PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
So Beon, we have some important stuff to talk about today, but before we get into that, I would like to talk about, and I mean this with all due respect, Inspectacles, for those who don’t know…

Beon DeNood
This is not our word, just so you know.

Ian Robertson
No, this is actually trademarked, which makes us so much better. Nick Gromicko, if you’re listening, I’m sorry, buddy. He came out with a new product called Inspectacles. You guys gotta look this up, everybody listening, because I first saw it and I thought it was a joke, but it’s actually metaglasses, so you know those AI glasses where you look at things and you can talk to it and they’ll tell you stuff. But they built in with InterNACHI stuff now, and so they’re calling them Inspectacles. And guess what, they come in pairs.

Beon DeNood
So, I have a theory on this. Nick Gromicko, in all his diabolical brilliance, he probably had a moment like this in mind exactly to advance marketing of the product, that was probably what he was looking to do.

Ian Robertson
Maybe, or it was a marketing blind spot, like every company has ever had, where you release it and everybody sits in a boardroom and they’re like, this is amazing, how did nobody think of this before.

Beon DeNood
I mean, there’s so many different ways you could have gone with that, but you know, to end up on that, yeah, that’s quite something.

Ian Robertson
I mean, how’s the advertising gonna go? Get yourself a pair of Inspectacles! I have so many other jokes that I probably shouldn’t say on the air, because we’re PG, right? Yeah. Oh my.

Beon DeNood
We don’t want this episode to get stuck, but yeah.

Ian Robertson
They’re only for men, everybody. I’m sorry, but Nick has excluded all female inspectors. I’m sorry, I could barely breathe there for a minute. My wife is like, you’re just cracking yourself up. I’m just walking around the office, just making up new Inspectacle jokes.

Beon DeNood
I’m battling between looking complicit, and trying to fight the urge to open my mouth and say anything. Just so you know, I’m always nervous in the intro for a show, because Ian never tells me what he’s going to talk about, so it’s like, you know, that nervous look I have right at the beginning of the show. I literally have no idea what’s coming. So here we are yet again.

Ian Robertson
Well, it’s perfect. We’re going to talk about Inspectacles. But can you imagine like being on the inspection and you have to give your Inspectacles commands, like Alexa? You say, Alexa, tell me about this, and your client walks in, not knowing what the heck is going on, and you’re just walking around the house, going, Inspectacles, tell me what’s next. Inspectacles, identify this, just yelling at your Inpectacles, and they have no idea what’s happening.

Beon DeNood
Oh man, yeah.

Ian Robertson
What were we supposed to talk about on this show? We should just do an episode on Inspectacles.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, we’ll do an unboxing and a review, so you know, we’ll make that a special episode.

Ian Robertson
That’s a real kick to the Inspectacles.

Beon DeNood
So, are they just like metaglasses that have been customized? They’re just metaglasses.

Ian Robertson
But they’re customized, you know how you can have them for different industries and stuff like that. So, they pre-upload them with everything. So, I don’t know, they’re on pre-order. So, Nick, if you’re listening, I’m sorry. Probably a great product, I have no idea, but hysterical name, and I think you should totally lean into that marketing. If you want, I’ll sit on the board of marketing for you, free of charge, just for the entertainment value of coming up with your marketing for that product. Anyways.

Beon DeNood
Anyways.

Ian Robertson
So that actually leads me into our podcast, ironically enough. We’re gonna talk about a couple of things. We have, obviously our market outlook for the real estate market, but before that, there’s a new bill that’s getting pushed through, and it’s a federal bill, which has a big impact on us over the next two or so years, some immediately, emotionally speaking for the market, and some, you know, physically speaking. But before that, I wanted to talk about the state of the industry, which Inpectacles lead me to the state of the industry.

Beon DeNood
All right, is that where we’re at?

Ian Robertson
I’m sorry, I can’t say that. So things are changing quickly, and some things are reverting back. So I was doing research for today, and if you go back, I don’t know, four seasons ago, or so I’m guessing, we did a podcast on, we’re not charging enough. And we brought out that I would see invoices for home inspections back in the 90s. I remember one of my clients brought it out, and he showed me it was like $300, $350. I was looking it up today, and if you go by certain numbers, I mean, everybody has numbers all over the place, but I’ll explain in a second. The average cost of a home inspection has gone back down to 350-ish.

Beon DeNood
Are you serious? Because we had made it to, like, what, mid-400s a little bit ago.

Ian Robertson
Mid-400s, but you have to qualify it. You have to look at each one of the studies, where they get those numbers from. Because there’s a difference between the cost of a home inspection and the overall home inspection bill.

Beon DeNood
Oh, I see. Okay.

Ian Robertson
So your home inspection can be $300, $350 but you add on a $200 sewer scope, or you add on $100 of wood destroying insect inspection, whatever. That’s actually where we get the four-hundred-some-odd-dollar number from. So, it depends on who you go by, but $350 to just below $400 is what on average we’re seeing. I mean, anecdotally, one of my favorite words, I look at inspectors’ invoices, it’s about right. I’m actually a little shocked by it, but we did see it go up, it was right around $400 and you can look and see, starting from the time period that AI started to be heavily used, not when it came out, but when it started to be heavily used, a slow plateau, and then a slow decline, and then a quick dip this year. We’re making the same in 2026 dollar for dollar as we were in 1990s. So to put that in perspective, I mean, I’d have to do the calculations, but we’re probably making half of what we would in the 90s for purchasing power, because of inflation. I mean, in the 1990s you could buy a house for under $100,000 and a nice one, you know. Now, an average house is almost $400,000.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Everybody can do their own math, but you know, we’ve been talking about that for the past couple of years, about how too heavily AI driven will eventually be the undoing of our industry. We can’t ignore it. We can make it a very powerful tool, but handing it over completely is a different story. What are your thoughts on that, Beon?

Beon DeNood
Yeah, it’s interesting. So, you think one of the aspects of driving the price down is the fact that we have AI, which lowers the, well, I guess it makes it faster, lower effort, or maybe lower barrier to entry, all of those, all of the above.

Ian Robertson
All of those. Yeah.

Beon DeNood
Yeah. I mean, in the industrialization age, it was a similar thing, right? Instead of having handmade goods that took X amount of time to build, I mean, we see it even now, things just got a lot cheaper, so much cheaper, because it was so much easier to actually put together. And that is happening with AI in a lot of industries, including this one, and it’s interesting, but it makes handmade a premium product, right? So you can buy something that is real cheap, manufactured, and you know you’re paying a low price, you buy it on wherever, Amazon, and you know this thing’s not going to be the greatest quality, but it’s going to work, you know. Or you’re like, wait, no, I need a premium product, I’m going to look for, made in the USA, handmade, you know, premium product. And we probably will see a similar kind of divide happening in the industry, where you’re going to have your more premium traditional home inspection service, and then your kind of bottom of the market pricing, in and out. You know as a consumer, it’s not going to be the super Cadillac, but it’s going to make sure nothing’s going to blow up kind of thing, you hope. So, I don’t know what that exactly means for for everyone, and you know, how it’s going to evolve. We probably will see something like that evolve. At least that’s the way I see it may be.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, and you’re spot on. We’re talked about the divide that’s coming, so it’s not the destruction of our industry, but it’s gonna be a drastic change to it. The reason I’m bringing it up in this podcast is, I have not seen a faster change in our industry than I have in the past six months. So, this is at the end of quarter two, so we’re doing Q3 outlook. I think by this time next year we’re going to see a bigger change, because that divide, it’s getting deep. There’s very little middle ground anymore of, I’m just a solo inspector, I charge a little bit more than everybody else, and that’s it. It’s going to be, you know, Amazon Basics, where you order it for $5 batteries, or you know, the $55 batteries, because you know they’re going to work better. And I think that’s a great illustration you brought out. I buy batteries for my game cameras, they’ll last all winter. I pay extra, I never get a bad pack, whatever. Amazon basic batteries, I also buy those for stuff I don’t care, but they die quick. Half of them don’t work when you pull them out of the package. Package is destroyed, you don’t care because they’re so cheap.

Beon DeNood
Right.

Ian Robertson
We’re gonna see a lot of that. There was a home inspector advertising that he did six inspections in a day.

Beon DeNood
Wow.

Ian Robertson
Then he proved it.

Beon DeNood
Wow.

Ian Robertson
But I believe him. But you know what that does is it creates two things, it makes it easier for us to do more inspections, and it also makes the barrier for entry, as you mentioned, easier to get through. So, a guy that used to have to work maybe a year or two to become really good can now start off running with $150 inspection fee, and having AI write comments to make him sound like a genius, but not understanding what those comments are. So he’s going to take the low end of the market, the middle of the market is going to pick one under the other. The guy who’s using AI as a tool and still doing a reasonable number of inspections and being able to stand by his comments and understand things, he’s going to be able to charge a premium. So we’re going to see a completely different inspector inspect a 2000 square foot average home compared to somebody who’s doing these nice homes charging, you know, $1,000, $2,000 for an inspection. It’s going to be a deep divide, and it’s happening faster this year than in years past.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, it’s an interesting evolution, because then you think about it from a home inspector point of view. If you have been around for a long time, you’ve got experience, and you can offer a more premium product. I guess a lot of it comes down to how you position yourself in the market, with your marketing, with your pricing, all that kind of thing. But you know, if you’re newer and you’re powered by AI, you’re going to try to punch way above your weight as well, you know, so it does kind of blur the lines from a consumer perspective, which makes your reputation, your reviews, that trust factor, that becomes the big differentiator, I guess, maybe along with whatever other guarantees and things you put on your product. But I don’t know, I’m just talking off the cuff here, I’m just trying to think of how that looks to differentiate yourself. It really, it would require time to build up that trust factor, where you become known as the premium choice, because everybody could technically look the same when you land on their website, or on their pages, or social pages, or whatever.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I think most guys, you can tell when you land on their website, which category the consumer is going to see them in. You know, you land on a website, and it’s a basic Wix website, and it’s all choppy and weird, and they’re like, okay, I’m getting an AI report. Yeah, but it’s kind of, I relate it to, there’s a friend of mine who, actually a mutual friend, he’s a broker for franchises, and one of the franchises he was telling me about was a painting company, and I immediately said, oh, like College Pro Painting? And he laughed, and he goes, no. These guys, College Pro Painters, is a franchise that will hire college students in the summer to paint houses. If you’ve ever seen them work, it looks like 30 college students painting a house. It’s insane. It’s like ants. They’re like, they don’t touch a house for under $16,000 for what most people would charge $5,000 for.

Beon DeNood
Wow.

Ian Robertson
And he goes, and they make a fantastic business by being painters that charge almost $100 an hour. They’re like, it’s clean, you don’t have to worry about the guys, the work is perfect, but it’s funny because I see College Pro Painters everywhere. There’s room for both the high end market and the low end market. There’s going to be the College Pro home inspection company, where you’re going to have them, I said this years ago, as AI emerged, I said we’re going to have companies like Inspectify, they’re going to hire college students, 150 bucks, do the inspection, because all they really care about is getting the data. They pay the college student, it’s a terrible inspection, but they have their Inspectacles on their face.

Beon DeNood
That may help in their situation. Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Okay, I gotta compose myself. So they’re gonna have that, and it’s gonna video record everything, it’s gonna have screenshots of all the areas, it’s gonna write the report, and that’s it. I mean, so it’s College Pro Painters. So there’s gonna be room for both of us, the high end and the low end, but at the same time it’s going to be a messy transition, and it already is. I’ve never seen this many new inspectors on the market, but I have not seen somebody ask the question, how should I write this up, or can somebody help me understand this, in probably months.

Beon DeNood
You see, and that’s an interesting point, because the same tools that are being made available to inspectors who are relatively green, but can lean on AI. Let’s not forget that homeowners also have access to those tools, and those tools are going to be increasing even more, so that you know, hey, don’t worry about hiring a home inspector, you can do something yourself with AI, you know. So I guess from a consumer perspective, you have all these different levels, and you’re gonna know what you’re getting out of it, you know, like anything, right? I need a new table. Well, I can go down to Home Depot and buy the lumber, and I can make the thing myself, or I can go to the cheap furniture store, and go buy one that’s going to last a couple of years, or I can go to the premium furniture store, have a custom one made. You know, there’s a market for each product, and it’s probably going to be very much the same in this industry as well.

Ian Robertson
And there is room. The issue was before there wasn’t room for the DIY inspection up until basically right now, there was no room for it. There are homeowners out there that just video record a walkthrough in the house and then pump it into AI, and there’s some powerful AI models out there. I’m not talking about the cheap, you know, free ChatGPT or whatever, they’re paying for good models, and I’ve seen it. It’ll get them 70% of the way. So, give it time, and it’ll be more. So, there’s room for it. But the DIY, there was no market share before. So, it’s not the end of our industry. It’s not doom and gloom. But anybody who’s listening, just kind of keep that in mind. Now’s the time to differentiate yourself, because it’s an opportunity. There’s only so much room in the high end of the market. If we’re putting ourselves in the low end of the market, that’s going to be a hard spot to compete on with the DIYers and big companies that are going to have 500 inspectors across seven states doing six inspections a day.

Beon DeNood
Right.

Ian Robertson
But that was something I wanted to kind of just cover a little bit, because we didn’t have enough metrics to go on up until this quarterly report. This year has been drastic in the changes, and there’s going to be services coming out relatively soon that’ll probably make us a little bit nervous, but only if we’re on the bottom end of things.

Beon DeNood
Yeah. And I mean, then there’s some inspections that just always require a human with a degree of experience in the loop, you know. And that’s either industry mandated formats for inspections, or state mandated requirements, or whatever the case is, that will sort of prevent the thing from just falling apart completely in some places, I mean, not that we expect that that’s going to happen, but that regulation is there that will affect maybe how it ends up being shaped from state to state, depending, and then market to market, you know, depending on the average value of the home and the net worth of the of the buyers who are paying for inspections, you know, how much they’re willing to lay out. There’s all kinds of factors. But it is not a situation unique to the home inspection market. I mean, I think even just of the software industry, the exact same thing is happening. You know, people are our vibe coding apps and actually being successful, but you know, can they scale those long term? Many can’t, you know, so there’s still room for the DIYer, the new guy who’s punching above his weight, relying heavily on AI, and then your experienced, you know, operator who can architect stuff, also augmented by AI that can be trusted. So, yeah, it’s an interesting dynamic that’s being observed across the board in a lot of industries.

Ian Robertson
Well, and we also don’t want anybody listening to think that we’re trying to be a downer, but I did want to talk about this too, because all I see people talk about is how amazing AI is for our industry. Every podcaster, like, oh, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this. At some point, we need to step back and look at the reality of it. As Winston Churchill said, those who feed the crocodile hope that the crocodile eats them last. I quote that all the time with AI. We feed our industry to the greater crocodile. The reason that AI knows how to inspect so well and write reports for it so well is we fed it our content by the software provider that we chose, by punching our comments into AI in general, it’s a learning model, it’s what it does. So it’s here, it’s not going anywhere. We can’t change the trajectory of the whole thing, but it is important that if we’re not adding other value by being boutique, being better at our jobs, and more importantly, adding things like you just talked about. You can’t have AI and some college kid do a proper sewer scope, do a septic inspect. I mean, you can, but they’re going to do a terrible job. They’re going to have a hard time locating it. Add the things that take skill or legal requirements, the roof certifications and WDI reports, the NPMA-33, all these other things AI is not going to be able to provide to some guy off the street. I almost called it the wrong word, Inspectacles.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, no, that’s very true. And I mean, you can leverage, it’s a tool, you know, so if you leverage it correctly, you can actually come out way ahead of where you were. You just have to go about it in a calculated way, understand how it is affecting the market, you know. And this is what this perspective is. It’s the macro view of how it’s affecting the market at large. Once you understand that, you’ll understand better how to leverage it for you to stay ahead in your market, you know, like the guy who was creating custom furniture, and the cheap furniture producer moved into town. They didn’t just abandon their business, they adjusted their model, you know, to be able to see it as an advantage, and it’s the same here.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. So I thought that was a good point to start off on, but getting into the nitty gritty of the market outlook on things, maybe we’ll skip that bill for just a minute, because I wanted to bring out some interesting information. So, we’ve been waiting for it to be a buyer’s market for as home inspectors, that’s where we get our business from, and it is still getting there. So, the median US housing payment has risen to $2,647 a month.

Beon DeNood
Median, that’s crazy.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, that’s the median. All right, so to put that in perspective, that is $31,764 a year. So, depending on where you live, that is half your household income before taxes. I think it’s $80,000 or so, is across the US if you average it out, so it’s almost half, but after taxes it’s more than half. So I go by that number and not the average cost of a house, because that’s important. It’s the combination of overpriced housing stock and interest rates being high, but interest rates are not the issue. Housing is too expensive, it’s still over $400,000 for the average house, so it’s affordability, but that does some good things for us. So the median sale price, this is from Redfin, the median sale price rose 2.3% year over year to a record high of $403,889. The weekly mortgage rate is 6.52% which, by the way, if you bought a house in the 90s or early 2000s or 90s, rather 80s and 90s, you would have been paying 10, 11%. These are still historically low interest rates that we as a generation just see as being high.

Beon DeNood
And globally still very low.

Ian Robertson
Globally, yeah, we just can’t sustain interest rates that are the same rate as inflation. It’s just not sustainable.

Beon DeNood
Right.

Ian Robertson
But because of that, buyers are backing off. Houses are sitting on the market for longer. There’s a house down the road from me that just a year or two ago would have been there for maybe a week, just to get all the offers. It’s been on the market now, month and a half. Then they rehabbed it during it, and then they tried to sell it again. Not rehab, but you know, they freshened it up a little bit with some paint and putty, so to speak. Things are just sitting there longer. So, pending home sales are down 0.6% week over week for the fifth straight week of declines. That’s a lot. Houses are coming off the market, and I mean, there’s a ton of numbers here, I’m not going to go through it, but basically agents are starting to tell their sellers, price competitively, you need to work to attract buyers now.

Beon DeNood
Interesting, and that’s from the first quarter of this year, or like second quarter in retrospective, those numbers.

Ian Robertson
No, this is year to date.

Beon DeNood
Oh, year to date. Okay. Wow, interesting.

Ian Robertson
Yep. Year to date, so two quarters. But the numbers are, if anybody listening wants to look this up, daily average 30 year fixed mortgage. Yeah, it’s year to date. It’s on Redfin, and I usually go a lot by Redfin’s numbers. They produce, I don’t know, a more understandable number set than a lot of the other companies. But what that means, though, is that we are reaching into a buyer’s market.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Pre-listing inspections are slowly still coming back, but the reason we haven’t seen an increase in home inspections yet, we’re in that weird middle ground where houses are coming off the market, people are accepting the higher interest rates, and people aren’t buying the houses because they’re waiting, so it affects how many houses close.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
But not many people skipping inspections, so that’s good.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, I think when you’re investing so much money, and like you said, you translated it down to what does it look like as a monthly payment. If you are taking that significant a portion of your paycheck into an asset, you’re gonna want to make sure the thing’s solid. So understandably, we’ll see that pressure there to perform home inspections and not skip them.

Ian Robertson
Okay, so let’s talk about that from our client’s perspective. This is why we could tie in the first point about home inspections. There’ll always be a bottom market for it, and it’s not necessarily the consumer’s fault, but if you have $80,000 of household income, $31,000 of that goes to your house. That doesn’t include your bills and groceries and all that stuff. So, let’s say you’re left with 50,000. What are taxes on $80,000, Beon, 15?

Beon DeNood
I don’t know, probably close, yeah.

Ian Robertson
And then you have property taxes, all that stuff. So, let’s say conservatively, $31,000, property taxes, average it out throughout the country, let’s say $15,000 for your actual federal and state taxes, depending on where you live. I mean, what are we up to? That’s almost $50,000. It’s like high 40s. That’s insane.

Beon DeNood
I mean, that leaves you enough for maybe conservative groceries. That’s it, you know. Forget about anything else.

Ian Robertson
Well, so, $30,000, how is somebody gonna buy the premium home inspector when at the end of the day they’re like, I have $30,000 to live on, and it’s not like rent is getting cheaper. I have a friend who rents, and his apartment, his two-bedroom, 900 square foot apartment, in an area where rent isn’t that high, has gone up to $2,500.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
So for him, he’s just like, I might as well buy a house, it’s only $100 more a month. But then the average homeowner spends anywhere from three to $800 a month on average on maintenance, so you add another, on the low end, $3,600 a year. But either way, $30,000, I mean, that’s not a lot to live on, especially if you have kids.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
You have gas, you have car payment, you have car repairs. I mean, you got to have some sort of medical insurance, or if you don’t, you got to pay for it when you need stitches.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
You’re in the negative.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, and then let’s not forget the, I mean, if you’re doing at the very least ten down, you got to have that, you know, that eight to ten grand available to put down for the purchase as well, and a lot of folks have burned through a lot of that, you know, so they’re in rough shape, but yeah, I mean, it really doesn’t leave one anything. I mean, I would never have thought years ago that earning the amount of money that one does nowadays, you’d think, wow, you know, that’s awesome, the numbers look good, but it’s in and out, you know, just because of the cost of living. So, for someone in that situation, if you’re putting such a massive chunk aside just for your housing, goodness me, yeah, you end up with nothing much left over.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. And remember, that’s the median, so 50% can make it happen. The other 50%, it’s going to be less. So, I mean, I think that pretty much wipes out a third of people being able to buy at those amounts. I think next year is going to be a lot better, because I think housing prices are going to come down, and I do think interest rates will probably be about the same, because you can’t really get them much lower, because inflation rate’s at like 3%ish, right now, I forget, I have to look it up, little over two, little under three, somewhere in there. So I mean, the Federal Reserve, and all them, there’s only so much they can do. I think it’s just how it’s going to be for a while, but I can understand why somebody who really wants a house is going to buy $150 home inspection with somebody wearing metaglasses, you know? I couldn’t say Inspectacles again, I giggle every time. Oh my gosh. Okay. But there was that bill that you mentioned before the show, before we started recording, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Beon DeNood
Yeah, that’s an interesting one. So, you’re probably aware of it, heard in the news if you’re keeping track, but I don’t know a ton about it, but I do know that it passed through the House and the Senate, and I guess it’s up for the president to sign it. It’s expected that it’s going to go into law, but it’s basically, it’s an effort to make housing more affordable for first-time home buyers, and for, you know, the generation that is now supposed to be entering the housing market and has not been able to get a home. But there’s a few interesting provisions in it, I think one may listen to the headline and think, oh, finally, that’s great, you know, we’ll be able to see more people being able to afford houses. And that will be the case, but if you look at the details of the bill, I’m not sure what your thought was, from my perspective, there are a lot of things that are like, okay, these are good, but they’re probably only going to really have a direct effect on the market, it may be a few years, you know, because there’s things that will contribute to raising inventory with houses being built, you know, they talk about like package plans for houses, making those available for lower entry level homes. They’re talking about provisions for relaxing local building permit requirements, and all that kind of thing. There’s some other stuff. Oh, for institutional investors, obviously that’s familiar to us, where they are barring a lot of institutional investing and encouraging institutional investors to sell homes that they are holding on to, so those things will help, but it’s not going to be like this immediate fix. It’s probably going to be a couple of cycles before we start seeing it having any real effect, at least that’s the way that I see it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, they’re estimating it’s not really going to have a big rollout until end of 2027 or somewhere in 2028. My estimates more in 2028. There is a slight chance that it won’t go through, but it’s rolling. In my opinion, it’s going to go through. Here’s some key provisions that I think will help, though. But again, this is probably going to be four years out, because here’s the timeline that they’re expecting. Number one, if the bill passes, then local AHJs and municipalities and things like that are going to have to adopt it. That’s going to take time. Grants are going to need to be given, applications are going to need to be processed. Then, depending on which part of it you’re using, it’s going to take six months to a year, and then we’ll start seeing results after that. So, three to five years, but it’s very important for us as home inspectors. There’s a couple parts of it. The grants to fix to rent was a big one, and it’s only to people who are considered small investors or single investors, so somebody who has five or less buildings with no more than I think 10 or 15 units, I have to look that one back up, so only small time, and they’ll give you 50 grand to renovate a unit to make it like new again. So, if you get a duplex, they give you 100 grand-ish, depending on the application. And then it’s a forgivable loan, so to speak. So, it’s a rider on your mortgage, and you have to own the property for 15 years, so you can’t just do junkie working and run. They’re like, you live with that, or you have to pay that money back, so then you own it for 15 years. So, I mean, there’s some holes in it that I could see people taking advantage of, but the new housing stock, that’s an important one. Zoning laws have blocked people from building apartment complexes, duplexes, single family homes, and manufactured homes. This bill would effectively make it so easy that there might as well not be zoning laws in some cases. I mean, there’s still going to be zoning laws, you’re not going to build a house next to a Walmart, you know, backyard, but all these vacant pieces of land, they’ll be like, okay, go for it, and it’ll have pre-designed duplexes and multiplexes. So one of the big things is, if you want to build a multifamily property, like in our area of New York, near impossible to build one new.

Beon DeNood
Okay.

Ian Robertson
Because zoning laws are like, we don’t want any more duplexes, blah blah blah, this would first of all wipe out that barrier, and then they’re like, okay, we have to submit plans that we have to approve.

Beon DeNood
Okay.

Ian Robertson
So now those plans, which would cost sometimes tens of 1000s of dollars and multiple times to the zoning board, you now just go say, the new zoning law says I can do this. Here’s the pre-approved plans from the federal government, stamp them. So it makes it faster, makes it way cheaper. You know, you’re building a $400,000 duplex or $600,000 duplex, you can save 10, 15 grand of expenses and 30 grand worth of time up front, that makes a big difference.

Beon DeNood
Okay.

Ian Robertson
So it is going to help the housing stock. So there’s going to be more houses out there, and that’s been one of our big pain points. So, long term, for those of us who are home inspectors in it for the long haul, four or five years, things are going to be looking really good for us. There’s gonna be lots of houses, enough buyers, affordable. It’s going to be a sweet spot. Oh, I’m rambling, I’m sorry, but I wanted to mention how we talked about how, like, 30-40% of people can’t afford a house.

Beon DeNood
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
The provisions in those is if you’re using any of these programs that you have to, for rental anyways, you have to rent to somebody who makes at least 60% or less of the median household income.

Beon DeNood
Oh, okay.

Ian Robertson
So the people that can’t afford the $2,600 a month, now have affordable housing.

Beon DeNood
Wow, so there’s potential, some big impact. I saw there also, there’s some support for modular housing production to relax codes or something to that effect. I’m not sure exactly, but to get them used more often, kind of cut through the red tape a little bit. Same with with mobile homes, what we previously called mobile homes, but now can be manufactured slightly differently. So it’s interesting how they are really trying to focus on that bottom end of the market to get people from renting or being stuck living with family to actually owning their first place.

Ian Robertson
Well, it’s funny you mentioned the manufactured home aspect. As a side note, anybody who does MFD foundation certifications, this will affect you because they are going to lax a lot of those requirements for the foundation it sits on.

Beon DeNood
Okay.

Ian Robertson
So I don’t know all the details, but one of the things was like temporary homes, like tiny homes had to sit on a trailer with wheels on it, they’re going to change some of those laws, how the manufactured home sits on a property, it’s foundation and things like that, so it will slightly affect you. I don’t know the extent yet, because I didn’t get that deep into the bill.

Beon DeNood
Right.

Ian Robertson
But I’ll tell you, this is one of the first things that I’ve seen them push through, and I’m kind of like, all right, this makes sense, like there’s a housing crisis, and you found a way to basically fix it, but there are some loopholes, like you’re going to get some people that’ll be like, oh, I paid my company to do the work, he owns the company, gets the grant, defaults on the grant, but his company is an unassociated member. Then they’re going to be siphoning money out like crazy. I can see a lot of ways for it to be abused. Also, anytime you start laxing zoning laws, you’re going to be like, okay, you put all of these people in a toxic waste dump because you got to skip a zoning step, you know.

Beon DeNood
Right. Yeah, and especially in places that don’t have a very robust local ordinance layer on top of federal and state, you’ll see that being affected even more. But I guess the thinking is that this is kind of phase one. There’s going to be another phase, who knows what shape or form that’s going to take, but as you said, if we’re going into effect like late 2027, we’ll only really start to see impacts of all of this sometime after that, so just as far as setting expectations are concerned.

Ian Robertson
But there will be an emotional effect. So the housing market is a lot like the stock market, it acts on more emotion than it does logic. So once that bill gets rolling, people are going to be excited, people are going to start saving for a home, they’re going to start looking into it, they’re going to be looking at new building projects, new purchases, things are going to roll a little bit faster. So, I think we’re going to still see the beginning benefit of that bell curve, probably towards the end of this year. I think we’ll see a little bit in the fall, definitely by next year, but, um, you know, we’re kind of coming to the end of the podcast, and, Beon, I’ll tell you what I think for the next quarter or two, what I think is going to happen, and you tell me your opinion. I think we’re going to get a little bit of an emotional uptick from that bill, because everybody’s making a big deal about it. I think we’re going to see home inspection base fees stagnate even more, unfortunately. I think the AI wars and home inspection industry are going to take a drastic turn by next year, and I think that we’re going to continue to do okay this year. So, listen, if you’re listening in and you’re like, business is bad, you’re probably in a pocket area or something like that. If you’re thinking it’s amazing, you’re probably in a pocket area, because right now it’s somewhere in the middle, which is what we predicted at the beginning of the year. Ride it out, it’s going to get a little bit better each quarter, and I think by end of next year, I think we’re going to be jamming. What are your thoughts?

Beon DeNood
Yeah, no, that makes sense, because a lot of the indicators we’ve been watching, as far as even just market, you know, the amount of time that a home sits on the market, we’re seeing that buyers are saying no to that, and sellers are having to adjust down, you know, so that’s a positive sign. Interest rates, which was a big discussion in the past, is not anymore, and the trajectory looks to continue to stabilize and decrease, so that’s not as much of a blocker anymore, and then you know other provisions like the bill coming in, so yeah, I think you’re spot on. We’re heading into more positive territory.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I know we don’t make big, grandiose guesses, but we’ve been pretty spot on for the past six years. I think we’re doing okay with our guesses.

Beon DeNood
Yeah, no, we’ve never come on and been like, man, we got that all wrong, you know, so, that’s a good thing.

Ian Robertson
That’s always good. But listen, Beon, thank you for being on, and everybody, thank you for listening. And everybody, be careful about looking up Inspectacles after this show, you might end up with a Google search you don’t want.

Beon DeNood
Thank you, Nick Gromicko for this gem.

Ian Robertson
Oh, this is going to give me weeks of enjoyment. Thank you, Nick. All right, everybody, see you on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

Home inspection is entering a strange new era where pricing, expectations, and trust are all being rewritten at the same time. We talk about how average base home inspection fees appear to be drifting back toward the $350 range, a number that sounds familiar if you remember 1990s invoices, but feels wildly out of place in today’s cost-of-living reality. The crucial nuance is the difference between a base inspection price and the total inspection bill, because many buyers now add sewer scopes, wood-destroying insect reports, roof certifications, septic evaluations, and other ancillary services. Even so, the broader trend matters: if base fees stagnate while inflation rises, inspectors effectively lose purchasing power, and the market starts rewarding speed and volume over judgment and craftsmanship. That pressure is colliding with rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in home inspection software, report writing, and field workflows, and the result is a fast-changing competitive landscape for inspection businesses across the United States.

The biggest theme is the “two-market” future: a low-cost, high-volume inspection model and a premium, boutique inspection model with deeper expertise and higher accountability. AI lowers friction and can reduce the perceived effort needed to produce a polished report, which can drop the barrier to entry for newer inspectors and also enable established companies to schedule more inspections per day. The risk is that AI can make a beginner sound experienced without the underlying understanding, and that can confuse consumers who shop by price or by surface-level presentation. At the same time, AI doesn’t replace skill-heavy services or legally constrained work. A competent sewer scope, septic inspection, detailed structural evaluation, or specialized compliance report still demands training, experience, and often additional licensing or standards. The opportunity, then, is strategic positioning: premium inspectors can differentiate through service scope, communication, defensible findings, specialized add-ons, and reputation signals like reviews and guarantees, while the budget end competes on speed and cost with thin margins and higher risk.

We also connect these industry shifts to the broader real estate market outlook. The median monthly US housing payment sits around $2,647, making affordability the central issue, more than interest rates alone. Homes are staying on the market longer, pending sales show sustained declines, and agents increasingly push sellers to price competitively to attract buyers. For inspectors, a move toward a buyer’s market can increase demand because cautious buyers tend to reinstate inspections they previously waived in hotter markets. But affordability also changes buyer behavior: when households feel squeezed by housing payments, taxes, maintenance costs, and everyday expenses, many will choose the cheapest inspection that still feels “safe enough,” or even experiment with DIY home inspection using AI by recording a walkthrough and generating a report. That raises the stakes for trust, clarity, and professional value, because consumers must decide what level of risk they’re willing to carry when making the largest purchase of their lives.

Finally, we discuss the 21st Century Road to Housing Act and why it could matter to inspectors, buyers, and small investors, even if the timeline is measured in years. Key ideas include incentives that can increase housing supply, programs that support renovation-to-rent for small landlords, efforts to reduce friction in permitting and zoning, and pushes for modular, manufactured, and other lower-cost housing pathways. The practical takeaway is expectation management: the biggest impacts likely arrive closer to 2027 and 2028, after local adoption, grant processing, and construction cycles. Still, markets often move on emotion, so even the momentum of a federal housing affordability bill can nudge buyer sentiment earlier. For home inspectors planning for 2026 through 2028, the message is simple: AI is not going away, and the middle of the market may thin out. The best defense is a clear identity, a service offering that cannot be easily commoditized, and a business model built to win in either the premium lane or a carefully managed, efficient lane without pretending the old “middle ground” will stay comfortable forever.