere. So the company gave the homeowner a quote to remediate those areas, as well. Unfortunately the home owner could not afford it.

Naturally, the problem worsened and so, some twenty months later, the company got a demand letter from an attorney that was seeking some $90,000 in damages for its failure to remove mold from areas of the house for which its services had not been engaged.

You cannot make this stuff up.

While I long ago stopped being surprised by the absurdity of the prototypical home inspection claim, I am continuingly astonished at the willingness of attorneys to undertake such doomed-from-the-start representations. If you are a trial lawyer, it seems to me that job one would be case evaluation.

That so many are not performing this threshold task is really quite remarkable.