Inspection Training

Complaint from Agent – The inspector did not give a complete verbal review. When we received the report the next day there were a lot of items in the report that were not discussed at the time of the inspection. Now my client is worried about all of these issues and I need to have the inspector call them to go over this report.

This is critical. Some inspectors have perfect technical skills, but could not communicate with the client.  They would not get referred. Or worse, people would call the office and say not to send that inspector again. Likability is very important.

Answer their questions. Make them feel good that you know what you’re talking about. Don’t sugar coat things, but don’t be alarming, either.

The client and agent feel very comfortable, or they’ll feel you didn’t know what you were talking about.

Giving a complete review at the end of inspection is mandatory and not optional. This is one of the most important parts of your inspection and is expected from our clients, agents and Axium. You should go through all of your pictures and take the time to answer all of clients questions prior to leaving the property. This review (and all communication) must be captured on your audio recorder.

“The Inspector was very nice and professional. He did a nice job. I however was disappointed that he was unable to talk with me for more than a few minutes. I would have liked to be shown a few areas and talked out of the earshot of owners when he was finished.”

Make sure to give your business card to everyone that is present at the inspection and tell them to call you if they have any questions once they receive the inspection report.

The inspector always needs to make sure that what they are telling the client verbally is also in the report. There have been many issues with inspector’s telling the client about a defect during the verbal review, but not backing that up in the written report with a picture and explanation.

We also need to make sure that our reports are accurate by properly hitting the “review” button when we are not going to complete the sentence at that time. This way when we are writing the reports later we know which sections we need to edit. If you don’t hit the review button, reports could get sent out with incomplete sentences that could confuse clients and make them think that the report was done in a sloppy manner. The last check that we have in place is the “Browse” feature right before we upload the report. This gives us a chance to browse through and look at how everything will appear in the report before we upload and it gets emailed to the client and agent. Make sure that the pictures accurately match the comments and especially pay attention to any “Repair or Replace comments in the report.