Important Characteristics of House Inspectors and Inspections
Desirable Characteristics of House Inspectors • Competent—they possess the required training, expertise, and experience to evaluate the property for sale. • Objective—they have no reason to side with the seller; they are independent of the seller’s influence. • Honest—they will conduct themselves with integrity, and they will share all of their findings with the buyer. • Skeptical—they will not simply take the seller’s assertions at face value; they will conduct their own analysis and testing. • Responsible and/or liable—they should stand behind their assessment with a guarantee and/or be subject to litigation if they fail to act with due care.
Desirable Characteristics of a House Inspection Service • Timely—the results of the service are reported in time to benefit the decision maker. • Reasonably priced—the costs of the services must not exceed the benefits. For this to occur the service provider will likely need to focus attention on
the most important and risky assertions and likely can’t provide absolute assurance, even with respect to important seller assertions. • Complete—the service addresses all of the most important and risky assertions made by the seller. • Effective—the service provides some degree of certainty that it will uncover significant risks or problems. • Systematic and reliable—the service is based on a systematic process, and the conclusions are based on reliable evidence. In other words, another
comparable inspector would likely find similar issues and come to similar conclusions. • Informative—the service provides a sense for how likely mechanical or structural failure is in the near future and provides an estimate of the cost to
repair known defects or failures.
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