Utilizing Neutral Language in Home Inspection Reports

Master the art of neutral language. Ever wondered how a simple observation can shield you from liability? Our latest episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk is packed with insights on maintaining professionalism by focusing on factual observations. We delve into practical examples, like how to handle those notorious water stains on ceilings, ensuring your reports stay objective and reliable. By avoiding assumptions and speculation, you not only protect yourself but also empower your clients to make informed decisions.

Join us as we explore effective report writing, share field stories, and discuss the vital role of clear communication in serving both inspectors and clients. We recount an enlightening encounter with an upset seller, demonstrating the power of sticking to the facts. Plus, learn valuable tips for enhancing your reports and get introduced to our app for streamlined scheduling and reporting. This episode promises to be a treasure trove of wisdom for home inspectors committed to upholding industry standards and delivering unparalleled service.

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Chapters

• 0:00 Importance of Neutral Language in Reports
• 8:47 Importance of Neutral Language in Inspections
• 14:00 Effective Home Inspection Report Writing

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk everyone. Today, we're continuing our series on inspection report writing, and today I wanted to talk about the importance of using neutral language in reports. Now, at first we say, well, of course, we're a neutral party. That's why people hire us, objective opinion. But oftentimes we don't use as neutral language in a report like we should. And I say like we should, because this is something that I am a real stickler for, and always have been, and when I first started to review inspectors reports a long time ago, when we were making courses, and obviously, when we came up with our inspection software and things like that, the one thing that stood out among the most was the lack of neutral language. And I'm going to give some examples as to why neutral language is important and also how to do it properly. And it's really simple, but it's something that we may want to go over our comments a little bit, our canned comments in our software, and also how we write our custom comments when we see things. 

So first of all, describe what you observed, not what you assume or suspect. Now I used to sit in rooms with home inspectors, and they would just go back and forth with me, and okay, if that's how you want to write things, that's fine, but I'm going to give you an example of what we're talking about here. So for instance, verbally, we may say to our clients, we see water stains on the ceiling, and we may say, yeah, that roof has got to be leaking. It's old, yeah. But what we say in person and what we write down should oftentimes be two different vernaculars, not different things, but different vernaculars. Like we can say, oh, man, if this were my house, I wouldn't worry too much about, you know, these old lead solder joints or something like that and we go into a big speech about it, but then in our report, we can just observe, yeah, there was lead solder joints, if that's what we're doing. I'm just trying to give an example. But we should only write down what we see and can measure. 

For instance, it might be easy to see water stains on a ceiling with a 25 year old roof and say in our reports, roof leaking observed at time of inspection. Did we actually observe the roof leaking? Most of the time, not. Unless it's a serious leak and all this other stuff, and we can actually observe it leaking, which I have, I'm sure most of you have at some point or another, on a rainy day, but we couldn't see that if we're just looking at stains on a ceiling. Instead saying something like water stains were observed, that's it. We don't know for sure if the roof was leaking or if it actually came from there. And I gave an example a few weeks back on a podcast about something that ended up being rodent stains. Stuff like that happens all the time. And one home inspector one time in these townhouses, he called out moisture stains from a roof leak, and the roofer goes up and said, I didn't find anything. And then everybody said, okay, must have been fine. Then the pipes burst that were in the attic. In my area, that's a big no no, because it gets cold outside and those pipes are going to freeze and burst. Somebody just had the bright idea to run a water line to a bathroom in the attic, and I still have pictures of it, water running out of the garage and freezing in the driveway all the way down to the road. That came from something as simple as an assumption. But now think about the implications of writing down what we assume. And in all reality, we could be correct, and that's the argument that I would get back from these rooms of inspectors. Well, it has to be coming from there. I'm like, yeah, but if you don't know, you don't know. So it does the same thing for us to write down what we observed, and for a client, it helps them out. 

So now let's say we are the attorney or whoever, for this client, and we read the report and it says roof leak noted. Send a roofer there. The roofer says nothing's wrong. That's kind of a dead stop. Now, if you say in your report that there's indications of moisture noted on the ceiling, okay, now we send a roofer over, roofer says nothing's there. Okay, well, where's this moisture coming from? Let's get a general contractor to cut a hole in the ceiling, get up into this attic. Oh, hey, look, there's a pipe in there. It opens up a whole world of protection for our clients and for us. So basically, it comes down to not assuming or what we suspect. We never, ever really want to talk about causality. An attorney taught me that, it actually was one of InterNACHI's attorneys, I'm not gonna say his name here, I don't know, I don't think he's still with InterNACHI, really great guy, but he would always talk about that. He's like, don't talk about causality. Write down what you can tell with your five senses, your sight, sound, whatever it happens to be, taste. I don't think you should be going around tasting homes, but hey, you know, you do you. So don't write down what we think. Write down what we can observe. Moisture stains noted on ceiling. They were dry at time of inspection. Take a picture with our moisture meter or infrared, but note that it was not raining, and rain hadn't occurred for three days and etc, etc. Write down what we can observe, not what we suspect. 


That leads us into the second point, which I kind of delved into a bit. Avoid speculation. Only report visible and accessible conditions. So an example of this is the plumbing behind the walls could not be accessed during this inspection. That should be a disclaimer in all of our reports, but I'll give you an example. I did a house and it was a flip of which we all know is kind of like an Easter egg hunt for defects, and it said, all new plumbing. Okay, so now I looked and there was all new plumbing. So I could have very easily in my SOP, in the state I'm in, it says, describe what the plumbing is. Now I put in PEX because that's all I could see. But there's always the disclaimer that we don't know what's behind the walls. And I see home inspectors make this mistake, and the quote, unquote defensible position is, hey, well, that's all I could see when the client opens up a wall and they find something different. Let them know that. Let them know, hey, I can't see behind walls. I don't know what's behind there. But anyways, back to the story. I went, and I was able to shine a flashlight up one of the wet walls. So I shone my flashlight up, and I could see that there was old, I forget what kind of piping it was, but it was ancient. Basically, they only changed out what you could see. So I wrote in my report I and I took a picture, and I said, this is what I observed going up into at least one of the wet walls. And then come to find out, they admitted, yeah, we didn't change out all the plumbing, just what you could see. And my client walked away, because it was just ancient plumbing. It was like a 100 year old house. So only report on what we can see. That's important for things like wiring, plumbing, all the stuff that's behind walls, insulation, like we put in our reports. Insulation was fiberglass, but now there's some houses in my area where in the walls, it's just old newspaper. I lived in a house when I was a kid where we opened up the walls and it was just old newspaper. That's just how they insulated. So now, if we say, hey, you have fiberglass insulation, they open it up and it's just old newspaper, me, as a regular consumer, I'm probably not going to be too happy with that. So avoid speculation, only report visible and accessible conditions, and make sure that is known in the disclaimers in our report. 

The next one is, refrain from personal opinions. This one is one that I kind of go around in circles with other inspectors on because they pay for our opinion, right? And that's what we're giving them. But really they're paying for our observations and opinions in certain respects, whether or not it's defective. What they're not paying for is our opinion about what should happen next. So in other words, here's an example. The roof needs to be replaced. Really not our place to make that determination. There have been plenty of times where that kind of wording has gotten home inspectors in trouble. So we say the roof needs to be replaced, and the roofer comes and he says, nah, this thing is fine. It's got five more years in it with some maintenance. We're probably not getting sued, but are we going to look like a bit of an idiot? Is that agent maybe not going to refer us after the third time that happens? Instead, why did we say that the roof needed to be replaced? Could it be that we should just say the roof has several damaged shingles, areas of possible leaking, and I say possible leaking because unless it's actually wet at the time of inspection and you observe the leak, possible leaking is a better term. Says repairs and/or replacement may be needed. Now, we just covered ourselves. Now, if there's observable leaking, yeah, it needs to be repaired, okay, but we shouldn't say it needs to be repaired or replaced. And then further evaluation by a qualified contractor, that should always be our go to. We don't make the determination of what happens to the item we inspect. We make the determination that the next step is for a contractor to come in and take a look. So be very careful about forming our personal opinions. These electric panels are garbage, they should be replaced. They shouldn't be in anybody's house. I don't care what anybody says, okay, and that's fine, if that's our opinion, but writing that down on a report that this panel has to be replaced...But now we can say the panel is a safety hazard. Okay, cool, we talked about hazards in a previous podcast. Cool, that's our opinion. And what they do with that hazard is up to them. Roof, anything else, leave our opinion out of it. Say this is what we observed. It's serious enough to be a problem. Contact qualified contractor or specialist and have them take a look. 

The next one is avoid liability with with our neutral language. So this goes back to what we just said about only reporting what we can observe. The roof is leaking. I have seen that in so many reports. And you know what's funny is half the time when I would be the inspector that would come back and inspect after the repairs are made, or maybe this was like a pre-listing inspection, I'm doing the inspection for the buyer, whatever. Whenever I was following an inspector that says the roof was leaking, the first place I would go to was the chimney, or I'd go to vent boot, and I checked those first, half the time, the roof actually wasn't leaking. It was a flashing leak. I'm like, okay, so $20,000 roof or a $400 flashing component. Big difference between the two. They didn't have to say roof was leaking. They could have just said evidence of moisture intrusion was observed in the attic space, and take a picture. Add a location, located near chimney, even saying chimney leak. First of all, does the chimney leak or does the flashing leak? We're not going to get into all of that, but just say indications of leaking noted at...And then tell them, get a qualified specialist. They'll come and they'll take a look. 

So those four points just illustrate the fact that neutral language, us as an observer, need to follow a very basic principle, only write down what we can verify with a picture and our five senses. So do we see moisture stains on the ceiling but we can't tell if they're wet or not?Moisture stains noted on ceiling in such and such an area, could not verify if they were wet or not, or where they were coming from, recommend a qualified specialist, evaluate. And I'll tell you a story. Can we use that language consistently? So we never know who our sellers are when we're going to inspect a house. We have our buyers that we're working for likely, and then the sellers, we never know who's there. So I had the seller get really livid with me. There was a leak underneath his bathtub, or something like that, and it's leaking into the kitchen. He tried to hide it, you know, I'm not gonna put this in the report, but he tried to hide it. Big fancy house. He came out. He was some highfalutin professional, I don't know, and he just went up one side of me and down the other, and I just kind of stared. The the agent I worked with was there, and they're kind of like looking at me with like, sorry, and I don't know what to do. And I'm just picking up the radon test. So I go and he started to complain about the wording in my report, and he said, you said there's an active leak! I said, no, I said, indications of possible leaking but could not verify, but I did take a picture of my moisture meter with 100% reading on it and water dripping. So I recommended somebody come and take a look and figure out where this leak is coming from. He's like, well, it's not leaking now. I'm like, we're not running any water right now. We went back and forth. In reality, he was just mad at the language in my report because now it opened it up for the buyer to come and say, where was all this water coming from? We want sellers to be upset at us for writing a good report like that. Now, if I had written water coming underneath tub, then he would have been really mad and have something legitimate, but he couldn't. He didn't have anything legitimate to say against me because I wrote my report properly, using neutral language, only writing down what I could observe, what I could verify, and not what I assumed. I knew it was coming from the tub. I knew that drain was leaking. It was right above the sink. I could see the tub. It happened when I ran the tub. Okay, even he assumed that, because that's what he assumed I was saying. So the more we use neutral language in our reports, writing down only what we can observe and verify, the more professional our reports will be, and also the more it'll protect our clients and ourselves. So stay tuned for more home inspection report writing tips in one of our upcoming episodes.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.

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*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.