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Accept No Substitutes

The other day, I got a call from an old friend and a long-time ClaimIntercept™ subscriber. He had been contacted by an E & O insurance monger retailing a product with a price that he found attractive and he wanted to talk to me about it.

I had never heard of the company but that is certainly not a disqualifying factor. After all, there was a time in my life when I had never heard of The Travelers. That’s another way of saying that there are lots of insurance companies that I have never heard of — and that you have never heard of — that are good quality, financially sound companies that serve niche markets and do so very professionally. It’s a big competitive world. What a country!

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Inspection Agreements: Is There Anything They Can’t Do?

When home inspectors contact me to squash a claim, there are three documents that I always ask for: All correspondence with the claimant, the Inspection Report and the Inspector’s Inspection Agreement. These documents essentially constitute the “claim file” and invariably provide a torrent of reasons why the claim will fail.

After having sucessfully dispatched over 300 home inspection claims since 2006, I never expect a claim to have any merit and my expectations are never dashed. Of course, claimants and their attorneys, by and large, do not regard the mere fact that a claim has no legitimate predicate as any obstacle to making it. Indeed, their most frequently and fervently expressed desire is that the inspector “turn [the claim] over to your insurance company.”

And who can blame them? After all, most insurance companies operating in the home inspector professional liability field do not regard the mere fact that a claim has no legitimate predicate as any obstacle to throwing money at it. As long as the amount does not exceed the insured’s deductible, that is.
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The Typical Home Inspection Claim Runaround

Tip #42 - The Typical Home Inspection Runaround Claim RunaroundI’ve now been successfully defending home inspectors against meritless claims for a decade now, and with over 1,000 claims under my belt, I feel I’m qualified to describe the typical home inspection claim runaround competent home inspectors like yourself receive when dealing with an “issue” that really isn’t your “issue” at all.

I recently received a phone call from an inspector who was STILL dealing with an issue after two-plus years. The attorney representing him had, not surprisingly, been running up massive legal fees in the six figures without even the slightest desire to terminate the case. Why would he? His interests lied in his own billable hours driving fees as high as possible.
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Risk, Its Place in the Home Inspection Industry and How to Combat It

The recent earthquake that hit near Japan set me to thinking about emergency preparedness in general and disaster-preparedness, in particular. The earthquake-prone nation is being widely praised for the strength of its building codes which contemplate the need for buildings to be able to withstand these inevitable periodic massive shocks to their structural integrity. And by all accounts, all things considered, the minimal damage that was sustained by buildings in cities closest to the epicenter of the huge quake has vindicated the decision to implement those precautions.

Where I live, we seldom experience earthquakes, a fact that prompted the actor David Morse [St. Elsewhere] to move here with his Philly-born wife, after an earthquake destroyed their family home in California in 1994. And the ones we do experience tend to be at the lower end of the Richter Scale. I personally have never experienced one and apparently slept through one that took place here in the early ‘70s.

We do get our share of capricious weather, however – Nor’easters, blizzards, hurricanes and the occasional tornado – for which you do have to be prepared. As President Kennedy sagely observed, “The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.” The time to plan for disaster is before disaster strikes.
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Managing Risk with E&O Insurance for Home Inspectors

A home inspector in Texas recently asked me via email what I thought “about the efforts to have the Texas Inspector E & O mandate rescinded” which was my first notice that such an effort was afoot. Evidently the Texas Professional Real Estate Inspection Association (“TPREIA”) had succeeded in having a bill to do just that introduced into the Texas Legislature.

Anyone who has been “stalking me,” as one HI who recently connected with me on LinkedIn put it, for any length of time surely knows that I am no fan of government mandates. In general. So, bully for TPREIA for taking the laboring oar on an issue that is a major concern to its membership.

Should home inspectors protect themselves from their nutty clients? Of course. And only those who are nuttier than their clients do not take some protective measures: tightening their pre-inspection agreements, contractually limiting their maximum monetary exposure [where permitted, of course, as many jurisdictions do not allow this], issuing short-term warranties, friending the Home Inspector Lawyer, and purchasing errors and omissions insurance for home inspectors.
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5 Steps to a Good Night’s Sleep and Higher Inspection Fees

The number one complaint that I get from Home Inspectors on the home inspector training Law and Disorder Tour is about E & O Insurance companies for home inspectors. Their perceived default claim posture of caving in and paying unmeritorious claims – usually with a hefty contribution from the inspector pursuant to the deductible feature of the insurance policy – sends inspectors over the edge. And justifiably so, in my opinion.

Having quashed over 200 claims at the demand-letter stage in the last four-and-a-half years – and several more where the first notice of claim was an actual lawsuit – I am confident that I have solved that problem – at least for those insured under the Lockton Affinity E & O Program described elsewhere on this site.
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Brand X Insurance Companies Can Be Hazardous To Your Wealth

As I was writing that headline, the thought struck me that many readers might not be familiar with the Mad Men-era advertising invention. For those benighted youngsters, in ubiquitous television commercials of the day, Brand X was the competing product that left ring around the collar, caused soapy buildup and dry lifeless hair. In real life, Brand X E and O Insurance Companies for home inspectors are ones that can cost you a small fortune.

A veteran home inspector recently called me about a claim that he had only the day before turned into his insurance company. He advised the company that he wanted to engage his own attorney to respond to the claim. The company told him not to do that; that it would handle the claimant. That, the inspector told me, was what he was afraid of.

The claim, of course. was completely ridiculous and involved the inspector’s alleged failure to advise the claimant that the supports for an elevated deck were inadequate. By the time that the claimant notified the inspector of the issue, she had already completed the “repairs”.
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