home inspection claims

When Clients Attack

A disturbing trend and something that I am seeing much more frequently is the tendency of home inspection claimants to threaten to harm inspectors by making reputation-destroying comments on internet rating sites and filing false complaints with Licensing Boards unless the inspector knuckles under to what are invariably unmeritorious complaints.

A recent case that surfaced out West is illustrative of the genre. The claimants bought a 38 year-old house in the desert and, upon moving in, were shocked, shocked to discover that the home’s described 125 ampere electrical service, which was more than adequate when the house was built in 1973, was insufficient to support the increased electrical loads imposed by modern day conveniences not known or in popular use in the ‘seventies.

Distressed that their starter home did not come fully retrofitted to present day standards, the claimants wanted the inspector to make it so by paying for an entirely new electric service. The inspector conducted a conference call with the claimants wherein he tried to explain as equably as he could that the adequacy and efficiency of household systems is simply not something that a home inspection is intended to determine and that, in the event, he had called out a number of issues with the system and had recommended that the claimants have it evaluated by a professional electrician prior to closing.
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Job Security

If you want job security, it would be hard to beat being an exterminator in New York City. Got roaches? Call the exterminator. Your problem is solved but now your next door neighbor has it. And the cycle continues.

Lately, I have come to the realization that I have pretty solid job security myself. Here’s a small sampling of the vermin that I have recently had to exterminate with extreme prejudice.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my ClaimIntercept™ subscribers consulted me about a claim that one of his clients was bringing after having discovered a bat infestation in his attic, some ten months after the inspection. And of course, the client is shocked, shocked that the home inspector did not manage to notice this when he inspected the attic.
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Answering The Mail

Recently, I’ve been re-publishing some posts from the archive on LinkedIn and facebook on the theory that many inspectors may never have seen the original posts. It turns out that it was a good idea, at least to judge from the tremendous uptick in the number of unique visitors that the site is attracting since then and the number of retweets and comments those archival posts have engendered.

Doug Zumach, commenting on Monday’s The Kamikaze Claimant post, asked “Joe: Won’t the inspector’s E & O premium rise for defending this case? Might it not be more cost efficient to have someone like you defend this?”

That’s a very good question that implicates one of the two major issues that home inspectors tell me concern them the most: the epic tone deafness of the insurance industry when it comes to responding to the overwhelming percentage of unmeritorious claims that plague the home inspection profession.

When an inspector receives an inquiry from a former client regarding a putative issue with an inspection, he never knows whether it will escalate into a fully-formed claim. That is how the Kamikaze Claim started out. When the inspector went back to investigate the claim, he learned that the roofing contractor had filled the client’s head with a lot of nonsense about what was causing the leaks, their provenance and the ineptitude of the inspector in failing to discover and report them.
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When Claimants Simply Make Allegations Up

Dear Joe – I am a Home Inspector of 5, very busy and successful years, here in [New England], despite the down housing economy.

I have just learned of you and have visited your website. I am very interested in learning more of your ClaimIntercept[™] Program.  Also I would like to know if your seminar titled “ Law & Disorder Seminar” is available as a DVD that I could purchase. I reside quite far away from the areas where you do any public speaking on a regular basis. I am a member of InterNACHI, and watch on their website for any further info about your Seminars maybe coming to [this] area.

Can you send me to any further information about ClaimIntercept?

My other reason for writing is that I am, for the first time, going to have a lawsuit filed against me for a “claimed omission” on a job, which is a false claim by a seller.  I do not feel I am responsible for the situation and that I did nothing wrong; it is the seller’s word against my word, basically. And that the seller is using this situation for his own gain, at my expense – to the tune of $15,000.
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Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

There’s a memorable scene in the Coen Brothers film Blood Simple where a character named Marty played by Dan Hedeya is trying to hire a private investigator played by Emmett Walsh to kill both his unfaithful wife and her lover. But Marty keeps beating around the bush about the nature of the engagement. Finally, Emmett Walsh drawls “Can you tell me what you want me to do or is it a secret?”

I am constantly being reminded of that scene whenever I read demand letters from attorneys that fail to make even a pretense of articulating any sort of legal theory of liability upon which a claim against the home inspector could possibly be based. You would be surprised how often that happens. In my experience, about fifteen percent of the time.

Recently, a home inspector in New England contacted me after having received a number of letters from an attorney over an inspection that he had conducted on a colonial era home. While the letters all seek damages in the low five figures, not a single one of them lets on what the inspector missed or what needs to be repaired. Just a demand for money.
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Seller Isn’t Trying to Point Out Material Issues

My most recent post prompted a question on the LinkedIn ASHI Group Discussion Board from a Massachusetts Home Inspector who wanted to know whether a home inspector could rely on the information provided in the seller’s disclosures or on responses provided by either the seller or the seller’s representative to specific questions about the property.

I guess the easy answer is that, if seller’s disclosures were reliable, there would be no need for home inspections. And a seller’s disclosures could be unreliable for reasons that are completely unrelated to any skullduggery on his part, to his desire to hoodwink or inveigle a buyer. As an example, I have lived in my house for 24 years. If someone asked me what’s wrong with my house, I would have to say “I couldn’t tell you.”

Since I have no intention of selling the house, at least not before the Singularity occurs, issues that might be of considerable concern to a potential buyer never enter my head. And I imagine that most homeowners are as oblivious as I am of these matters and, thus, represent a huge market for pre-listing inspections.
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A Nation Of Gavones!

Once upon a time I had a paralegal who had been born in Italy but had come to America when she was a nine- or ten-year-old child. She had an Italian last name but was a totally assimilated American who spoke English fluently and unaccented. The only time she spoke Italian was when she spoke to her mother.

Since I had grown up in a neighborhood that comprised first-generation Irish, Germans and Italians, I gained an early appreciation of other cultures and took a particular shine to the Italian culture, its cuisine and language.
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Welcome To My World Redux

My last post prompted this response from a Florida Home Inspector:

Joe –

I also experience a claim wherein a buyer, who just so happened to be a litigation attorney, stated that there were damages to the roof in a specific location in the house he had just purchased, which we inspected.

He demanded that he be provided with our insurance company, policy #, phone number, and address of same. Did not want a phone call, a visit from us, or to discuss the matter whatsoever.

We had perfectly described the roof leak at the home he was purchasing, taken adequate photos and put them in the report, as well as described the faults to his face when he was there for the walkthrough at the end of the home inspection. We covered ourselves by putting in the disclaimers, some provided by InterNachi lawyers, and some we have put in over the years, something to the effect of “recommend further evaluation by State of Florida licensed roofing contractor”, etc.
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Welcome To My World

A home inspector whom I have known for a couple of years came up to me at Ken Compton’s recent Workshop in Naples, Florida and said “I have to run something by you.”

He had gotten a demand letter from a local attorney seeking damages for alleged failure to detect mold. Not surprisingly, the underlying facts are ridiculous. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that mold detection is excluded from every extant industry Standard of Practice and was not part of this inspection, the mold was discovered only after destructive probing secondary to some remodeling that the claimants were undertaking.

The inspector tried to explain to the claimants’ attorney why there was no case but was unsuccessful in doing so and subsequently reported the matter to his insurance company which appointed a local law firm that specializes in insurance defense to represent the inspector.
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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.
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