home inspection agreements

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.
(more…)

One of the more annoying issues that I have to contend with on a weekly basis is the drill of having to jump through the hoops erected by the myriad of Brand X E and O insurance companies that home inspectors latch onto that seem to be designed to thwart my efforts to prevent them from committing suicide and taking the home inspector along for the ride.

I call them UIs [you eyes] because I have never heard of the vast majority of these companies and that was the term that we used in the military to refer to enemy units whose identity was unknown. They were “unidentifiable”. Hence the acronym “UI”.

An inspector out West, who is insured by one of these UIs, recently contacted me to respond to a claim being made by one of his clients over an inspection that he conducted.

It almost never rains where this inspection took place and the inspector noted that the ceiling of the home had recently been painted, thus, making it impossible to ascertain with any certainty whether there were any prior issues with the property’s roof. The inspector did note a number of other issues which his client used to exact substantial concessions from the seller.
(more…)