Welcome to my new blog post series called Agent Tips! For the first tip we’re going to talk about re-wording inspection report comments for your inspection response/request sheet. If you don’t feel like reading this whole post then here is the TL;DR… Don’t Re-Word Inspection Report Comments for your inspection response. You are not qualified to do so and in doing so it opens you up to taking full liability of issues with the home and it may very well be a violation of licensing laws.

If you want to learn why this is a bad and a potentially costly mistake, keep reading. Doing this has the potential to take the liability of any issues with the house in the report off of the home inspector and put it onto you, the agent. Yikes!

How? Glad you asked, I’ll explain. I have run into problems in the past after my client (the buyer) has hired me to come back to the house they are buying for a re-inspection after the issues in the inspection response have been “fixed” by the seller. The buyers agent gives me the inspection response listing the issues the seller agreed to fix, I start looking over the response, and then I realize the buyers agent re-worded my deficiency comment from my report and put it in their own words for the inspection response. The issue was lost in translation because the buyers agent didn’t fully understand the issue, or they wanted to simplify/shorten the comment so they re-worded it. The seller then fixes, or hires someone to fix an issue that actually wasn’t the issue I had originally wrote in my report. Uh oh, now they’re a few days from closing and the seller fixed the wrong thing or didn’t fix the right thing because the buyers agent didn’t use my comment word for word. Not good!

Here is an example scenario of how this can happen, there are many but this one was the first to come to mind. My report says “The expansion tank was installed horizontally. It is recommended by the manufacturer that they be installed vertically in a downward position as they cannot support themselves properly horizontally, especially if filled with water. The weight could damage the water line. As an improvement I recommend having a professional evaluate and correct as needed. A strap can be mounted to structure above and wrapped around the tank to support the weight of it.”

The buyers agent may re-word this to save space and say something along the lines of “fix expansion tank on water heater”. The seller then, with no idea what’s actually wrong with the expansion tank, hires a general contractor to look at it. The contractor sees expansion tanks mounted horizontal like that all the time and doesn’t know that it’s actually an issue so he doesn’t do anything to fix it and says it’s okay. The sellers agent then writes a response stating that a contractor looked at it and said it was okay, or the selling agent just says it was fixed.

Now if the contractor and seller were able to see my actual comment, it could have helped them understand what exactly was wrong with the expansion tank. Let’s say the buyer doesn’t get a re-inspection from me after the contractor okay’d the expansion tank. The buyer moves in and a few months later the expansion tank fills with water, the water supply pipe can’t support the weight of it, the water pipe breaks and the basement floods. Now the liability could be on the agent because they didn’t put the full comment I had wrote in the inspection response, instead they rewrote it in their own words so the problem was never addressed as it should have been. If you use me as an inspector then you will be covered because my insurance covers the referring agent in situations like this. BUT not every inspector has that coverage with their policy.

In short, just copy and paste any comment the inspector has in their report, and if their report has numbered sections like my reports at Rigid Inspections then add the section number too! My reports are written using Spectora and come with a feature called Agent Tools that lets agents export any category of comment (low, med, and high priority), either with pictures, or just as plain text comments in a convenient copy and paste box. There is also a great feature for agents called The Repair Request Builder. The repair request builder allows you to scroll through the inspection report and just check box which issues you want to include on your inspection response. You can then add comments to each item and monetary requests if desired. There are many great tools for agents in the inspection software I use here at Rigid Inspections so be sure to add me to your recommended inspector’s list.