PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Beon DeNood
This is Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Ian Robertson
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. So today I wanted to talk about why we, as an industry, should not be afraid of AI. So last week, or a week or two ago, we did a podcast with David about the home inspection singularity. Actually, it blew up. There were a lot of people listening and watching, and everybody kind of has an opinion on AI. And some people have said to me, they’re like, oh man, don’t be a luddite. You know, we have to accept AI. I accept AI. I really do. I do think there’s some things coming that we need to prepare for. I’m not saying it’s going to destroy our industry, but it’s definitely going to change it as time goes on. But here is why I am not afraid for the home inspection industry, and it is not the reductive, oh well, you can’t get AI to crawl into a crawl space. Yeah, you can, guys. I mean, you get one of these crawlspace crawlers, and you know, people will make it happen. The technology is already there. The real reason why we shouldn’t worry about AI taking over our industry is the same reason why pizza places never worried about DiGiorno.

So, I’m actually planning on taking a Saturday afternoon off, getting a pizza, and just watching some old TV shows from the ’90s and enjoying myself while my family’s off doing something. And I was thinking about this because I’m like, I could get DiGiorno. I can make my own pizza. I can make the pizza cheaper. I can add the ingredients that I want. I can make two or three DiGiorno pizzas, whatever. I’m still gonna order a pizza for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I don’t feel like getting out all the stuff and cleaning up. Second of all, I don’t feel like, you know, I have a pizza oven and I’m like, if you don’t have a pizza oven, it’s like, okay, do I want to build a pizza oven and go through all this expense for pizza? There’s a pizza place down the road. They make fantastic pizza. They make pizza better than I can make. So why would I spend an hour or two of time or however long it takes to make a pizza? I don’t know, and all this expense and all this cleanup, when I can go for 10 bucks and go grab a few slices. We are beings of convenience.

And this is stemming actually from a comment that somebody made on a Facebook post about, there’s a lot of doom and gloom about AI taking over the industry, and then the other side was saying, well, you can’t get an AI to go into the crawl space, you know, the standard arguments. One person actually brought this up, and it was very intelligently presented, but completely dismissed, which always baffles me. But he said, listen, if you’re buying a home, no matter how far AI gets into things, there’s a lot to think about, even just the tools. So imagine if somebody wanted to do their own home inspection using AI. They’re going to have to get a thermal imaging camera. They’re going to need to get moisture meters. They’re going to need to get or borrow ladders and access to things that they may not know where it is and they could spend all day and by my calculations, anywhere from $800 to $1,500 if they’re buying cheap thermal cameras and cheap equipment and things like that, or they already own some as a hobbyist, you know, drones. By the time you get done with it, the average person is just going to be like, okay, am I making this home inspection pizza myself, or can I just go to the guy who already has all the equipment and is probably going to do a way better job than me? We as human beings are very convenience-driven, more than we’d like to admit. I mean, it’s the reason why I’ll stop at Five Guys rather than go home and make my own smash burger or whatever. We go for what’s convenient. Have you ever met somebody that’s their own mechanic? It’s kind of funny. They’ll spend $2,000 on a $1,000 job because they can do it themselves, and then all their friends kind of make fun of them for it. It’s the same thing with a home inspection. Eventually, people are going to be like, listen, how are you going to get this agent to let you into this seller’s house for an eight-hour day, so you can figure out how to do your own inspection badly, kind of lose some negotiating ground because the sellers, if somebody was inspecting my house and I’m like, are you a professional inspector? No, but I have AI. I’m like, all right, I’m going to need more than that to negotiate. A lot of attorneys in my area, wouldn’t ever allow it in any reasonable aspect under the sun. We’re just convenience-driven, but we’re also data-driven. How many of us like seller repairs? That never ends up well, but it’s the same principle, right? Seller goes, “Well, I’ll fix this myself.” And the attorneys in our area before closing, they’re like, “Are you number one, a licensed mold remediator? Are you a qualified carpenter?” Etc. etc. If not, they’re like, “We don’t accept your repair.” You can repair all you want. And then, how many times? Listen, we’re home inspectors. How many times have we gone back to check out a seller repair, and it’s terrible by far a generous number would be nine times out of 10. That’s extremely generous. I think maybe I found one or two out of many 1000s of inspections in my career where the seller actually repaired something pretty well. I’m like, oh, okay, that’s not bad. 99.999% of the time, it’s terrible. We’re not the only ones who know this. Agents know this. Attorneys know this. Closing companies know this. That’s why seller repairs are often kind of like, that’s not great. So now you’re going to have the home buyer, who’s first of all not objective, do their own inspection. No matter how good the AI gets, if we have quantum computing, if we have the most intelligent AI out there, we have everything that we ever wanted, which is not going to be here in time for most of us to see in our career. If we had all of that now, people would still be like, yeah, but I’m not going to go buy a thermal camera. I’m not going to go buy a moisture meter. I’m not going to go buy whatever. I’m not going to go and have AI spit this into a PDF report because then I have to explain stuff and I can’t explain things. And still, no matter how good AI is going to get, there’s still going to be errors. AI has gotten 1000 times better in just the past couple of years. Just the other day, I had it do math. I had it add a bunch of stuff together, and then it corrected itself. It goes, oh, you know, I missed $108 on three conversations ago, I’m like, that’s weird. How did you miss $108? And then farther down, it goes, oh, oh, I didn’t miss $108. It just was never there. And I’m like, if I’m buying a half million dollar house, or what’s the average house now? It’s like $440,000 nationally. I’d kind of want somebody looking at it, checking it, making sure that it’s right. I am very good with AI personally. I use it every day. I use multiple different LLMs and for different aspects. I’m heavily vested into the industry in that way. And even I will not do my own taxes. Could I have AI do taxes for me. Sure, I could just pump everything in there and it’ll do my taxes. But I still pay somebody to do it for me. Let him do the AI. I don’t feel like sitting around and learning how to use that AI to do my taxes, and then doing it worse than if he had just done it. In my mind, it’s like okay, if I save, I don’t know what my taxes are-a $1,000. If I save $1,000, but I lose $3,000 because of a mistake, that was stupid. There is a bottom part of the market where people aren’t going to think that way. Let them have it. All they’re going to do is prove our point. We don’t have to worry about them. The vast majority of the market is going to be like, yeah, I’m gonna want a home inspector, and most of them are gonna want a good home inspector. You don’t want to avoid using AI because it’s gonna do a crappy job, and then use a crappy home inspector. You know, some kid just on a high school job with AI, just working for this huge company. Nobody’s going to want that. We still want reassurance.

So there’s a psychological premise that I’m not going to get into. I’ve said it before. I love studying psychology, but we need social reassurance for just about everything. It’s really funny. The clothes we wear are because there’s social reassurance that it fits into society, t-shirt and jeans, button-up and khakis, the types of shoes we wear, etc. We need social reassurance. It also comes down to social reassurance for things like medical stuff. We’re gonna go to the doctor, even though we know we’re fine, but we’re just gonna go just so the doctor can tell us we’re fine. I have some friends that are medical professionals, and they’re like, you wouldn’t believe the large percentage of patients that come in just needing reassurance that they’re not going to die. You know, it’s the old WebMD or now ChatGPT telling you have three different forms of cancer because your elbow hurts. When we are buying a home, there’s a lot of reassurance going on. People are going to hire home inspectors just for reassurance, especially for those of us that are a bit older and we have almost a parental feel to us. We’re like, oh, we gotta look out for these kids. You know, it just naturally exudes from us. They’re like, they’re the same age as my son or my daughter, and I want to help them. People are going to naturally look for that.

So am I afraid of AI taking over home inspections? Not even slightly in the least. There are some aspects that’ll change in our industry that I may not like, and there’s as we mentioned in the home inspection singularity podcast, there’s a lot that we can’t predict now. We’ve kind of hit that point. But at the very least, if you are 25 or over, in my opinion, you won’t have to worry about AI taking over our industry in your working career. You’ll be long retired, likely before any of that happens. So sit back, relax, enjoy the fact that as you’re driving to your inspection today, you are extremely hard to replace, even with super smart artificial intelligence. Thank you for listening in, and we’ll see you next time 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

AI in home inspections is the topic everyone has an opinion about, and the loudest takes usually miss the point. The future will absolutely bring change to the home inspection industry, from faster drafting to smarter defect pattern recognition and better photo organization, but “change” is not the same as “replacement.” Even if technology can eventually reach crawl spaces with robots and capture data with drones, most buyers are not looking for a science project. A real estate transaction is already stressful, time-bound, and high stakes. When you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, the goal is not to prove you can do it yourself. The goal is to reduce uncertainty, protect negotiating leverage, and move forward with confidence.

A practical way to think about AI home inspection tools is the pizza problem: you can buy ingredients, bake at home, and even do it cheaper, but you still order from a pizza place because convenience matters. Home buyers behave the same way. A DIY approach requires collecting and learning specialized equipment like a thermal imaging camera, moisture meter, ladders, safety gear, and possibly a drone, plus the time to interpret results and explain them in plain English. Add up entry-level gear and you can easily reach $800 to $1,500 before you even “inspect” anything, and you still have to clean up the mess of organizing photos, drafting a coherent inspection report, and figuring out what actually matters.

Then there is access and credibility. Doing a self-inspection with AI means asking an agent and a seller to tolerate an all-day learning session while you poke around, open panels, and try to understand systems you have never evaluated before. In negotiations, credibility is currency. If you present a report and the other side learns you are not a professional home inspector, you risk weakening your position because it reads as subjective and incomplete, even if the AI outputs look polished. This mirrors what happens with seller repairs: buyers, agents, attorneys, and closing professionals often distrust “I fixed it myself” because quality is inconsistent and documentation is thin. Real estate is not only about data; it is about defensible data that other parties accept.

Finally, AI still makes mistakes, and mistakes are expensive at housing scale. Anyone who uses large language models daily has seen confident answers that later get corrected or reversed. That is fine for brainstorming, but it is risky when the downside is thousands of dollars in missed defects, bad decisions, or misunderstood recommendations. The smarter move is to treat artificial intelligence as a force multiplier for a professional home inspector: faster writing, better checklists, clearer summaries, and improved client education. Buyers are not just buying information; they are buying reassurance from someone objective who has done this thousands of times and can calmly say, “Here is what matters, here is what to monitor, and here is what to negotiate.”