the house detective

contractor decides to do home inspection?

DEAR BRIAN: Before you bid on this inspection, you should consider the risks of an undertaking for which you have no specific training. The belief that construction experience is the only background needed to perform a home inspection is a common misconception that has led contractors into miry legal nightmares.

While home inspection requires knowledge that is fundamental to construction, the skills and protocols essential to home inspection are far different and are understood by few outside of the home inspection profession. Home inspection incorporates an intricate combination of disciplines, skills, and learning, of which general construction is only a part. Besides construction knowledge, an inspector must recognize and evaluate the symptoms of deterioration and wear that affect building materials and mechanics: conditions that would not be familiar to persons who deal primarily with new materials and products.

Home inspectors must also be familiar of building, plumbing, mechanical, electrical, and fire standards, and this knowledge cannot be confined to current building requirements only. Inspectors deal with buildings of all ages and must know which standards were in effect when a particular structure was built.

Above all, an inspector must have an acutely honed and thoroughly practiced sense of forensic observation, a skill that cannot be learned by any amount of construction experience. The capacity to identify sub equate with those of an experienced crime detective, likewise, it takes years of specialized training for a contractor to attain competence in the skills that pertain to home inspection.

To understanding more fully the broad scope of a detailed inspection, try to compose a complete list of the particular items you intend to evaluate in the course of your inspection. Then consider that a professional home inspector's list would include at least three hundred routine conditions, and these would only account for the most common of building defects. The actual number of significant conditions familiar to the trained eye of an experienced home inspector could easily be numbered in the thousands.

To embark upon a property inspection without prior experience, particularly a large complex of apartments, is to subject yourself to unseen legal liability. Your client will base a major purchase decision on your findings. Any defects that are not disclosed in your inspection report could be discovered at a later date, and you could be held financially accountable for the cost of correcting those conditions. Worse still, you could be held personally liable for the consequences of undisclosed safety hazards.

Consider these caveats before you undertake the complex demands of a highly specialized and unfamiliar profession. Your clients would be better served by someone thoroughly versed in the unique disciplines of home inspection.