EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN REPORTS DOES NOT MEAN MORE WORDS AND CONTENT. LEARN WHY BEING CONCISE IS USUALLY BEST IN THIS WEEK’S EPISODE!
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CHAPTER MARKERS
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Over Complicated Home Inspection Reports
11:21
Simplifying Home Inspection Reports
19:27
Simplifying Inspection Report Comments
28:58
Effective Communication in Home Inspections
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Ian Robertson
Hey, David, you know what’s, what’s weird about, uh, having a podcast that apparently a lot of people listen to?
David Nyman
The sudden surge of fame and people want to talk to you all the time?
Ian Robertson
No, it’s, it’s when there is no podcast. Like I had to take a couple of weeks off. There were some personal matters and some things that required the vast majority of my attention. So and you know, throughout the year, we’ll take two weeks off, or a week off here or there. We do it, I think we do an average of 45 weeks out of the 52 weeks in the year. But it’s, it’s funny, the messages that I get, like, if I miss a week, and it’s really nice, like, they’re kind comments.
David Nyman
Did you die?
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. Like, are you okay? Is everything all right? Did you die? One guy said, just sent me a message. I miss your voice.
David Nyman
Did you put him on the watch list?
Ian Robertson
No, no, no, he was, he was just messing with me. I’m like, all right, all right, but we’re back in full swing here. And interestingly, we’ll, we’ll only be having a podcast here for another four to six episodes-ish, because then we take off the half of December and then come back somewhere in January. But this one, I’ve been really wanting to get on there, and I think you’re the perfect person to have on this with us. I’m going to explain, first of all, what it is and why I think you’re the perfect person to have on this episode. Number one, we’re goingto talk about something that hurts my brain, and it’s over complicated reports, and we’re going to see why it hurts my brain. But I think you’re the perfect person for this, because for the past 20 years, I have written, I forget how many 1000s and 1000s of reports Ireviewed, probably 10s of 1000s of reports at this time, other people’s reports from other software, from our software, from Inspector Toolbelt, but you are in a unique position. You’re not a home inspector, so you represent the consumer side of things. But then you’ve also reviewed 1000s of reports I would imagine, at this point as well, and there’s something that you and I universally agree on, that they are, a lot of the reports, not all of them, but a lot of the reports are just way too complicated and full of stuff. How often do you see that? Like, throw in a rough percentage.
David Nyman
Out of the ones I see, but, but to be fair, I do tend to see more of thelong and complicated ones, just because a lot of times they’re the ones that run into issues. But I want to say that from what I see, it’s 50/50, but it’s probably slightly skewed. So I don’t think it’s, it’s that, like that common among home inspectors. It’s probably more like 30/70 you know, 30% complicated, 70% just right.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, I would actually swing, swing in a different direction there. I would say about 20% of inspection reports I look at, I’m like, wow, wow, this guy’s got it figured out. And then I would say 40% are like,oh, my goodness, this is a 300 page report, and I know what I’m looking at, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong with this house according to this inspector. And then the other 40% are like, man, I could use a sentence or two more about this, like, just something, you know, I need more than it’s broke and, and we’re not trying to make fun of everybody, because I’ve been on, I’ve been on both ends of that spectrum too. I spent past couple of decades trying to perfect my report writing, and I just want to share some things that I’ve learned from seeing the consumer side, seeing the software side,seeing the home inspection side, and everywhere in between. And I would say the vast majority of our reports are just kind of missing the mark a little bit, one way or the other. But let’s kind of go over a couple of things here, David, we’re going to break this up into parts. First of all, why complicated reports? When I say complicated, I’m also meaning like long reports, like I remember this one guy, his template. I’ve never, I’ve never seen so many comments in my life, and his comments sometimes were 7, 8, 9, 10, paragraphs long, lots of detailed explanations of possible scenarios, why things were bad, how it should be, and he would just click on those and add these comments, and his report would be near unreadable. So that’s what I mean when I’m talking about a long report. I’m just talking about lots of information for the sake of having information there. So why that’s not good for our consumers. Second of all, why it’s not good for us individually and as an industry, and number three, why it actually creates more liability than negates. So before we get into those three points, though, David, why do you think guys, the home inspectors, write these long, complicated reports now? Because years ago, that it wasn’t like that. We had to elevate the industry years ago. When I first started, it was like a handwritten report, three pages, carbon paper. Now it’s a different world. Why do you think that is?
David Nyman
Yeah, I definitely think the digital age of report writing has a big deal, a big impact on this just because it’s easier to make a rotary report. You know, you have pre-created comments and a lot of inspectors, you know, they have a lot of knowledge, and, you know, it’s just natural you want to, you know, you want people to see you as a knowledgeable source. So they go into it, they start writing out, okay, this is all I know about this subject. And like you said, it can go on several paragraphs, but with a digital report, all you have to do is tap on a button and you write three paragraphs for your client for each comment. So yeah, I mean that, that’s definitely what made it easy to become wordy.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and that’s a fair, very good point. It’s easy to write one big, long, you know, 800 word comment, and then just add that to every report. The reason I find most personally is we think that’s what the consumer wants and makes us look awesome. That’s the, that’s what we think it it does. And I was thinking last night, actually, interestingly, I was thinking about this because I did this to my nephew. He comes over to my house and he goes, hey, Uncle Ian,can you tell me how to start a business. And instead of just giving him, like three actionable items, I laid out every bit of business experience that I have accumulated in my lifetime, and the look on his face, he was texting me later, he got on a plane and flew back to North Carolina.
David Nyman
He just left.
Ian Robertson
He just left. It was like I’m done.
David Nyman
I’m going back home.
Ian Robertson
But he was texting me later, asking questions, and he didn’t remember the important points, and he was like, asking me about quotes. I quoted Winston Churchill, and I quoted and I quoted, I’m not even making this up. This is hysterical that I did this and I quoted Teddy Roosevelt, and he’s asking me about these random quotes instead of the three actionable things that I really wanted him to do. We’ll, we’ll digress, but all it did was just bury the important information because I thought that’s what he wanted, and I thought it would impress my nephew. And he’s like, whoa. And he’s like, alright, this is useless.
David Nyman
Yeah, you just made me think of this experience. I heard about a person that didn’t know they were bipolar, but they found out after, I think, you know, it was way back, so they, like, hitchhiked with someone and and, you know, they started talking to the person in the car with them, and literally, like, they didn’t realize how much they were overloading them, just telling them thing after thing. And eventually, you know, that person is like, just basically kicking them out of the car.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, but we can do that to, we can do that to our clients. We think they want that, we think they want everything in the kitchen sink, when, in reality, I’ve had plenty of clients, especially recently, that will say things like, can you just give me the big things? Can you do two separate reports? I’ve even had people say, one that just says, here’s the three big things, and then give me the report with all the as they put it, you know, one guy’s like, all the gobbledygook or garbage and all the other wordy stuff. And I thought to myself, I’m like, is that what we’ve done as an industry is that, like we’ve, we’ve trained people to know that we’re gonna give them as they put it.
David Nyman
Created a monster.
Ian Robertson
We’ve created a monster, when, in reality, I think of a very close friend of mine who’s an inspector, and he writes some pretty amazing reports, but when I read his reports, and he’ll, a lot of his reviews are just like, oh, the most amazing report ever this and that, I’ll read it, and he’ll just one or two sentences, here’s the defect, here’s why it’s bad, here’s what you do next. And I’m like, the simplicity and conciseness is beautiful. Here’s the problem is that writing simply requires more effort than writing a big, long paragraph. I’m going to quote two people, Abraham Lincoln, if you.. And Winston Churchill, well, Abraham Lincoln said, if you need me to speak for five minutes, give me an hour to prepare. If you need me to speak for an hour, give me five minutes to prepare. Basically, that’s just saying make things concise and to squish them into shorter periods of time in that case, but in our case, shorter paragraphs and just a few sentences. Takes expertise. It takes a level of knowledge and effort to make it concise but still say the same thing, but especially if you use Inspector Toolbelt. I mean, go in and shorten your comments with AI. So use the AI assistant that we have in there. Say, shorten this comment for me to two sentences. You’ll be amazed, because Einstein said, if you can’t explain something simply, you simply don’t understand. And we’re not saying the home inspectors don’t understand, and Einstein’s not saying that necessarily, but he’s saying it’s a next level bit of understanding to say, okay, this is what you do, and this is what’s the problem is and what you do in two sentences.
David Nyman
And Winston Churchill. Yeah. And it requires you know both to know the subject very well and to know your audience. It’s a combination of the two, because, like a lot of the home inspectors report feels like they’re written for home inspectors, which a home inspector would be very impressed with this, but your general home buyer would be like, I lost you after hello.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. So let’s talk about that. Since you’re you’re broaching that part of it, let’s talk about the first point, why these long reports are not good for home buyers. Now, you just said something important. Agents and clients are kind of like I lost you at hello. They’re bombarded with so much information. We had to think as home inspectors. The last time we bought a home, there’s mortgage contingencies to sign, and you have to learn what escrow is, and there’s title work, and then now there’s like, oh, well, there’s a discrepancy in the title. And we’re like, what in the world is that, we’re getting bombarded with information. We don’t need the home inspection book thrown at us. What they’re doing, we have to remember the purpose of a home inspection report. And I think Jay Wynn who’s on the show repeatedly, said it best one time, we are bridging the gap between technical and the average person, and we forget that, and we end up giving the average person a technical manual. We don’t think it is. They’re like, oh, well, they should know what baluster spacing should be, and this and that, rise and run and and then meanwhile, the person standing there like, what, what’s, what’s a baluster? You know, we need to bridge that gap. And if our report doesn’t bridge that gap, it’s not doing its job. There’s a happy middle ground between the technical and the and the, you know, three page carbon copy paper reports. And we need to be able to find that.
David Nyman
Yeah. And something like, you know, some people like that information. But what I’ve seen, I’ve seen some home inspectors do, I know, kind of jumping ahead a little bit here, but having links to articles instead of having it in the report, like, if you want to know more about this, you know, here’s a place where you can find all that information, because there are, you know, there are always people out there that I call them weird, but they’re just different, but they do like all that information, and they might feel like they need to know all that information to make a decision, but your average home buyer, like you said, you know, they feel like as long as they get the information that they need to understand, you know, what’s their issues? What do I need to do about them? That’s all they want.
Ian Robertson
You say, the average person who wants all that information is weird, and I’m going to agree with you, because they are an oddity. So the average person reads at about a sixth grade level, even highly intelligent people, because that’s just how we’re designed now. Our brain is trained by scrolling through TikTok and watching videos and all this stuff going on. Our brains don’t read at the same level that we used to, and I love it when guys put in a link to an article. So instead of all, instead of taking that article and pasting it in your report, which we basically see. So an example would be water heaters, TPR, the drain tube is not within six inches of the ground. That’s a beautiful, concise sentence. You put a picture in, point to the pipe and say this is an important safety feature. Recommend correction, whatever we want to say, beautiful and concise. If we dump a whole bunch of information in there, that confuses the tar out of the average person, and then it makes it hard to figure out that information, I have a hard time figuring out, so my mechanic, I always bring up my mechanic and my doctor here, hopefully, I wonder if they listen. But years ago, he used to give this little report about the car, and I didn’t read it. I’d flip through it, and if there was something wrong, I had no idea. And then, like, six months later, the transmission have a problem. He’s like, hey, it was on page 47 and I’m like, okay, I didn’t get, I didn’t get, I didn’t get past the opening page, dude. So that protected him, but really didn’t make him look good. Didn’t create great business. And you know what he does now? He gets a one pager, and he has like these little lines on the page, and it says, watch your transmission. Get your oil changed in 5000 miles. A rear wheel bearing will need to be changed in six months. I’m like, oh, cool. And then, now I know what’s happening, and he can, and he can put links and stuff in there to articles for the weird people, because the average person is not going to read our report. I can see data. I can tell you that there’s a percentage of people that don’t actually even open the report, let alone read it. The vast majority of people just want to know, what’s the big stuff? Can we fix it and negotiate on it? That’s it. The problem is we, we listen to who yells the loudest, and sometimes we’ll get an email from this engineer who loves our report and is just like, oh my goodness, the 832 pages of technical data you put in there really shows your professionalism. And then we’ll quote that guy for the next 10 years as we’re handing out 852 page reports. That’s an exaggeration, obviously, but that’s, that’s what I hear. I had a guy recently he said something like that, oh, my clients love my long reports. They love all that data. I can’t simplify it. I’m like, how do you know they love it? Oh, I get emails all the time. How many emails? I don’t know it’s all the time. And I know this guy really well. So I started drilling down. Turned out three people. Three people thanked him for how long and technical his reports were the weirdos. And then I asked him. I’m like, I don’t exactly remember how this part went down, but I’m like, go back through and find out how many people, or just over the past year, asked you to explain the report, how many times you had to make a phone call to explain the report. How many attorneys had questions? How many all this stuff? And he goes, Well, I mean that that’s part of part of the job. And I’m like, All right. So even just this past week, you’ve had more people ask you to explain your report than over the past five years, the people who complimented you on how complicated to report is, if we really drill down, that’s not what people want. They want to know what’s the issue? What do I do? The roof is leaking. It’s 25 years old. Go get a roofing contractor, find a concise way to tell me that that’s really what people want. I don’t want to complicate it. I brought out my doctor before on another podcast, and he’s just like, you know, this part of your cholesterol is a little high. Your plumbing is awful. My plumbing is awful. But he’s like, he’s just like, here’s some things to do to lower your cholesterol. I’m like, okay, as complicated as the human body is, he gave me everything I needed to know in one page.
David Nyman
Yeah, he didn’t tell you what cholesterol is, or, you know, how they come about.
Ian Robertson
Yeah. Here’s examples of numbers. Yeah, oh my goodness. But we do that to ourselves, and it’s really not what the customer wants. So that’s the first thing. It hurts our clients in a few different ways. It makes the report too complicated or intimidating to read, and it’s not actually what they want, and we’re tailoring our reports for the minority instead of the majority. So the second thing that it is not good for is for us as home inspectors. So why do you think, David, that’s not good for us as home inspectors?
David Nyman
Well, the first thing I see, you know, working with support in the app is the more pre written comments you have, you know, not to say that you should limit yourself too much, but I’ve seen some inspection templates to have like, you know, 50, 70, different comments on a single card, which, you know, slight differences in an explanation, slight difference in the wording. The app is made to make you, you know, we made the app in such a way that you’re trying to be as fast as possible on the inspection. But if you have to sit there and scroll through comment after comment and all of them very long. You are not saving time. You’re actually making your inspection take a lot longer. I have seen that quite a few times. You know different inspectors that you know they say, okay, I need something to cover every situation I run into. But in reality, I said, like you say, a simple comment that just gets to the point could actually eliminate so many of those comments from their lists.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I guess that’s the issue. So in Inspector Toolbelt, we have a comment library so you can just type in a couple keywords, or even just start typing a few letters, and all these comments will show up anyways. But like you said, the common thing that I hear is in this component, I need every possible situation to be able to come up. So on a template I saw recently had 100, over 100 variations, of comments for one item. So I actually timed how long it took to find the right comment, put it in and then read it to make sure and check that it was the full right comment. Because it was three paragraphs long, most of them, and it took me longer to find just the right comment than it would have to just write the comment out myself. Or in our app, just click AI and say, write something out and then adjust it. If you have to scroll through over 100 comments, you’re not saving time. I mean, just if you’re an ITB user, I’ll just give you a pro tip. Take the top five comments, you’ll find that 80% of the time those five comments are going to cover you. For the other 20% of the time, use the search feature and get the comment you want, and if it’s taken too long, just write out the comment. Preston Kincaid always talks about that. I actually went to one of the seminars recently, and he talked about that, there’s no need to scroll through 100 possible comments, or even 20 comments, and then you’re trying to figure out which one is just right, at that rate, write a new one. Grab the top five. That’ll cover you 80, 90% of the time. And you’ll probably find that as you go through your inspections, you’re like, you know what? I don’t need a different variation for this comment for, for, you know, double hung windows versus single home windows, you know, the issue is going to be the same. So if we can, if we can do that, that’ll save us a lot of time in general. But it is. It’s bad for us in a couple of ways. In my opinion, for home inspectors, one is going to be time as you’re talking about. Home inspectors always talk about, how can I get faster? And then what I see in the Facebook groups is, well here, have 7000 comments ready to go for you. I’m like, that didn’t make it faster. You know, you just have 7000 comments to roll through. That’s always our go to. It seems lately, like just add more comments. Canned comments or pre-written ones are awesome, but I say limit them to the top five at most for all of your, all of your items.
David Nyman
That sounds very reasonable to me too. If, if your first five comments on the card doesn’t cover it, you know, maybe you don’t have enough cards. Sometimes it might be that you’re trying to squeeze too much too into a single card, but instead having, you know, a card that describes a slightly different issue, and you know the comments on, there would be five comments. You can, you can save yourself hours, I’d say, over, literally, over the week. I mean, so much, so much simpler.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and let’s talk about how the comments constructed itself. So a comment is constructed by one, identifying the defect. Two, identifying why it’s bad, and three, what to do next. So there’s variations of that. There’s whatever you want to talk about, or your particular SOP in your state or province, but that’s basically what a comment’s made up of. So if you identify what, what’s the problem? Roof is leaking, not performing its intended function. Cool. That’s what I need to know. Why is that bad? I mean, water is getting in the house, sometimes our, sometimes our identification of the problem is just kind of self-explanatory. And what we do next is almost always the same. What we do next is we go and find a particular specialist in that area, a qualified roofer, qualified structural contractor, or whatever it happens to be. When we break down a comment into its basic elements, it’s actually really simple. We’re the ones who over complicate it. So we can look at our comments and say, where’s all the fluff? And usually where the fluff is is explaining how it should be. Which why send them to a specialist if we, if we’re telling them how it should be anyways. And baluster spacing is the one I’m picking on today, because that’s the one I see it the most, is baluster spacing is too wide, safety issue. However, we want to write that up. Pretty simple defect, pretty common, but I’ll see almost a full page in a report dedicated just to this, pictures of different spheres from InterNACHI’s website, all these different things. And I’m like, all the person wants to know is picture of what, are there kids head stuck in it.
David Nyman
Picture of a baby sticking their head through the..
Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. But like you said, if somebody wants that, put a link to that article, and they can read all about baluster spacing, but if I’m the client, I really just want to know, oh, that’s too wide. I need to make it smaller, cool. That’s all I, that’s all I really, really wanted to know. But there’s also the legal liability part of things. So you know that old proverb, in many words there is transgression, right, David?
David Nyman
It’s true. So the more, the more you put in there, especially, like you said, when it comes to what should be done about it. Now we’re telling our clients, okay, this is what I think should be done about it. So now you’re making yourself the expert in a field that you might not have as much expertise as your report seems to you know, incline, impute. Can’t think of the word.
Ian Robertson
Impute. Your Swedish is coming out. But David, I’m a real estate agent, and I’m telling you, I love how many of those comments you put in there to tell us how it should be, you know why an agents, yeah, why?
David Nyman
Of course you would. It takes, takes the responsibility out for you.
Ian Robertson
Boom. You nailed it. And that’s exactly it. Of course the agents are going to say, I love you. I love it when you tell me what to do, because now I don’t need to go to that contractor and guess who all the liability falls on? Us as the home inspector. So it really is interesting. So I had a guy whose wife was an attorney who tried to pull that on me. Wanted me to say, how should it be, and what he needs to do to get it to that spot. And a lot of reports have that in there. And turns out he even admitted his wife was just trying to get it so that she could have shared liability with me so she’d have more people to sue if something, something went bad. So the other thing that it comes down to with legal risk is too much information or technical jargon can lead to misunderstandings, which could create liability issues. So here’s here’s the problem with a lot of content. So let’s go back to baluster spacing. Now we say the baluster spacing is too wide, but now in our description of why it’s too wide. We cover a whole swath of things. And one of our images has a picture of the handrail height being too low, because it’s showing a diagram of how high the handrail height should be. Now, if we don’t know, and we’re just an attorney, agent, client, whatever, now we’re like, well, is the hand rail too high? Which is this, and that can create lots of legal liability and issues later on. And to be frank, if that creates misunderstanding, is also going to lead to people not referring us. What agent or attorney is going to refer us if they have to decipher our report later on? So there’s a, there’s definitely a lot.
David Nyman
Yeah, and it does affect the client’s view of you, too. If they’re like, every time I get one of these reports, you know, I have to, like, call him up, ask about more explanation. It could end up in our reviews, which you know, would hurt our future prospects, too. If they understand everything first read through, it’s always going to be a better impression than them having to come to us, ask questions, get more clarification.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and that’s, that’s really what it comes down to. If they need more information, we can provide it. If I were to take some of the actionable things that we’ve talked about so far to make our reports, and I’m not going to say simpler, because that’s not what we’re going for. We’re going to say more readable. If we want our reports to be more readable and understandable but still comprehensive, make our comments more concise, and use AI to help us if we can’t figure out how to do it, put in our three paragraph comment into ChatGPT and say, shorten this please to two sentences while still keeping the same basic content. Number two, stick to the five basic comments that we use on the component. If we have 50 comments for what we say for GFCI outlets. I mean, come on, we’re gonna have GFCI didn’t function at time of inspection, and like two other ones, stick to maximum of five canned comments per item. And then also use a link. I really love the suggestion you made. Instead of dumping tons and tons of information. Put a link in there. Would you like to understand this better? Click here. That also reduces our liability in a certain way too, because now it’s not in our report. We didn’t provide that, all that technical jargon, we referred them to, InterNACHI’s going to be the easiest one, they have an article on, like everything, they have brominated fire retardant article that I just read not long ago. I’m like, who has this? They have an article for everything.
David Nyman
Did you need to sleep?
Ian Robertson
I don’t know. It was interesting, though, but they have a link for everything. Put that link in there and just let it be, reduce our liability and give those, once in a while, people that want more information, something to click on and read. We’re really going to save a lot of time that way. But one thing that I always hear, and I was on the phone with a home inspector, and I told him all the same basic stuff, and he kept saying, “I’m not going to compromise my report.” I’m like, I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to say the same thing with less content. “I’m not going to compromise.” And I’m like, he kept saying that because I think it was just him with some cognitive dissonance kind of fighting it. I’m like, I could say the same thing you did in just three sentences, and I did. And he goes, well, what if they want to know more? I’m just like, then give him a link like you said, I’m like, and he was wondering why nobody was, his business wasn’t taking off, and agents were complaining about his reports, and he kept brushing it off as, they just don’t want a good home inspector. I’m like, long, complicated reports don’t make you a good home inspector. I can copy that content off the internet. What makes you a good, what makes you a good home inspector is to be able to bridge the gap between technical and the average person. How do you write that same content in a few sentences with sixth grade reading level? That’s a real measure of somebody who can write a report.
David Nyman
Yeah, exactly. So you have, you have all that knowledge, but being able to express it in a way that someone understands. You know, without that, that knowledge is useless. It’s good for you, but not for the client.
Ian Robertson
Yep, that’s exactly it. It makes us feel good. And we get the once in a while email, oh, I loved how technical your report was. It’s, it’s going to be like a car with a great engine but no wheels on it, it’s not going to take anybody anywhere. So, anything else that you wanted to share, David, because you see a lot of this, you work with the home inspectors a lot, with the training sessions and helping them. Anything else that you wanted to bring up?
David Nyman
No, maybe just, you know, you can, you can still take your pride in your work, but, like, I think that’s, that’s a big thing. You know, a lot of home inspectors, they want to, you know, provide the best report possible, but taking pride in giving them a report that can help them to see the issues, understand them, and know what to do. But being able to do so in a way, you know, without, without, like you said, you don’t have to compromise your report, but you have to make it accessible to the people that actually are ordering the report from you.
Ian Robertson
Yeah, and I’ll go back to Einstein. Einstein, there was a lot of, Einstein could have explained things very complicated. And if you’ve ever, like, done, you know, quantum physics or anything like that, and you want to, like, read about it on the side, no, yeah, a lot of people don’t. He said E equals mc squared. If we ever looked up what each one of those symbols meant and how his equation actually pans out, he could have explained it to the world in the most complicated terms, and nobody would have gotten it. E equals mc squared. He just explained half of the universe with just that one thing. And that’s why I think he was the perfect guy to say, if you can’t explain something simply, you simply don’t understand. We’re a real inspection genius if we can explain the complicated in a simple way, help our clients understand things better, and then also, at the same time, vicariously, save us time and limit our liability. That’s the way to go.
David Nyman
Yeah, it’s a win win.
Ian Robertson
That’s a win win. That’s what we’re gonna really need to practice as an industry. But I think this was a good discussion, David. Thank you. I think this is actually your idea to put on the board, and hopefully everybody benefited from it.
David Nyman
Yeah, it was great. And I think, I think, too, like, you know, as home inspectors, just taking themselves a little, a little less seriously, I guess, because, you know, I remember just an anecdote to close it off, maybe in high school, when I was, you know, I was taking a technical class in high school, and we learned all this about, you know, cosine and stuff like that, and me and a couple of classmates, we love talking about it in front of other people, because we knew they wouldn’t understand us. But the thing is, that’s something that you do just to make yourself feel good, but that won’t make you any friends, I found out, sadly, yeah, but, but really like taking, taking the time to explain something in simple terms that can help people understand it. I mean, that’s, that’s the way to make yourself, you know some friends of your clients too.
Ian Robertson
That’s a real skill, and that’s really going to help our business. Our report is the end result of what we do. It’s the last thing that people see from us, and it’s the way they’re going to remember us. So if they remember us as explaining things simply but respectfully while covering all the points, that’s really going to win us friends, as you called it, but it’s really going to win us agents and clients, and it’s really just going to give our our industry, better value overall. But thanks a lot, David, as always, appreciate you joining in, and we’ll see everybody next time on Inspector Toolbelt Talk.
David Nyman
Thanks, Ian.
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].
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*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
In today’s digital age, home inspection reports have evolved significantly, but not always for the better. The latest episode of our podcast dives deep into the challenges and solutions surrounding the creation of these crucial documents. Our special guest, David, brings a unique consumer perspective, highlighting the importance of clarity and simplicity in report writing. Many inspectors fall into the trap of producing overly detailed reports, either to showcase their expertise or in the belief that more information is always better. However, this can lead to confusion for homebuyers who are often overwhelmed with technical jargon.
David and I agree that striking a balance between detail and clarity is essential. Homebuyers need reports that are easy to understand, focusing on major issues and solutions. This episode emphasizes the art of simplifying complex information without losing essential details. Effective communication is key, and by crafting concise reports, inspectors can minimize stress for both themselves and their clients. Furthermore, we explore the role of digital tools in report writing, acknowledging that while they can enhance clarity, they often contribute to lengthier, more complex documents.
The use of pre-written comment libraries is another hot topic. While these can streamline the report-writing process, inspectors must be cautious not to overload reports with unnecessary information. The episode discusses the benefits of limiting pre-written comments to the most common issues, thereby saving time and reducing potential legal risks. By structuring comments to identify defects, explain why they are problematic, and suggest next steps, inspectors can ensure their reports are both informative and accessible. This approach not only aids in client understanding but also enhances the inspector’s reputation and trustworthiness.
One of the significant challenges homebuyers face is the bombardment of information during the purchasing process. Reports that bridge the gap between technical jargon and layman’s terms are invaluable. Providing links to additional resources can satisfy those interested in more detail while keeping the main report focused on critical issues. Tailoring reports to meet the needs of most clients, who typically prefer straightforward information about major concerns, is crucial for client satisfaction and industry credibility.
Our discussion also touches on the importance of concise communication. Drawing inspiration from Einstein’s philosophy of simplicity, we explore how well-crafted reports can transform into powerful tools for client education. Simplifying technical reports not only reduces liability but also boosts the inspector’s reputation and business. By bridging the gap between technical details and client comprehension, inspectors can significantly improve client satisfaction and industry value.
In summary, mastering home inspection reports in the digital age requires a delicate balance of detail and clarity. Inspectors must focus on effective communication, using concise language and tailored content to educate and build trust with clients. By leveraging digital tools wisely and streamlining the use of pre-written comments, inspectors can create reports that are not only efficient but also serve as valuable educational resources for homebuyers. This episode provides invaluable insights into transforming home inspection reports into tools that enhance client satisfaction and trust, ultimately bolstering the inspector’s reputation and success in the industry.