Time Is Of The Essence

Recently a home inspector contacted me after receiving notice that his firm was being sued for failing to detect mold in a home that he had inspected several months before. Of course, he was not conducting a mold inspection. And the claimant was not the one for whom he had performed the inspection.

And folks still give me odd looks when I tell them that I never see a legitimate claim!

I asked him if the suit was the first notice that he had had of the claim. It was not. He had received a demand letter from the plaintiff’s attorney a few months before and turned it over to his insurance agent who forwarded to the inspector’s insurer.

A few weeks later he received a letter from the insurance company advising him of its “coverage position”, to wit, since the claim implicated a mold claim and since he did not have coverage for mold, it would not be providing any coverage.
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The Way-ay-ting Is The Hardest Part

As I mentioned last time, I had returned home from a few days of R and R at the shore to a torrent of fresh home inspection claims, several of which were actual lawsuits. The lawsuits were all multiple-defendant affairs comprising multiple counts and exceedingly vague allegations that made it impossible to ascertain exactly what it was about the inspection that was aggrieving the plaintiff so.

Nevertheless, after speaking with the inspectors and then the attorneys, I was not surprised to learn that the claims were all for something that was highly defensible: outside the scope of the Standards of Practice; or concealed at the time of the inspection; or disclaimed in the report; or discovered and reported; or working then but not working now.

Not surprised because that is universally the case.
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Tremendous Marketing Opportunity For The Confident Home Inspector

A friend forwarded to me an article, entitled Why home inspections have become more important, that ran May 10, 2012 in the Washington Post’s Real Estate section. The author is a Washington area attorney specializing in real estate law who wrote the article for the benefit of potential home buyers.

You can read the article for yourself but what struck me square in the eyes was its closing sentence: “Virtually all inspection reports limit the inspector’s liability to the return of his inspection fee.

If I were an enterprising home inspector practicing my profession in the D. C. Metro Area, I would be contacting this attorney and advising him that, “Unlike ‘virtually all inspectors’, I do not limit my liability. I stand behind my findings and report. So Mr. Jacobs, if that’s what your clients are looking for in a home inspector, here’s my contact information.
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Groundhog Day

One of the collateral benefits of being an itinerant speaker is having the ability to catch up with friends who have pulled up stakes and scattered across the continent while I happen to be moving about the country fulfilling a speaking invitation.

As you read this, I will be en route to Columbia, South Carolina to speak to the Winter gathering of the South Carolina Association of Home Inspectors on Saturday morning. I’m heading to Savannah, Georgia this morning because I have two high school buddies who have retired to Hilton Head and they were kind enough to invite me to stay a few days with them on either side of the speaking engagement.

I also have a friend from Artillery OCS who owns a seafood restaurant in Hilton Head and I am hoping to be able to stop by to see him, as well.

Of course, I am also looking forward to meeting the home inspectors who have registered for the seminar. If this South Carolina seminar is even half-way typical of others what follows is bound to happen.
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Contradictions and Predictions

My friend Hugh Gilmore is a local Philadelphia celebrity and, I hasten to add, justifiably so, whom I met rather serendipitously about a year ago. He writes a widely read column, in one of our local community newspapers, that celebrates the quaint pastime of reading books. Imagine. So that’s how I first came to “know” him.

Of all the gin joints in all the world, we met in a local liquor store – go figure! – during the Christmas rush in 2010. I espied him, relying for markers on the Seurat-like pointillist portrait that accompanied his column, as I was checking out and asked “Are you Hugh Gilmore?”

He owned up to the make, even while expressing astonishment that it was even possible to do so, given the source. Not the first time I’ve been ordered to move to the head of the class!
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Is E & O Insurance for Home Inspectors Really Necessary?

A reader recently wrote to me: “One quick question comes to mind in reviewing your E and O insurance for home inspectors blog.  You clearly state a number of times that virtually all claims against home inspectors lack merit and/or can basically be quashed at the point of the initial demand. This being true, why then would one even need to consider E+O when you have made it abundantly clear most if not all E+O claims against inspectors can be successfully defended, likely at a fraction of the cost of insurance?”

In my experience, only three of the over 500 claims that inspectors have asked me to respond to were valid claims. That’s less than one percent. Am I seeing a different segment of claimants than the typical E and O insurer for home inspectors? I very much doubt that I am.

Yet, while my success rate at terminating these claims has been, by any metric, phenomenal, I would still hesitate to counsel inspectors to forgo the back-up protection that an E & O insurance policy with a solid company provides for two very important reasons. One, about 15 % of the time, the first notice of claim is an actual lawsuit. In other words, I will have had no prior opportunity to prevent the suit from being filed in the first place. And while I have successfully persuaded plaintiffs’ counsel to dismiss inspectors from lawsuits multiple times, that is a much more difficult trick with a much lower success rate. Two, my responsive letters are only successful at dissuading claimants 97 % of the time. That means that three knuckleheads out of every hundred cannot be persuaded that they have no claim. In those cases, you will have to hire private counsel and litigation is one of the most expensive undertakings imaginable.
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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.
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No Good Deed for Home Inspectors Goes Unpunished

When it comes to unreasonable, hard-to-please consumers, in my opinion you really have to go some distance to top the average house buyer. Throw in unreasonable and vindictive and you have a good idea of the sort of nincompoops to whom I have lately had the pleasure of explaining the facts of life: to wit, that their intemperate, unwarranted and extraordinarily foolish decision to post defamatory rants against their inspector on social media sites would very likely permanently impoverish them, if not immediately removed.

In every case where I have had to intervene, there existed no grounds whatsoever for impugning the inspector’s work product. Of course, as I have conclusively demonstrated, that is almost always the case.

For that reason, a lot of inspectors believe that they can persuade the slanderer to remove the offending post by sheer logic. And you would think that that would work. After all, if the issue was something that was outside the scope of the inspection, or concealed, or disclaimed, or found and reported, or clearly working when the inspection was performed – that is, something for which the inspector would be blameless – then surely any fair-minded person would apologize for their actions and promptly remove their offensive post.
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Myth # 5 All Home Inspector Insurance Companies Are The Same

There is nothing that boosts my confidence in the absolute need for the service that I provide this industry quite like going back out on the road with my home inspector training at the Law and Disorder Seminar and meeting a bunch of full-time professional home inspectors and listening to their stories of E and O insurance for home inspectors claim mismanagement of such surpassing magnitude that I am often half-tempted to excuse myself, call my broker and ask her to short the entire insurance industry. Only my fear of prosecution for trading on inside knowledge prevents me from doing so.

At last Thursday’s seminar in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, one of the home inspectors in attendance related that, some years before, he had had a mold claim on which his E and O insurance for home inspectors company eventually paid $250,000. Do you not have to question the sanity of an insurance company claims executive who would authorize the payment of $250,000 on a mold claim when a. the identification of mold or any other toxin is not within any extant industry Standards of Practice and b. coverage for mold claims is specifically excluded from the insurance policy?

As it happens, I was, at that very moment, in the process of extracting a home inspector client from a lawsuit wherein the gravamen of the complaint was that the inspector had failed to detect the presence of lead paint. I simply called the plaintiff’s attorney and apprised him that the inspector had not been engaged by his client to detect the presence of lead paint, that the inspector’s inspection agreement specifically excluded lead paint detection from his services and that the state specifically forbade home inspectors from inspecting for the presence of lead paint unless the inspector possessed a license from the Department of Health and Senior Services which this inspector did not possess.
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Report Writing: First Person or Third Person

A home inspector in Connecticut recently asked me this question: Which report writing style is more defensible: writing in the first person or the third person? “I observed the roof to be in poor condition” or “The roof is in poor condition.”

I personally cannot recall ever reading a report that called out defects in the first person but that certainly does not mean that there have not been any. I think that most reports are written in a style that flows from first to third and back in a logical non-jarring way. “The roof appears to be in serviceable condition. No signs of water infiltration were observed, I recommend that you inquire of the sellers whether they have ever had any problems with the roof.”

But I do not believe that the choice of person – first or third – has any bearing on the defensibility of the report. The reports that I have the easiest time defending are ones that note the defect/concern in clear language, show a photograph of it with a red arrow pointing to it and repeat the observation in the Report Summary.
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