home inspection

Tabula Rasa

There’s something about the start of a brand new year that tops off my hope reservoirs and makes me look forward to bigger and better things. Out with the old, in with the new.

Not that last year was too shabby, mind you.

I got speaking invitations from the four corners of the nation, the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Boston Bay to the Nevada Desert and deep in the heart of Texas. In April, this website launched and has attracted a thousand unique visitors each month ever since. And I successfully terminated an average of two claims per week on behalf of home inspectors from all over the United States.

Looking over the list of claims, I was struck by their variety. Many of the claims were against home inspectors who are not insured but most of them were against home inspectors who were insured and were simply tired of being sold out by their insurance company. In two of the cases, I was able to convince the insurer that both it and the inspector would be better off if it allowed me to respond. Of course, that is not an issue for inspectors insured through the Lockton program that I promote on this site.
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How Long Should Home Inspectors Hold on to Written Reports?

The other day, I received a comment from Naperville, Illinois Home Inspector Carol Fisher to a recent post on how long inspectors need to hold on to inspection reports.

Carol, who posed the original question, wrote: “The answer you gave is safe.  Of course I would save my digital reports, but some of us have been out there in the dinosaur era when they weren’t digital. Plus even today I still have paper relative to each report that I still need to keep even if the inspection report is digital. I have 21 years of reports and I would like to get rid of some of them. There must be some limit of liability to this industry or case law that would help in validating a time frame.”

Point taken. I confess that, in responding to Carol’s original question, I hadn’t even considered that the legion of home inspection pioneers who created this industry generated their reports the old-fashioned analog way. I’ll try to rectify that oversight with this post.

As I have repeatedly pointed out on this site and in home inspector training seminars, claims that are made against home inspectors almost never have any validity. And the proof of that can generally be found in the inspection report itself. It is the inspection report that is of inestimable help to me in responding to claims on behalf of home inspectors. So hanging on to them for some length of time is a matter of considerable self-interest.
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