Fun With Home Inspectors

Update:

After some coaxing this morning, the inspection company abliged our request to re-inspect the property and add to the final report the necessary items that were presumed to have been missed during the initial inspection.

All is well that ends well.

Original Post:

After making a purchase decision on a place in FL, I arranged for 2 separate home inspections last week:

1. General inspection to ensure that nothing requires repair and that the home is structurally sound (standard stuff).

2. Wood destroying organism inspection to check for termites, beetles, mold and other living things that can destroy a home.

The general inspection happened on Friday and the termite inspection was completed on Monday, after a weekend of torrential rain storms. It turned out that the termite inspector found several items that the first inspector should have found, but weren’t related to his “wood destroying organism” report, so he couldn’t and wouldn’t write them up in his report. Figuring that this made sense, I called the other inspection company, explained the situation and asked that they send their inspector out to the property to verify the termite guy’s findings and amend their original report.

What happened next was that the first inspection company questioned the qualifications of the termite inspector, then suggested that it would cost me an additional $150 for a “re-inspection” (this would be on top of the $360 that I already paid them for the first inspection).

When we spoke with the inspector who did the inspection last Friday, he seemed genuinely regretful that he missed something, but explained that he would need authorization from his supervisor to come back out to the property and document the defects that he missed.

This seems a little screwed up to me. The interesting part about it is that we are talking about simple things that anyone who has ever owned or lived in any house would notice…

- A missing screen which is allowing vermin to enter a crawl space on the side of the home.

- A small roof leak that only became apparent after the rain storms that occurred over the weekend.

6 hours after our initial discussion today, I haven’t received a response as to whether they are coming back to finish the job, or not. We’ll have to see what happens tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even publish the name of the inspection company as an extension of gratitude.