Houston Inspection Lawsuit

[Blaine Wiley]

Originally Posted by dbowers

For the record, MY OPINION is mine. Its not yours; its never wrong because its MY OPINION.

Which is why my PIA states "In the inspectors sole opinion".

[Bruce A. King]

Originally Posted by dbowers

The sellers claim that the HI was practicing engineering.

I saw nothing I felt would qualify as "The practice of engineering".

I'm not a Doctor. If I see a deer get hit by a semi, and the head was severed. The head was on 1 side of the highway; the body on the other side of the highway. If I say "In my opinion the deer is dead", am I practicing medicine without a license.............

If I go to the museum and see a 1,000 year old mummified corpse, are we ALL: practicing medicine without a license if we see the mummy is dead??

If as an inspector, I see a 60 Amp MAIN electrical panel with 5 sub-panels wired off of it (going to a 240v A/C unit; 240v tanning bed; 240v disconnect in a detached workshop; etc), Am I practicing engineering by saying "In my opinion, the service needs upgrading"?


For the record, MY OPINION is mine. Its not yours; its never wrong because its MY OPINION.

Very good point! Too many inspectors out there that think they have to "prove" their writeups with code references and other long drawn out explanations. The clients pay us for our professional opinion and thats what they really want. Besides, when you infer a code violation you are just making a nice loophole for an agent to tell the client "it met code when the house was built". The client thinks, hmmm, the agent must be right then since it passed the code inspections....... so I'll just forget that one.


I get clients every week that used other inspectors in the past and were very unhappy with the way the other inspection and reporting was done.
I have to admit, I was not sure my system was the best at first but after four plus years and multiple praises from clients and agents I have not changed it except to add even more explanations of my own opinion to the report.

[Gary L. Farnsworth, CMI]

Anyone in Texas heard about this recently? People here in Kansas are interested.

[John Cahill]

Originally Posted by bwiley

Which is why my PIA states "In the inspectors sole opinion".

That will not work in Texas. TREC rules limit the inspectors opinion to "reasonable opinion". That means the TREC lawyers decide if you did the job correctly.