home inspector insurance

Disclaimers Are Your Business’ Best Protection

I encourage home inspectors to utilize the proper use of disclaimers – and go into it in some considerablTip 24 - Disclaimers Are Home Inspectors Best Friende detail – during my Law and Disorder Seminar.

A knowledgeable home inspector knows that there are many issues concerning a home-buying decision that are NOT going to be uncovered during a home inspection. Unfortunately, your clients don’t understand this fact.

That very real disconnect is the reason why home inspectors should be incorporating disclaimers into their practice. I go through a few examples of proper disclaimer usage during this week’s video blog.
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Home Inspector Selfie! Take More Photos During Home Inspection

Tip 23 - Home Inspector SelfieHome inspectors – I’m sure you are familiar with the “selfie” mantra of today’s youth. In essence, they love taking photos. You should have the same passion during a home inspection. Take photos of each room in the house, appliances, HVAC units and more. Take far more photos than required or that you will even put into the inspection report.

Why is taking so many photographs important from a legal perspective? I walk you through the protective process and highlight a specific home inspector’s plight in this week’s video blog.
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Don’t Indulge Rage-Induced Home Sellers

Don't Indulge Rage-Induced Home SellersI’m starting to see a very disturbing trend developing between the home inspection industry and the real estate marketplace: non-client home sellers are bringing claims against home inspectors for the failure of their clients to follow through on the agreement of sale as a consequence of the home inspector’s findings.

Some of these frustrated sellers, desperately attempting to unload a home in a still slowly recovering housing market, vent their fury at the home inspector for a lost sale in entirely inappropriate ways.

How should you, the competent home inspector just fulfilling your professional duty, handle these angry home sellers when a filed complaint comes your way?

I go through how to squash these unreasonable requests in full force in this week’s video blog.
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Why Your Home Inspector Insurance Company MUST Defend You

Your Insurance Company Must Defend YouA claim is brought against you after inspecting a vacant house, and your insurance company wants you to (surprise, surprise) settle it quickly and claim responsibility. However, you didn’t do anything wrong and instead want to fight the claim, but you are afraid your insurance company will bail if you don’t agree to settle.

False. I explain why your insurance company must defend you in this week’s ClaimsAcademy video blog.
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Don’t Create Problems Where None Exist

One aspect of human nature that has always baffled me is the tendency on the part of some people to create problems where none really exist, notwithstanding that I have been living with a member of that tribe for the last thirty-one-and-a-half years .

To these folks, a rainy day at the beach is an enormous problem. To me a big problem would be something, say, on the order of getting a leukemia diagnosis. Do you see the difference?

Several years ago, I was out sailing with some friends and one of them accidentally threw my anchor overboard. Unfortunately it wasn’t connected to the boat at the time. When he realized what he had done, he was extremely upset and nigh pathologically remorseful. I told him to forget about it. But he wouldn’t let it go.
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The Importance of Home Inspector E&O Insurance

I am continuously surprised at the number of inspectors who do not carry professional liability insurance or, as it is popularly known, Errors and Omissions Insurance for home inspectors (“E&O”). When I ask inspectors who attend my home inspector training at the Law and Disorder seminar whether or not they carry E & O insurance, between 40 and 60 percent of them say that they do not. That number is constantly diminishing, however, as more and more jurisdictions have introduced laws requiring that home inspectors become licensed and have made the carrying of E&O insurance a condition of licensure.Some inspectors who do not carry E&O would, perhaps, like to carry it but simply do not conduct enough inspections to be able to afford it. Those inspectors generally leave the profession when carrying professional liability insurance becomes a condition of having a license.

Many others do not carry it because they think that it is “too expensive” and/or that it “paints a target on your back” – that is, it makes you more likely to be sued than if you had no insurance.

Whether or not a given product is “too expensive” is something that individual consumers have to determine for themselves after conducting a cost-benefit analysis and considering competing products.
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