Optimizing Home Inspection Reports

Effective inspection report writing requires finding the perfect balance between thoroughness and client accessibility, with strategic organization making all the difference in client satisfaction and efficiency.

• Report summaries should be placed at the beginning, not the end, of inspection reports for maximum client usability
• Common industry fear that front-loaded summaries create liability has little evidence to support it
• Consolidating report sections (like combining all bedrooms under "Living Spaces") streamlines reports without compromising quality
• Separate bathroom and kitchen sections from general living spaces for clarity and client expectations
• Limit canned comments to 5 primary options per item to avoid wasting time scrolling through excessive choices
• A streamlined report takes less time to create and is far more useful to clients and contractors
• The Einstein principle applies: if you can't explain something simply, you simply don't understand it

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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 Introduction to Report Writing Series
• 1:44 Report Summaries: Location Matters
• 4:47 Optimizing Report Structure
• 8:05 Consolidating Living Spaces in Reports
• 13:20 Kitchen Sections and Canned Comments
• 16:58 Closing Thoughts and Next Episode

Transcript

Ian Robertson  
Hey there IT crowd. Ian Robertson here back with another episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. So we're continuing our report writing series, and this one is an important one in my opinion. It's about optimizing our reports, not only for ourselves, but for our clients. And there's a nice happy medium that we can find that really makes our reports stand out. And this came from a couple of different questions. Some listeners came with questions such as, do you do a room by room inspection or system by system? Should you have a report summary? Or where does your report summary go? So instead of just answering these individually, I want to encompass it in this podcast, because this is really where our reports can stand out. 

So oftentimes we talk about optimizing a report for ourselves. I find that we as an industry do extremes. Either we have a report that makes it easy for us and hard for our clients. In other words, we write a report that takes us 10 minutes and they just get a junkie report. Or on the other end of that extreme, the client wants something simple that they can read, and we hand them an encyclopedia, and we're all proud of it, because we're like, oh man, my reports are so long. It's not very helpful. We use the illustration a lot in this podcast of a mechanic. So if a mechanic gives me a 20 page electronic report and I'm just scrolling through all these different things of everything, I'm going to get frustrated. I want to see what I need to see. I want to understand what I want to understand, and if I want to see more, I'll look at more. So how do we make sure that we give them a good, thorough inspection, but optimize a report for us and for our clients. 

First of all, let's address that question about a report summary. Now I am still surprised. Probably most of you listening have a report summary. If you're an Inspector Toolbelt user, very likely you do, but I am still surprised at how many inspectors don't include a report summary and even include just a narrative report, which, if you write a narrative report, I'm sorry this might be offensive to you, but I don't want to read a story book just describing my home. I want to have a little red icon, or I want to have something say this is broke. And I want to know what to do next as a client. So looking at it from the client's perspective is what we want to do today. So report summary. We should have it in there. That is a strong personal opinion of mine. We need to have a report summary. But where do we put it? For me, for many years, well over a decade, I always put it at the end of the report. And there's this old trope in the home inspection industry, if you have a summary, put it at the end. And I remember years ago, inspectors, when I first started, were even like, I don't put pictures in my report. That creates too much liability. Look where we are as an industry now. "I don't do a report summary because they have to read the whole report, and that protects me from liability." I don't know where that came from. I cannot find anything. I'm not an attorney. Talk to an attorney, but none of the attorneys that have ever reviewed my reports have said, yes, put the report summary at the end because it forces the client to read through the whole report. That's the usual reason I hear inspectors say, I put the report summary at the end. Well, I want them to see the whole report. They have to scroll through the whole report before they get to the summary. Has that ever protected anybody? I don't know if it has. I can't find anything to substantiate it. And to be perfectly frank, we're a pretty low liability industry. We're gonna have a podcast coming up about an increase this year of incidents, legal incidents. We're gonna be interviewing an insurance agency. They've seen an uptick. Even then it is such a minuscule number, and the vast majority of them completely go away. Why are we so worried about liability that this, you know, liability is important, but is that really saving us? And as a client, I want to open a report, scroll down a half a second into looking at a picture in an address, say, oh, yep, that's the house we inspected. I want to get right into the meat of it. There's the three issues Ian told me about during our inspection. Done. You're going to have happy clients. You're going to have happy agents. Instead of making everybody scroll through this whole report to get to the end. So should you have a report summary? 100%. I don't think a report should go out without a summary in my opinion. Where should it be? Again, if you're an Inspector Toolbelt user, you can put it at the beginning, you can put it at the end. But my personal preference, and most softwares will allow you to put a summary in, put it in there and put it at the beginning. Let it be the first thing. The defects should be first. Don't make them wade through every bit of chipped paint on their siding and things like that. Let them see the stuff in red, so to speak, the very first thing. That's going to optimize the report for our clients, and it's really not going to add any work for us. It's no more work for us, for the summary to be in there and be at the end. Our softwares will do that for us. 

But now, what about the actual report itself? Well, there's something that we can do that will not only optimize it for our clients, but also optimize it for us at the same time. And this is the real magical thing. Now I'm going to preemptively pre-argue a point, because I have brought this out to inspectors personally and in groups, and I have had them say the same thing every time. "I will not compromise my report writing." I'm not asking you to. I'm not asking you to do that at all. I'm going to start with an illustration of the mechanic again. Imagine we go to the mechanic, and he writes a report, a section of the report on each tire, and his report goes: rubber rim, bolts, bearings, he has all these things, and he writes that same report on all four tires. My eyes are going to roll in the back of my head. I'm like, why can't you just have one section on tires, and then if something's wrong with the tire, you can tell me everything's good in all these tires. But you know, if there's a bad bolt somewhere, just say on passenger side, front tire, missing bolt. Oh, man, that stinks. Okay, we'll fix that. Same information. Didn't compromise any inspection. He inspected the same things and gave the same information, but he consolidated it into a streamline report. Now I'm going to read you each section, and again, I'm referring to, you may hear me refer to cards and sections in a report. They're referring to Inspector Toolbelt home inspection software. That's because that's what I use personally, and obviously that's what this podcast is ultimately about. And you know, it's just easier for me to tell you how my reports are laid out. So this is how my reports are laid out. And I'm going to start off with a mistake that I make in my report that hopefully you don't, and I only do it because I'm an old cranky inspector, and there has to be one wrong thing that I have to hang on to, and that's putting the general information section first. In my report and even in some of our templates in Inspector Toolbelt, the general information section is first. That's going to be things like the weather, temperature, who was on site, was the electricity on? All that junk. Does it need to be in there? Oh, yeah, 100%. That totally needs to be part of our report. But why do I make my clients scroll through all this stuff that they don't want to see? Again, that's like my mechanic saying it was 75 degrees in the garage. This was your mechanic's name. You know, the tire pressure was this and that and okay, was there anything wrong with my car is what I'm going to start to say. So we wouldn't lead with that information just telling people it. So why is it the leading information in our reports? That should be at the end, in my opinion, it needs to be in there, people need to know it. Put it towards the end, right before our last section of disclaimers, or whatever we have in there. But this is going to make more sense as I go through it. So I lay out my report to optimize it for myself to inspect, but also for my client to in their mind, follow me back through the house. 

So roof, exteriors, lots and grounds, my first three sections. Exteriors and lots and grounds can really be combined into one section. Then I have the garage and air conditioning. I always have air conditioning right after the garage, because that's where I would actually start my inspection of the HVAC system, because there's an exterior unit. Then the next two sections are going to be structure and basement, just because structure and basement are not necessarily the same thing, but that's where I start my structural inspection. Then, because I'm already in the basement, next sections are plumbing, heating, and electrical. And then before I do any part of the middle section of the house, I go to the attic. Here is where, though, our inspections get bogged down, and I see this in so many inspection reports, bathrooms, living spaces, and kitchen, bedrooms, all those things. Think about that tire example for a moment, imagine a house has four bedrooms, so we have a whole section in our report for bedroom number one, northeast, second floor bedroom, bedroom number two, southeast, master bedroom, or whatever we call it now, main bedroom, whatever we call it. Why? The big stuff doesn't usually happen in the bedrooms. It can, but most part, you know, basements, attics, main system, structure, that's where the big stuff happens. 90% of the time it's going to be a moisture stain on the ceiling from something that we saw in the attic anyways, we're going to notice some tears in the carpet, whatever it happens to be. Why do we make our clients go through a report where we individualize each quote, unquote "tire in the house?" Here's the bolts on this tire, here's the rim on this tire, here's the rubber on this tire. It's mind numbing. Same thing with dining room. Now we make them read a section on the dining room. We've just taken our report, and I know we're proud of reports being extra long, I don't know why, though. Einstein said, "if you can't explain something simply, you simply don't understand." Being concise and putting things in categories helps us, because now we don't have to go through four different bedroom categories in our report and scroll through them and find every section, and it helps our client, because now they're like bedrooms, cool, living spaces. There it all is. Now all my bedrooms, dining rooms, living room, and everything is in one section called living spaces. So broken window in the living room, I'll go to the window section under living spaces, and I go, broken window in living room, broken window in second floor bedroom, all in one section. I find myself not having to fill those sections out a whole lot, and you'll probably find the same thing too, the odd off outlet that's broken or window that's stuck. And then it also helps us. if you listen to our podcast about grouping items in an inspection, now we find four windows way easier to group things. Instead of having a window section in each bedroom and say, please see main bedroom window section, we're grouping all these items together, it's already grouped together for us. Several windows in the house were damaged or broken of the same manufacturer of the same year. There could be an issue. It's grouped together already for us and our clients love it. We gave the same information. We did not compromise our inspection. We inspected the same number of windows, the same process. We gave them the same information. We just did it all in one section. Now that's living spaces, where I put all the living spaces except two things. 

My next section is going to be bathrooms. I don't do a separate bathroom for each one unless the house is a mess, like if we're doing a flip, okay. There is going to be a huge defect in each bathroom. So then I separate them. 99.9% of the time I just have one section that says bathrooms. So guys will be like, yeah, but there could be a broken toilet in one bathroom and a loose toilet in another. I'm like, okay, cool. So I just write a comment under toilets, under bathrooms, that says loose toilet in main bedroom bathroom, broken toilet in second floor bathroom. Done. You know what that does for my clients? When the plumber comes to go fix it, he goes, oh, cool, yeah, there's the two toilets. He doesn't have to scroll through three or four different bathrooms trying to figure out, okay, which bathroom is this? We save time because we're not sitting there labeling each bathroom in each section of our report. I used to do that for years. I'm like, okay, northeast bedroom on the second floor. And I'm like, why am I doing that? Nobody's standing around with a compass trying to figure that out, and it makes it harder for my clients to find it. I just write bathrooms. If everything's good in the bathrooms, you know what? You didn't have to write anything out, and you don't have to have all these sections in your report. You know what's the worst thing is when you have a clean inspection and somebody has to scroll through five bedrooms and four bathrooms of nothing, not a defect, not a broken doorknob, loose hinge, nothing, so they're just scrolling through empty space of nothing in your report. Consolidation helps our client and helps us. It's what we would want, right? We wouldn't want every bolt itemized on our car. So why do we do it in the reports? So living spaces, bathrooms. 

The only other section of living space that I separate out is the kitchen. I just couldn't find a good way. It has its own plumbing sources, and it's not a bathroom. It's not really a dry living space. It has plumbing in it, and it has other mechanical systems. So you might find a better way. And if somebody has a better way to categorize this, let me know. We'll hopefully mention on a podcast if it's actually a better way of doing it. But I do have the kitchen as a separate section. I also find that my clients do like to know that their kitchen was inspected, and if you just categorize it in living spaces, then, you know, they feel like that maybe just got overlooked a little bit. Like some guys will have a separate section in living spaces, like, if in the app, if you have living spaces as a section, and right after, you know, smoke detectors or something, you put kitchen, just one line. They feel like they didn't get the most important part of their house in their mind, really thoroughly inspected. So just for my client's sake, I leave that out, but I'm looking at it. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 sections. That's it, 13 different categories for the house, I could probably get it down to 10 or less. You could have one section for mechanicals that include plumbing, heating, and electrical. The more you can consolidate those things, but do the same inspection, and give the same information. 

Number one, it helps us, because we're not going to have to fly around to multiple different sections and scroll through these ginormous templates. It's all just right there. Number two, our clients are going to love it. The more I consolidated, the more the agents and the clients will give feedback, oh, this is amazing. You gave great information, and it's nice and consolidated. Everything makes sense, they could find what they needed. Awesome. Happy inspector, happy client, happy agent, same information. It's a win win. 

The last thing I'll mention about optimizing reports, and I've mentioned it before, canned comments. Canned comments, years ago, home inspectors didn't want to use them. I remember 15 years ago, they're like, oh, I custom write every comment. Now we use canned comments but we went to the other extreme. There are guys out there with 100 canned comments on one item. So you'll have something like, I'm looking at electric panel, they'll have 120 comments. Even 20 comments is way too much. By the time I'm done looking through each one of those canned comments to find just the right one. I could have just typed out the comment. The best way to do it is to, one, keep our canned comments to five primary comments that we use all the time. If it's outlets in the living space, you're going to have five comments. Outlet was not functional at time of inspection. You know, non GFCI outlet. You know same things over and over again. For those odd off ones, again, if you use Inspector Toolbelt, we have a comment library. Just start typing and it'll just automatically pull it out of the main comment library. Quick comments are so that you can go and just go, click, done. Comment added. If you have 120 of those comments, or even 20 or more, you're scrolling through them, reading each one. That takes time. Trust me, I've sat there and timed out how long it takes to scroll through some of these guys comments, and I said, listen, it took me 30 seconds to find the comment. Then it wasn't the right one, then I had to go back in. I'm like, it was two minutes for one thing, I'm like, I would rather just typed in GFCI, had all my GFCI comments come up, click on the right one and been done in 10. That last one takes a little bit of practice and a little bit of refinement. 

But these things optimize our inspection reports. That makes happy clients, happy inspectors. If you agree or don't agree, let me know. But keep those suggestions coming. We love talking about them. We'll see you on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

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.