Sunday, October 7, 2007
**Orders revising process resisted
**Home inspectors say new rule is hindrance
By James Romoser
JOURNAL RALEIGH BUREAU
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RALEIGH
Many North Carolina home Inspectors are protesting a new state mandate that they say will make it harder to alert home buyers about safety defects in a home.
Supporters of the change say that the inspectors are overreacting and that the new mandate will serve the public by standardizing the written reports that all inspectors prepare. These supporters want home inspectors to stick to the facts, rather than issuing recommendations or opinions about a home’s potential safety problems.
“You can put, ‘House has no smoke alarms.’ You just can’t say the house is going to burn down,” said Jim Liles, the vice chairman of the N.C. Home Inspector Licensure Board, which has approved the new mandate.
But most home inspectors believe that the change will be much more restrictive than that. They accuse the North Carolina real-estate lobby of pushing the change to water down inspection reports and remove obstacles that sometimes complicate home sales.
Real-estate agents “are trying to keep these comments out of home inspectors’ reports so they don’t have to deal with them,” said John Woodmansee, a home inspector in Winston-Salem who is leading the opposition against the new mandate.
The mandate takes the form of a new rule handed down by the state’s licensure board, which has the power to discipline any of the more than 1,000 home inspectors in North Carolina. The rule spells out what information can and cannot be included in the summary section of the written reports that inspectors issue after inspecting a home.
Full inspection reports can be quite long, and inspectors say that home buyers and real-estate agents often ignore everything but the summary.
Under the new rule, the summary must include information about “any system or component that does not function as intended and is in need of repair or warrants further investigation by a specialist.” So, for instance, if a house’s furnace does not work, that fact would go in the summary.
But the rule prohibits inspectors from including in the summary “any recommendation to upgrade or enhance the function, efficiency, or safety of the home.”
That’s because the inspector’s summary should be like “a photograph in time of a house from a factual standpoint,” Liles said. “It eliminates as much opinion and speculation as possible.”
The rule has not yet taken effect. The licensure board is accepting comments from the public about the rule until Oct. 15, and after that, the rule will go before a state rules commission for approval. If 10 or more people write to the rules commission objecting to the rule and asking that it be reviewed by the state legislature, then the rule will get thrown to the legislature, which could either introduce alternative legislation or, by doing nothing, allow the rule to take effect.
If it does take effect, home inspectors say, it will hinder their ability to do their jobs. Home buyers should have as much information as possible so they can decide for themselves what to do with that information, said Gerald Canipe, a home inspector in Fayetteville who is the chairman of the licensure board.
Canipe and two other inspectors on the eight-member board oppose the new rule, but they were outvoted by the other members, most of whom are not home inspectors.
Inspectors worry that the rule will restrict their ability to notify home buyers of safety matters such as a staircase railing that doesn’t have a handrail or a lack of grounded wiring in an old house.
“We like to say in our report that your system does not have grounded wiring in its circuitry,” Woodmansee said. “It would be safer as a system if it had grounding throughout. Not that we would even recommend that it would be changed, but at least they ought to know.”
Most people who have sold a home know that issues in a home inspector’s report can throw a last-minute wrench in the closing. Once an inspector identifies defects, the home buyer and the seller generally work out an agreement about what the seller will fix.
John Hamrick, a real-estate agent in Durham and a member of the home-inspector licensure board, acknowledged that the new rule will make life easier for real-estate agents. But he said he believes that it will make life easier for everyone, including the buyer and seller.
The purpose of the rule, Hamrick said, is to make inspectors’ reports more uniform and to clamp down on overzealous inspectors who, according to Hamrick, sometimes include unmerited opinions and speculation in their summaries.
Hamrick said he believes that inspectors don’t like being told what to do, but he said the new rule will benefit the public.
“If I’m John Q. Public out here and I’m trying to buy a house, I expect you to tell me the defects. But I don’t want you to tell me that this carpet needs to be replaced because you think it’s dirty and you don’t like the color,” Hamrick said.
When it comes to legitimate safety issues, however, inspectors say that sticking to the literal facts, without explaining what they mean, does not make sense.
Many people, for instance, might not know that a lack of grounded wiring can increase the risk of electrocution.
Even for more basic issues, the same limits apply, Woodmansee said.
“What do you say in a report?” he asked. “You say, ‘Well, the stairway to the basement lacks a handrail.’ Period. That’s all you say? Is that good or bad?”
■* James Romoser can be reached at 919-833-9056 or at*
jromoser@wsjournal.com.
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