SHOULD HOME INSPECTORS GROUP DEFECTS TOGETHER IN HOME INSPECTION REPORTS? LISTEN IN AS WE DISCUSS THIS SUBJECT!
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CHAPTER MARKERS
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Benefits of Grouping Items in Inspection
10:10
Effective Report Writing for Home Inspectors
18:35
Inspector Tool Belt Podcast Promotion
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Ian Robertson
As always, welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about something different than we usually talk about. We talk a lot about business and sales and ethics in our industry, and just a wide range of things, but I want to get back a moment to the purity of what we do, which is inspecting houses and writing reports, protecting people. It’s what we do, and specifically I wanted to talk today about grouping items in a report.
Ian Robertson
Now what we mean by that is there’s two ways to kind of write up an item, multiple items in a report. The best illustration I could think of is windows. So some of us will have one component in our report for windows. Some of us will have windows in the kitchen, windows in the living room, windows in each bedroom, and we talk about all sorts of different windows. But what is a tendency that I see in our industry that wasn’t around many years ago for the most part anyways, is that if there’s a big room, like we have a big sun room, and one window is busted, it doesn’t work, or there’s wood rot around it, what I’ll see a lot of inspectors do is they’ll separate that one window out and make that a defect, and then separate the other windows out and either by creating a whole other component, or within that section somehow saying this one window was defective, but the rest of them were functional or acceptable, or however we write our reports. In logical day to day inspecting, that makes a lot of sense, right? It’s like one windows broken, the rest are fine, but I learned many years ago from an attorney, something good I did on accident, was grouping items together.
Ian Robertson
So what ended up happening was, I was inspecting this house, and some windows were painted shut. I’m like, boy, that’s weird. And then there was some wood rot on them. Like, man, that’s really weird. So I wrote up in my report that five windows were defective, but I grouped them with all the windows. I didn’t separate them out, and it was kind of on accident. It was early on in my career, so this was probably 18 years ago, and so I put them all together, and I gave them all the same rating. And so effectively, because my rating says this is the defective item, you should have a qualified contractor look at them, the attorney took that and said, all of these windows now need to be looked at. The attorney for the buyer, that is, so when the contractor went in, he goes, the other windows look fine, but I’m really glad your home inspector failed them too, because watch what happened when he started taking things apart that I couldn’t do and it showed that they had the same defect as the five windows or four windows, however many it was that I found. So the attorney actually called me and said, Ian, thank you for that. Most home inspectors wouldn’t have grouped items together like that. And the way, he was super nice guy, to this day I still know him, Facebook friends at this point, not that I see him very often, but he explained to me why grouping items together is so important. He said, when we group items together, first of all, we, as home inspectors, don’t know what is going on behind the walls. And he said, what if you fail one window in a big sun room and you say the rest of them are fine. Now during the exploratory measures, the contractor comes in and says, yes, the other windows are fine, but they all have the same defect that caused this one that had rot around it, so they all need to get replaced. He said, from a legal standpoint, that ties my clients and my hands behind our back, because you only said the one window. So now it becomes either a fight or my client doesn’t, doesn’t get a credit for those other windows. And a light bulb popped in my head and I said, okay, from this day forward, I’m going to group items.
Ian Robertson
Now this is a sensitive subject, because I have brought this up to other home inspectors and man, besides which, flashlight is the best, and if you should walk a roof or use a drone, I have never seen home inspectors get more fiery, so I’ll probably get some flack for this podcast. But they said you can’t fail something that’s not defective. That’s the argument that I get from most home inspectors distilled down. The argument that this, that this attorney made, is, if you see an indication that one of the same thing is defective. What’s to say the rest of them aren’t, and isn’t that what we’re doing as home inspectors, we are looking for indications of an issue, because we very rarely can see the whole issue. If we see a little bit of wood rot over a window, we know there’s probably a heck of a lot of wood rot underneath that sheet rock, right? I’m going to give you two instances, where grouping items together and not separating them out, was beneficial, both to me and my client.
Ian Robertson
The, ironically, the second one has to do with windows too, but the first one is a roof story. Now I probably told this on this podcast before, but this was one of my favorite instances of how it protected me legally. So I was inspecting this ginormous house probably 15, 16, years ago, not long after I had discovered that grouping items together was beneficial for me and my clients. But I was up in the attic and I’m like, oh man, there’s mold everywhere, and there’s leaks and yada yada yada. So what ended up happening was I failed, the backside of the roof was leaking, the front side of the roof was fine. So what I did was, instead of separating it out and having two sections saying the front of the roof was fine, the back of the roof was leaking, I just wrote the whole component roof, as in my area, we call them major defects. That’s a whole other story, what we call them in my area. And in the report, I said indications of leaking on the back side of the roof, etc, etc. No indications of leaking could be found on the front side of the roof at the time of the inspection. But recommend that the entire roof be evaluated by a qualified contractor, roofing contractor. I think I wrote contractor, but what ended up happening was the buyer came back and was angry. Still remember it, I was driving down the road and I was turning on the highway, and this guy was just laying into me, and it’s like 8am and I’m driving to an inspection and just laying into me hard. So come to find out, after like 5, 10 minutes of this, he goes, my wife is an attorney. She said you were just trying to protect yourself, so you’re just making it so I don’t have any recourse against you. And then there was a pause. The first time he paused, I learned a long time ago, you let people get angry enough without saying anything, they’re gonna cut their own legs off. And during the pause, I just waited, and he didn’t say anything. I said, your wife is upset because I am well covered. And he’s like, well, that just seems like a shifty this and this and this. I’m like, that doesn’t seem shifty to me. It seems like I protected you and your wife wanted to be able to have some legal recourse to come back and sue me. A few weeks later, I don’t know if it was about this report, but the buyer’s attorney for one of my somebody, and I assumed it was this, but he left a message, and I saved that voicemail. He said, I’ve never seen a more well written report that protects my clients. You will get referred by me for all of my clients. That taught me something. If an attorney who wants to get at you is angry because they can’t, and the attorney that benefits from it because it protects him and his clients loves it, you’re doing something right. Because, remember, we are technically writing, whether we like to admit it or not, a legal document. We are writing a document that goes to attorneys, that goes on file with attorneys and offices and buyers and sellers and agents, and oftentimes these will be used in court if things get that far, we’re writing a legal document. Grouping things together, and not in a ridiculous way.
Ian Robertson
So let me caveat it with this. Let’s not get ridiculous. It’s like, okay, this window is kind of stuck. Make sure you have all the windows in the entire house evaluated and make sure you have the roof inspected by a dinosaur. Just let’s calm down, folks, okay, but, uh, I say grouping things together within reason. If we find one or two windows that are broken, let’s have it evaluated. Now, our company, one of my companies, actually ran into this recently, and it wasn’t anything big, but grouping items together protects our client and protects us. And the roof is a good example. I have seen so many inspectors separate sections of roof out. The west side of the roof was defective, but nothing could be found with the south side of the roof. It’s like, all right, they’re both 24 years old. Are we trying to make an agent happy with this evaluation? Or what are we doing here, guys? It’s like, listen, I found indications of leaking on the roof. If you want to see the leaks, they’re on the west side, but I recommend that the whole roof be looked at. Or front of the roof was new, but the back of roof was not new, and leaking. I still say, okay, front of the new roof was new, I don’t exaggerate anything, and no indications of leaking was was able to be found. But recommend evaluation by a qualified contractor of the entire roof. In almost 20 years, I’ve never had anybody come back and get mad, besides that one buyer. Agents don’t get mad. Nobody’s gotten upset at that language, and they’re like, oh, okay, cool. And buyers agents would actually refer me because I they’re like, okay, now my clients are protected. Because, believe it or not, as much as we like to complain about agents, there are good agents out there, and the good agents would like to protect our clients, let’s just say, because they’re a good person. But even if they’re not, they want referrals. They want to have people come back and hire them in 5, 10, years, when they go to sell their house and buy a new one. That’s how they make their business. They like, good agents like to protect our clients. So without exaggerating, grouping things together is important.
Ian Robertson
Second one is another window instance, and it’s funny how these things keep happening with windows, and it’s the most common thing that I hear with home inspectors is windows. In fact, with our app Inspector Toolbelt, they’re like, how do I separate, can I have just a card in each section for each window? And what if there’s five windows? Can have five window cards? I’m like, why are we separating our windows so much? Typically in the living spaces of my inspection report. I have one card that says windows, one component for the whole house, and that was very good for me and this other big house. Oh, boy. I don’t remember how long ago this was. This probably wasn’t that long ago, maybe eight, nine years, maybe a little less even. But I walked in and they had, I’ll tell you the end of the story. Ultimately they had a leak behind some flashing up on the roof. So they didn’t have gutters, which was also in my report. But the fascia, the top of the fascia, if you can picture this, popped off so there was no roof rake. So that’s that top board at the roof, before the before the drip edge, and so that was a problem too, but it popped off, and water was running into the fascia, and somehow found a channel and ran down behind the siding, through the framing and over the top of several windows all the way down. So big, fancy house, lots of windows, and I’m pretty sure any two or three of these windows together probably cost more than my truck. Was that kind of house. So I was only able to find one window. The only reason I found it was, it was the first floor window down in the basement. I found wood rot on the, on the sill plate and on, yeah, basically on the sill plate and some of the sub flooring underneath this one window. And I’m like, this is behind a covered porch. Like no water should be getting here. There’s no hose, there’s no plumbing. And so then I said, oh, there’s water somewhere behind here, but it’s at this window. So I looked and I failed this one window and the one above it, and I pointed out where the water is, quote, unquote, likely coming from. Always, never determine where something is coming from. It could be coming from this but the origin of the moisture was not able to be fully determined. Recommend evaluation by a qualified contractor. So it turned out these two windows obviously needed repairs, but because I grouped them together, I only have one section in my report for windows, I said these two definitely have problems. And because my rating system, says in the rating, anything that falls under this rating should be evaluated. Turned out that other windows had the beginnings of other problems because they did not flash them properly. It was not visible. But the window contractor came and pulled off a couple pieces of siding, and they did not, they did not tape or flash around the window installations. So, I mean, this is seven, eight years ago, so there’s probably some details that I’m forgetting, but basically what happened was, instead of people getting upset at me saying, Ian missed all these other windows without flashing, and then me having to explain I don’t take off siding, instead they said, holy cow, Ian is amazing. How did he know! I became a hero, because the attorney’s like, because your home inspector said all the windows should be evaluated effectively by putting it in one group, he saved you 10s of 1000s of dollars. I got thank you emails, referrals, and if I remember right, if this is the same circumstance, the seller’s agent hated my guts, but she never argued with me ever again after that, because I think she was too afraid to like, okay, dude, can see behind walls, and I couldn’t, but I grouped it. If there’s something wrong with one of something or one part of something, the likelihood of something being wrong with the rest of it that we can’t see is very, very high. It protects our clients, and I’ve never had an agent get upset.
Ian Robertson
But we do have to be very careful how we write things. So one of the, I’ll just go back as a side point, one of the reasons that buyer with the roof was mad at me is because I recommended a qualified contractor come and look at it. So I didn’t say licensed. I never say licensed, because there’s not always licensing, and licensing doesn’t make somebody good at their job. So I found this out from attorney, if you type, if you write in a licensed contractor to evaluate, and that contractor is bad, that actually opens up you to liability. So one of the things this guy’s lawyer wife wanted to do was open me up to liability. So if they hired a contractor that was bad, they could come back and say, you told me to get a licensed contractor. I got a licensed contractor, and things turned out really bad for me. If I say qualified, what one attorney explained to me was, now you put all of the, all of the obligation on the client. Now that sounds harsh, like put all the obligation on them. Qualified encompasses license. So if there’s licensing, they have to get someone who’s licensed. But now it also encompasses the quality of work that the contractor does. So they can, if they go and they get just the cheapest bid, they come back and I say, this guy was a jerk. I’m gonna blame the home inspector. That attorney is like, what are you gonna say? I said, qualified. How did they qualify him? Can we see the other bids? These other bids were higher. Why did they choose the lowest one? Or even if they chose the highest bid they’re like, did they look at his ratings? This guy has bad ratings, so that means he’s not qualified. They didn’t do their due diligence. So there’s a side point in my personal opinion, I always put, based on attorney advice to me, I always put qualified.
Ian Robertson
But we need to be careful how we write our language. We don’t want to be overly soft. Now, let’s be honest, some of us are overly soft in the language that we use in our reports. We go to extremes as human beings, don’t we? Well, I don’t want to come off as an alarmist, so we go overly soft. Well, you know, there was leaks on the west side of the roof, but you know, leaks happen. The roof could be serviceable. Maybe there was some ice damning or, you know, it’s probably not that bad. It’s like, okay, let’s not be warm and fuzzy. Leak is a leak. Call it a leak. Let the roofer come and figure out the rest of it. But some of us get overly harsh, like it’s, it’s like, this one report recently, and it was, I forget what it was, but it was like a, it was like a small chimney flashing leak. And I’m like, oh, okay, yeah, those stink. But then I read the rest of the guy’s report, and he was like, the house was gonna explode is like, he goes, he goes, there could be damage everywhere. There could be mold. And he goes into all this stuff about all this toxic mold and yada yada yada. He asked me to review his report. And I’m like, um, was it really that bad? He goes, no, but I don’t want anybody to come back and come back and sue me if anything ever happens, and I’m like, man, I would just never hire you and as a buyer if I didn’t know, if my doctor wrote a note like that about me, I’d be freaking out. Say what it is. There was leaking noted at the chimney flashing. Never say from chimney flashing, in my opinion, at chimney flashing for other legal reasons, but then say unseen damage and other issues could occur. Recommend evaluation by qualified contractor. We don’t need to make up stories in every scenario that could ever possibly happen, to protect ourselves. In fact, that probably creates more liability for us. So it still comes down to grouping things together. That’s the crux of what I wanted to today. Those were just side points. But watch our language when we group things together, say what it is. If there’s chimney flashing, I know one home inspector, he was telling me, he goes, the left side of the chimney cricket was leaking, but not the right side. And I’m just like, you all know me. You listen to the show. I’m fairly blunt, and I’m gonna go. I’m like, dude, you are splitting hairs so hard. Just fail the, fail the cricket. He’s like, okay, we don’t need, we don’t need to split things up. Chimney flashing, leaking, noted at at cricket, and there’s other parts of the chimney flashing, say, recommend evaluation of the chimney flashing by a qualified contractor. Boom. Done. Simple. Client knows what’s the issue, we can have in our rating, unseen damage may exist. Recommend full evaluations for any other damage that could not be seen at time of inspection. Then when they find more, they’re like, oh yeah, the home inspector said there could be unseen damage. Yay. That’s writing a beautiful report, clear, concise, protects our client without exaggerating or without writing a soft report.
Ian Robertson
But I don’t know if you can tell, I get a little bit passionate about report writing. Maybe I should do more podcasts on it, because I really, the purity of our, of our profession, that’s what, that’s what we give people, right? We give them our report. They pay for our opinion, and our opinion gets written down in this beautiful document that either helps them or hinders them. So there’s my opinion. You have a different opinion. I’d love to hear it, but thanks for listening in, and we’ll talk soon again on Inspector Toolbelt Talk.
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 this insightful podcast episode, we delve into the often-overlooked nuances of home inspections, focusing on the powerful impact of grouping minor issues and effective communication. Grouping seemingly minor issues during inspections can unearth significant underlying problems, providing a safety net for both inspectors and clients. This episode offers a deep dive into how grouping similar items, like windows, can reveal hidden defects that might otherwise go unnoticed. By strategically organizing inspection reports, inspectors not only ensure thoroughness but also foresight, two crucial elements in building a solid reputation in the industry.
The discussion highlights the importance of crafting detailed and precise reports. Effective report writing in the home inspection field is not just about documenting what you see; it’s about communicating potential issues clearly without overwhelming the client. The podcast provides a fascinating look into how language can influence outcomes. For instance, the choice between recommending a “qualified” versus a “licensed” contractor can significantly shift liability. This subtle yet crucial distinction underscores the need for inspectors to use language carefully, balancing between being too cautious and overly alarmist.
The episode further emphasizes the importance of strategic communication in building trust with clients. By sharing real-life examples, such as a roof inspection that revealed extensive damage through strategic grouping, the podcast illustrates how inspectors can save clients from hefty repair costs. The key takeaway is that grouping similar issues together, even when they appear isolated, can provide a comprehensive view of potential problems, ultimately safeguarding the client’s interests and enhancing the inspector’s credibility.
The art of language in home inspection reports is explored in depth. The podcast underscores the importance of choosing words carefully to ensure clarity and protect against potential legal complications. Precise language not only conveys the severity of issues without causing unnecessary alarm but also positions the inspector as a trusted advisor. The episode shares insights from legal experts on how certain phrases can impact liability, highlighting the need for inspectors to continually refine their communication skills.
Beyond technical skills, the episode also touches on the human aspect of home inspections. Building trust through effective communication and strategic grouping of issues can significantly impact an inspector’s relationship with clients. By adopting a client-centric approach, inspectors can foster trust and establish themselves as reliable professionals in the industry. This focus on building relationships underscores the broader theme of the podcast: that home inspections are as much about people as they are about properties.
The podcast concludes by encouraging inspectors to embrace these strategies, emphasizing that they are writing legal documents that can have far-reaching implications. By mastering the art of effective communication and strategic grouping, inspectors can enhance their professional practice, protect their clients, and build a lasting reputation in the industry. The insights shared in this episode offer a valuable toolkit for inspectors seeking to refine their skills and elevate their service offerings.
Overall, this episode provides a comprehensive guide to mastering home inspection communication. From strategic grouping to precise language and trust-building, the insights offered are invaluable for any inspector looking to enhance their professional practice. By adopting these strategies, inspectors can not only improve their reports but also build stronger relationships with their clients, ultimately leading to greater success in their careers.