Privatised building inspections are a fucking disgrace. I didn’t even realise there were no licencing requirements. I thought they had to be engineers at the very least.
Privatised building inspections are a fucking disgrace. I didn’t even realise there were no licencing requirements. I thought they had to be engineers at the very least.
Certainly in the US home inspectors carry insurance and bonds for this, and would have been responsible for substantial portions of any repairs.
I’ve worked in the Australian housing inspection industry. The good ones have insurance for this. They also, generally, do a good job. Most of them are builders with decades of experience who are no-longer physically fit enough to work on the tools all day.
Some of them can’t get insurance, specifically “Professional Indemnity” insurance which means if they don’t do their job properly the insurance company will pay to fix their mistake. You do not want to work with one of those inspectors.
The real issue is it takes a very long time to properly inspect a house and even longer to properly document your findings with photos/etc. Most people aren’t wiling to pay for that, so they end up hiring somebody cheap who does a half assed job (and can’t get insurance because they do a half assed job).
As someone with building experience myself, I kinda don’t need an inspection… but I still spent the money on a good one because I didn’t want to take the time to go over every aspect with a fine toothed comb and then write up a list of things I should probably fix one day. I’m not an experienced inspector, which means it’ll take me far longer than it takes them even though I probably could find all the issues.