Over the past two weeks, I've had numerous people share a recent home inspector-bashing article with me. This article gave some unsurprising statistics followed by two anecdotes of home inspectors who were probably bad at their job. There are two versions of this article floating around; the first version is basically an admonishment about home inspectors giving incorrect information. The second version is about 25% longer and has some patently incorrect information. Unfortunately, this article has been picked up by several news outlets, helping to redistribute this bad information.
Combine the incorrect information with a slant that makes home inspectors look bad, and you end up with a lot of whipped-up home inspectors. And yes, you can put me in that group.
The article starts out by saying that 1 out of every 20 real estate sales contracts blows up, and nearly one-third of those are the result of the home inspection. In other words, maybe 1 out of 60, or approximately 1.6% of deals fall apart because of the home inspection. The article calls this a sobering fact, perhaps because this should sound like a high number, but it actually sounds low to me. The article then goes on to concede that most of these inspections probably turned up legitimate stuff. So that's a good thing, right?
These are alternate titles to the same article, found on various other news outlets The next part of the article shares a couple of second-hand stories from bloggers about home inspectors who did some stupid stuff. Yep, you can find examples of bad apples in every trade and every profession. There's no getting around that.
That's where the first version of the article, shown above, ended. The second version of the article is the one that contains incorrect information about standards for home inspections. That's the version that got all of the shares. Here's one of them: Home inspectors need to play by rules. The screen shot at right shows a few more of the titles floating around.
InterNACHI and life expectancy
The second version of this article says "under widely recognized professional rules of conduct, inspectors are not supposed to "determine the life expectancy of any component or system." I have several things to clarify here. First, by "widely recognized professional rules of conduct," I'm assuming the inspector being quoted is referring to the InterNACHI Home Inspection Standards of Practice (SOP), as these standards are referenced later on in the article. Second, the InterNACHI SOP says, under section 2.2.I.A: The inspector is not required to determine: the service life expectancy of any component or system.
So does this mean that home inspectors who choose to follow these standards are "not playing by the rules" if they report stuff that's at the end of its life? No. Does it mean that home inspectors are "not supposed to" report on systems and components that are at the end of their life, as stated in the article? Absolutely not.
According to Nick Gromicko, founder of InterNACHI, the InterNACHI SOP does not prevent a home inspector from reporting on components that are at the end of their life. The standards simply do not require a home inspector to do this. If a home inspector decides to do this, they're still "playing by the rules".
