Originally Posted By: Benzadmiral
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Real estate broker here. I get this a lot and it's really the exact opposite of what everyone else is recommending. About 2/3s of the time I end up recommending an inspector and I only recommend good ones. I've been at this for over 10 years, have a degree in electrical engineering and own 10+ units. Most of the inspectors I recommend have a contractor's license and are also certified for pest inspections. Never had anyone tell me after the sale that the inspector was bad. The worse inspectors I've run into are the ones that the buyers pick themselves. At least in this state, the inspectors have to be licensed so you just can't pick anyone random person like a fireman. I really wonder if they know their heating systems or know what might be asbestos. The bad ones either miss things or say things are bad when they're not. Had one inspector say the heating system was bad because he couldn't get it started up. I started it up for him and it was fine. It was a foreclosed building so when the heating system is off for a while, you get air in the gas lines and the system won't fire up. All he had to do was fire it up again as it took a while for the gas to actually get to the furnace.
When you get inspectors that realtors won't recommend, they end up saying everything is bad so you end up using them again.
It doesn't really bother me if the buyer picks their own inspector, there's actually less liability and if it's really bad, it's the buyer that picked the inspector.
In general, most of the inspectors are pretty good, there's only a couple that I wouldn't recommend. The real difference is the amount of time that the inspector will spend at the place. Some just blow through the whole place in 45 minutes to an hour. The good ones will take at least an hour to an hour and half even for a small place. Did one not too long ago where it took 5 hours, but it was a big place.
Wolf,
Thanks for the input. So going with someone my agent recommends isn't necessarily a bad thing, then? I was going on analogy to "You don't want a pre-purchase inspection done by the used-car dealer you're buying the car from." I didn't want to hunt up someone nobody would recommend -- I just was thinking, avoid going with the inspector recommended by the guy whose commission depends on the report.
If I check the Yellow Pages (yes, I'm Old School) and look for licensed contractors, then find my agent has recommended one of them, it's not necessarily a problem, then?
I usually recommend a couple, that way the buyer still ends up picking one. Same thing, less liability. You could actually interview the inspector to see how good they are. Like how long they've been doing it and what experience they have in the trades. Like I said, the ones I recommend had a contractor's license so they do know construction. You don't need a contractor's license in order to get a home inspector's license. What ends up happening there is that the inspector just doesn't know and just says that he recommends further inspection. So you might wasting more time and energy on getting a 2nd opinion because your inspector isn't sure due to lack of experience. Sometimes it basically boils down to cost, my really good inspector isn't cheap. If you get the cheap one, he still does it by the book, but blows through it or doesn't give much detail. Had one cheap inspector completely miss a second cooling system, one was in the attic and the second was in the basement, buyer called him and he came back. I didn't recommend the guy so I could laugh a little.
