joe ferry

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

My dad was born on January 15, 1898. Yesterday would have been his 114th birthday. To my considerable surprise, he died in 1983. Up until about 1980, I really expected him to make it to 100.

For one thing, he was never really sick. For another, he was still doing physically demanding labor even as he was turning 80.

About six months before his 80th birthday, I was vacationing in Ireland, both touring and visiting with family. One Sunday, my cousin Denis introduced me to a few of my father’s contemporaries who were hanging outside church after Mass,smoking and joking. Pointing to the Yank, Denis asked my dad’s friend and cousin Cormac McFadden if he knew who “that fellow there is.”

He hadn’t “a clue” and Denis told him “That’s Denis’s son, Joe!”
(more…)

The general over-the-top excitement bordering on mass hysteria that surrounds the turning of the calendar from one year to the next has always puzzled me. In fact, so un-into it am I that I am seldom awake when it happens. To me the whole cultural phenomenon is a vast waste of calories that could be put to much better use.

One such use that I heartily endorse is the making of New Year’s Resolutions, especially those that revolve around breaking bad habits and forming good ones.

Here are some that home inspectors should give some considerable thought to adopting.
(more…)

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.
(more…)