Examination By Peers – Acuspect Home Inspections

Bob Kille Acuspect Home Inspection Yesterday I had the opportunity to take a review by peer exam for the Arizona ASHI master inspector program. The program is not yet in place and the exam was only a trial so that the chapter could get some experiences in how best to proceed with the program.

My self and two others took the exam which consisted of; doing a home inspection, relating the major defects in an oral exam and then a small question and answer session followed by a show and tell photo exam.

The oral exam was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. Many of my disclaimer types of comments are written in my report and I couldn’t recall exactly what they said when asked because I wrote them once a long time ago and really haven’t been asked about them since.

Even some of the terms I was using in my oral exam didn’t match what I had written. It’s kind of a high-pressure question and answer with the examiner playing stupid if you didn’t qualify what you were saying in layman’s terms.

The assumption that your client understands what you’re saying just because his head nods is probably a mistake. I think we get caught up in using the terms that as home inspectors we use everyday and expect that others are just as conversant in them.

Yeh, I failed. I needed to get a score of 10 must report on items in the home inspection and came up short by 3. Not to give too much away but I blew it in the areas of access, structure and appliance venting. Not inspecting one of the building’s rooms didn’t help either. How’d that happen?

Well, it happened because I was out of my normal routine. First, because this is a controlled environment you couldn’t use your own ladder. Second, you were not to occupy the same general area as one of the other participants which in my case altered my path. That’s how I missed the exterior storage room, bumped into another inspector and took another route. This can typically happen to you on a normal inspection when the client pulls you away to look at something and you don’t quite get back to where you stopped your routine.

Of the three items missed only one was something that I didn’t already know which had to do with access. The structure mistake was one I don’t think would have happened if I had been able to use my own equipment. The venting issue is one in which I don’t have any excuses, not that I’m making excuses, I just plain missed it.

It was a good experience and one that has me thinking quite a bit on how easy it is to mess up and a reminder that there’s still more to learn. Of course your most expensive mistakes are your best-learned lessons. I got to skate on my structure mistake which if in real life had come back to haunt me would have cost twenty large.

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