To you potential home buyers, Part III

Don’t trust home inspectors. Now, I’m sure there are some good home inspectors out there, ones with construction background, but most of them merely took a class and started shop. They don’t really know what separates a good home from a bad.

Case in point: A home inspector went through my beautiful, mostly new house last week. This house passed all its inspections when it was built just five years ago. Now, as a homeowner, I could have chosen to do something crazy in those intervening five years, a storm could have damaged the outside, or I could have done something stupid to destroy something inside. And that’s why home inspections before a real estate transaction are necessary.

But this home inspector stated that the fascia was faulty. To be specific, he said that whoever did the fascia on this home needed to go back to school. He further stated that the entire thing needed to be redone.

Now, I happen to know the contractor who put the fascia on my home. I know him very, very well. It’s my father. My meticulous, perfection-isn’t-good-enough father who has been in the construction trade since he was old enough to swing a hammer beside his father. Siding — and with it soffit and fascia — are his specialty. In fact, you could say he’s an expert on it.

So the idea that he did it wrong was preposterous.

And the fact that the home inspector stated he needed to go back to school was, well, it was offensive. Even more, it was unprofessional.

The thing is, home inspectors don’t actually need to have any construction background before becoming a home inspector. There’s a test to pass, but the rest is, well, up to them. They apply their own opinions to their inspections, and if they have no real-world experience, those opinions are often faulty. In my family of construction workers, the term “home inspector” is a curse word. In most cases, these home inspectors don’t really know much. But the problem is they have a lot of power. If a home inspector says there’s a problem, he will likely scare a buyer off. If the buyer sticks around, the “issue” is going to cost the seller time and money to get it fixed.

There are certainly some issues with homes that need to be fixed, and there are certainly good home inspectors out there. The lesson here: Hire home inspectors with construction experience, preferably contractor experience. Use one that had a good reputation as a contractor and one that has a good reputation now as a home inspector. My realtor advises her buyers to bring their friends with to look at homes, the ones that are actively working as electricians, plumbers and sheetrockers. Get opinions from folks you can trust.

I’m just lucky we were able to convince our buyer that my contractor knew more about fascia than his home inspector. It was touch and go for a few days — and that’s a horrible situation to be in as a seller.