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No Country For Old Inspectors

There is nothing like a road trip for restoring your faith in the future of this country and reminding you that, despite our manifold problems, the present is pretty awesome, too.

As I write this, I am sitting at the departure gate for my flight home to Philadelphia after having spent a few extra days in New Hampshire and Maine following the presentation of the Law and Disorder Seminar to about 25 home inspectors at the ASHI Northern New England Chapter’s Spring Conference in Eliot, Maine.

The inspectors who came to this seminar were all seasoned veterans and virtually all of them had had one or more bad experiences with an unreasonable client, a cowardly insurance company, an unprofessional real estate agent or a vindictive seller that had caused them considerable agita and cost them lots of money. In other words, this was a sampling with a margin of error of zero.

This, of course, is not exactly terra incognita to me. I am accustomed to inspectors being shocked, shocked that their insurance company would pay a bogus claim, or would immediately offer their deductible to the complaining former client, or would assign them an attorney “who didn’t seem to know anything about home inspections” and who would churn the file, running up legal fees for years, before eventually caving in and settling the case for “nuisance value.”

And I am completely inured to the astonished reaction from veteran inspectors who are hearing for the very first time in their inspection careers that there is no longer any reason for them to stand for this nonsense. That there is a new sheriff in town! That their days of routinely refunding inspection fees are over!
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Accept No Substitutes

The other day, I got a call from an old friend and a long-time ClaimIntercept™ subscriber. He had been contacted by an E & O insurance monger retailing a product with a price that he found attractive and he wanted to talk to me about it.

I had never heard of the company but that is certainly not a disqualifying factor. After all, there was a time in my life when I had never heard of The Travelers. That’s another way of saying that there are lots of insurance companies that I have never heard of — and that you have never heard of — that are good quality, financially sound companies that serve niche markets and do so very professionally. It’s a big competitive world. What a country!

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Karma is Hell

“What goes around, comes around” is a popular expression where I come from. It is a celebration of comeuppance, the schadenfreude one feels when, every so often, some bad deeds do not go unpunished.

About fifteen months ago, one of my ClaimIntercept™ subscribers had gotten a demand letter from someone for whom he had performed a home inspection. The claim was prototypical of a home inspection claim in that it had no merit as to the home inspector and very likely none to either of the other targets, the seller of the home and the listing agent.

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Inspection Agreements: Is There Anything They Can’t Do?

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.
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Good News for Arizona Home Inspectors! Not!

“Good News for Arizona Home Inspectors!” was the headline on a blurb sent to members of Arizona ASHI. What was the “Good News”? The Arizona State Board of Technical Registration – the guys who impose preposterous punishments on home inspectors who have had the misfortune of being the subject of a complaint by their delusional clients – had been operating under the truly ludicrous notion that there should be no statute of limitations for home inspections. In other words, to the citrulls on the Board, you should be subject to suit for a claimed negligent inspection until the end of time. And beyond.

How professional licensing boards always manage to comprise a startlingly large number of knuckleheads would be, it seems to me, an interesting avenue of scholarly inquiry for some enterprising doctoral student.

So the “Good News” for Sun Devil inspectors is that the Arizona State Legislature has reduced the time within which a home inspection claim can be brought from whenever and forever to four years. While four years is a damn sight better than the incumbent standard, which remains in full force and effect until the legislative session mercifully ends, pardon me if I seem underwhelmed by this legislation.
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The Kamikaze Claimant

One reads a lot of news stories nowadays about people who engage in so-called “self-destructive” behavior. I’m prone to feel sorry for these folks who can’t seem to help themselves, providing that the destructive behavior is self-confined, as well.

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case and the self-destructive behavior invariably causes collateral damage to other innocent bystanders.

I sometimes see home inspection claimants engaging in self-destructive behavior when they allow their perhaps understandable annoyance at the development of some unexpected problem with one of the systems in their new residence to morph into a full-throated and completely unwarranted attack on their home inspector’s level of professionalism.
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Another Groundhog Day

Since our kids have grown into responsible adults and are no longer needing or wanting to be around us for longer than necessary, Lady Agag and I have been spending more of our time at the seaside, especially in the so-called shoulder seasons of May-June and September-October.

At the moment, we are half-way through what local meteorologists are calling “the best week of the year” weather-wise at the New Jersey shore. I cannot disagree. The temperature has been a very-tolerable-for-Irishmen eighty-ish and the humidity has been blessedly low every day so far and it is forecast to continue so. It’s a bit like Groundhog Day.
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Pre-Inspections for Relocation Companies

A home inspector recently emailed me with a question about doing pre-inspections for relocation companies. I referred him to a prior post that I wrote on the subject which answered his question. But it reminded me of several cases that I have had involving inspection companies that subcontract out inspections on behalf of relocation companies.

Based on the experience of those cases, if I were a home inspector, I would steer well clear of doing inspections for one of those outfits. For several reasons.

First, in order to get the business from relocation companies, they drop their pants on pricing precipitously. So the inspector who actually does the inspection is very likely losing money on the proposition.

Second, their loyalty is to the relocation company, not the inspector. So the minute that there is an “issue”, they are all too willing, ready and able to adopt a customer-is-always-right attitude despite the mountain of empirical evidence that I have assembled that, when it comes to dissatisfied home inspection clients, the customer is invariably wrong.
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Joe Ferry’s Fight For YOU Against Meritless Home Inspection Claims

People ask me regularly to explain my business’ mission – and while the end result is easy to quantify (get rid of meritless home inspection claims), its power is best rooted through video, as you can see below in this video that clearly answers WHAT I do and WHY you need me on your side! My interest is in squashing these meritless home inspection claims before they destroy the professional reputation and livelihood of home inspectors across the country.

99% of ALL home inspection claims have NO merit – and you shouldn’t have to fork over valuable capital or lose your insurance deductible to a claim that has NO merit!

Click ‘More’ to watch why you need Joe Ferry on your side.
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Subrogation Claims Against Home Inspectors

To the ever expanding list of rent seekers that Home Inspectors have to fend off, please add insurance companies that have paid a first-party claim on behalf of a homeowner and then want to recover that payment from the home inspector through subrogation.

Subrogation is a legal concept whereby one party – the subrogee – succeeds to the rights of another – the subrogor – either by operation of law or by contract. The most familiar examples of this concept involve insurance companies that pay losses sustained by policyholders and then seek to recover those payments from tortfeasors that may be legally liable for the policyholder’s loss. The insurance company by virtue of its payment would succeed to the policyholder’s rights against the tortfeasor.

Thus, if an insurance company paid a collision loss on behalf of its policyholder who was not at fault in the accident, it can seek to recover that payment through subrogation from the driver who had actually caused the accident. Health insurance companies and workers compensation insurance companies who pay medical bills on behalf of their insureds will endeavor to recover those outlays from parties who may be legally responsible for causing their insureds’s injuries.
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