I Want to Add Narratives to My Home Inspection Report With The Click of a Button

One of the more frustrating things home inspectors face in report writing is not being able to locate a pre-made narrative comment that you know exists somewhere in your software. While no software can make every comment instantly available, smart software will provide an inspector with multiple ways to sort, sift through, organize and recall your narratives. One of my favorite tools at the moment is the Inspector Only Notes checkbox. Inspector Only Notes are designed to show up in...

Using ScribeWare for The Best Home Inspection Reports in the Industry

This article is designed as a series of tutorial videos to walk anyone through the steps needed to write great home inspection reports. The Basics Once you download your ScribeWare trial, play around with the software to see how easy it is to produce and publish a great inspection report. The software is designed to be as intuitive as possible, so very little training is needed to make a report using a basic template. However, to maximize the quality and...

AFCI Protection and Alterations to Your Residential Electric System

I have heard it said that the development of our modern electrical system is the single greatest engineering achievement of mankind. While that is a bold statement, I find it difficult to conceive of technology that has more drastically changed our lives; stop for a minute and visualize life without electricity. Not only has our electrical grid revolutionized life on earth, but we have managed to do this in a remarkably safe way, especially in North America, where electricians are licensed...

Length Does Not Matter

Quality Matters Discussions among home inspectors frequently circle back to the “correct” length of a home inspection report. Obviously, there is no right or wrong answer here and the sheer number of observations in a report is likely to reflect the size, age, and condition of the house being inspected as well as the style and detail of the home inspector. The risk for inspectors is writing too little and leaving the appearance of a thin and useless service. Or, write...

“I’ve Had 20 People on This Deck!”

It has not failed to date… Every home inspector has heard some version of this refrain at least once a week for their whole career. In this one, the claim in question was deck construction. The insistence that the deck was perfectly fine – because it had not collapsed to date – came at me from a stubborn seller who was advised by his attorney, in a for sale by owner situation, that he should shadow the home inspector and the buyer...