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Archive for October, 2020

SUMMARIZE THIS

Oct 7, 20 • News

I often get requests for summary reports to be attached to my inspection reports.

The Texas Real Estate Commission and its broker and agent minions foist numerous counterproductive ideas upon the home-buying public every chance they get. One of these is the summary inspection report.

 

Summary reports benefit mostly only the real estate agents by allowing them to better control the sellers, buyers and inspectors in property re-sales. The benefits include, but are not limited to:

 

1. The natural tendency for most buyers is to avoid reading too much of the mountains of paperwork produced during a real estate transaction. Who can blame them? So then, when confronted with one of my 100-page home inspection reports, they proceed to wilt. Instead of performing their duty of due diligence by actually reading the report, they want someone to predigest it and feed it back to them as pabulum. With the report dumbed-down and truncated, the agent has an easier time of dealing with the profusion of property defects found on every house by all but the agents’ pet inspectors.

 

2. The summary report also lends itself to becoming a repair list for the agent to present to the seller during a resale transaction. Though they make the lion’s share of profit from the transaction – 1.5% to 6% of the sales price on a $300K house is $4500 – $18,000 – as opposed to the average inspection fee of around $600, they avoid doing anything that resembles actual work.

 

My errors and omissions insurance carrier strictly prohibits summary reports, as they should. It is often the case that the buyer will simply refer to the summary without reading the entire report, thus missing much of the nuance and most of the significance of the whole document.  Additionally, listing defects in an attempt to prioritize their importance is impossible. This sort of non-thinking requires not only the ability to predict the future, but also the ability to predict the timing of future failure events. Care to definitively state when your next flat tire will occur? Which tire will it be? What will be the exact cause of the flat? Good luck with that.

 

Home builders are also fond of summary reports. With one of these in hand a builder can easily deflect any supposed defects found by simply arguing around the brevity of the summary statements. New home defects must be identified by specific building code citations that do not lend themselves to abbreviation or curtailment.

 

Further, if all of the issues are already contained within a written report, exactly what is the purpose of reiterating these in the very same document?

 

Finally, if you find yourself terminally ensconced in one of the generations needing helicopter-parenting after leaving home, do us all a favor and find an inspector who will write you a flowery, Reader’s Digest version of a real inspection report and hand you those rose-colored glasses to boot. You won’t find him here.