The Best Way to Find a Professional Home Inspector

The Best Way to Find a Professional Home Inspector

As the would-be buyer of a new home, it is not only your right, but your responsibility to ensure your future investment against structural problems. Whether they be immediate, near future, or even many years down the line, identifying and understanding the possible faults that may be included in your home purchase is essential to avoiding difficulty and making home ownership the dream it should be.

In this endeavor, the only secure route is to find a professional, well qualified home inspector to assess the structural integrity of your possible purchase. Capable home inspectors should meet a small, but exclusive, range of criteria that separates a part time carpenter or contractor from a full fledged home inspector.

This criteria includes professional membership in an accredited inspector organization, certification from an institution that demands excellence, insurance to cover any mistakes that cannot be avoided, and the ability to provide a written guarantee while avoiding any conflict of interest issues.

Professional home inspector organizations include a few industry-known agencies that strive for excellence in their members. Perhaps the most well known is the American Society of Home Inspectors, or ASHI, which requires its members to qualify by taking and scoring well on certain tests, but only after successfully completing a certain number of home inspections already.

The National Institute of Building Inspectors-NIBI-is another well known organization, that demands its members be insured and certified through its own certification process.

Insurance takes the form of Error and Omission coverage, which, as it states, prevents mistakes in lack of observation from costing the home buyer. Coverage also simultaneously guarantees that the inspector is competent, as insurance companies will not cover an inspector that repeatedly makes mistakes.

Any errors found after inspection and purchase are rendered moot-in the light of obtaining insurance or reimbursement-if the inspection is not documented and signed by the inspector, however. Professional inspectors will never shy away from, and will often volunteer, written inspections that are signed off on by their own hand.

Professionals that double as contractors sometimes avoid documentation as a means of being first in line to handle repairs. It is therefore, important, that a professional home inspector be just that, and only that, to avoid any conflicts of interest when assessing your possible purchase’s value.