The White Bull

When I first launched this website, my biggest concern was whether I would have enough material to meet my self-imposed twice-a-week publishing goal. I didn’t want to have a site that inspectors would come to once, never to return which is the justly deserved fate of static sites that never change after their initial publication.

So twice a week, I confront the white bull. That’s the name that famed bullfight enthusiast Ernest Hemingway gave to the blank page, the quite worthy adversary that writers regularly face.

“It’s a real albatross” I explained to a lawyer friend over lunch last week even as I was enthusing over the beyond-all-expectations effect the site has had on virtually every aspect of my practice: from an immeasurably heightened profile to new clients to great testimonials to speaking engagements. All together, a pretty good return on an investment of about four hours of research and writing a week.

Regular readers will frequently suggest topics for me to write about and I regularly consult industry message boards and home inspector groups on LinkedIn to see what issues are foremost in the minds of home inspectors. But my most reliable muse is the most recent home inspector who has consulted me about a claim.

And those are the posts that write themselves.

A home inspector who has engaged me twice before to put down a nettlesome umbrage-monger recently got a call from an upset former client claiming that he failed to report that the oil tank was reinforced with fibreglass. When he went to look at it, the patch was so obvious, that he “could not believe that I missed it.”

Do you know what I told him?

“You didn’t miss it.”

How do I know that? The guy has inspected thousands of oil tanks and this defect was “obvious”. After handling close to 300 claims against home inspectors, I know this much: Inspectors do not miss “obvious” issues.

When I was stationed at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in 1970, I used to pick up the Chicago Tribune at the PX. One Sunday, the magazine section had a major article on Dick Butkus, the Chicago Bears’ Hall of Fame Middle Linebacker, who was then in the prime of his career. In the article, Butkus allowed that “If I’m not in on a tackle, someone is doing something illegal.”

If an inspector with thousands of inspections behind him fails to report an “obvious” issue, believe me, someone prevented him from seeing it.