Lockton Affinity

3 Ways a Home Inspector Can Eliminate Anxiety and Sleepless Nights

Ways to Reduce Anxiety and Sleepless NightsAs a professional home inspector who cares about your craft, the anxiety center in your brain likely never turns off. It causes you to sit up or pace the halls at 2 a.m. unable to sleep and left wondering if you missed a leaky pipe or something else critical during a home inspection the preceding day.

A client, who is all too interested in whether you are insured, is likely to trigger this anxiety center. And this client isn’t an anomaly, but rather the type A client you see and hear from time and time again.

How can you reduce this anxiety and work without worry? Follow a few simple cardinal rules I outline in this week’s ClaimsAcademy video blog.

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E&O Insurance Is Even For The Mistake-Proof Home Inspector

E&O Insurance for the Mistake-ProofHome inspectors often ask me, “Should I have professional liability insurance?”

Conceptually speaking, anyone who offers professional services for a fee has potential liability exposure of unknown magnitude. The genius of insurance, however, is that it converts an uncertain, potentially devastating loss into a known, small cost for which you can budget.

With that said, many inspectors still inquire about E&O insurance’s relevancy and necessity in the profession. I detail the pros of having E&O insurance as part of your liability protection in this week’s video blog.
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Make Sure Your Clients Read the Inspection Report

Read Home Inspection ReportA home inspector’s friend was recently buying a home and had a home inspection completed. However, he never read the inspection report!

When he took ownership of the home, he discovered a huge crack in the kitchen’s granite countertop, a defect that was never disclosed on the seller’s disclosure, BUT was detailed in the unread home inspection report.

What recourse, if any, does the new homeowner have? I detail what happens next as well as the importance of reading a home inspection report in this week’s video blog.
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Underbussing is Now a Reality TV Show!

HGTV Show Underbusses Home InspectorsThere is a current television show whose host maligns home inspectors for not discovering defects he was only able to discover through using a sledgehammer and other intrusive means.

Home inspectors were immediately taken aback by the show’s message, and rightfully so. Several asked me to watch a few episodes to gauge how the show would play in the meritless claim game.

After watching a few episodes, and switching between disbelief and comedic release at the host’s house destruction, I came to a firm conclusion.
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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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