Value Over Price

“We made how much in 40 minutes?” That question hits different when you remember what a great home inspection actually does. We unpack a story from Jay Wen: a septic inspection goes sideways fast, the system is flooded, and the discovery isn’t just a finding it’s a financial save. The right mentality shift turns a short appointment into a clear statement of value: protecting a client from a $25,000 mistake.

From there, we dig into the real difference between charging for time and charging for outcomes. When we price like a commodity, we silently cut corners: fewer tools, less training, less confidence, and weaker service. When we price around value, we feel the pressure to deliver it with better thermal equipment, better sewer scopes, sharper reporting, and clearer communication. We also talk about why “cheap but high quality” doesn’t hold up for long, and how clients still seek premium service when the decision is big and the risk is real.

We also connect this to the larger trades gap. Knowledge of how homes are built and how systems fail is becoming rarer, and the inspector who can translate technical problems into plain English becomes essential to the real estate transaction. A dead roof, a hidden hazard, or a failed system can mean tens of thousands of dollars, and our job is to surface that truth before buyers get stuck with 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.

Transcript

Ian Robertson 

Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk, everyone. Today we have a quick tip, but it's less of a tip of maybe how to inspect and more about a change in our mentality. This was sent to me by actually Jay Wynn. We're gonna actually have him on the podcast soon again for one of our favorite segments, Drinking With Jay. But he brings his son on inspections with him during the summertime, and especially for septic inspections, he brings him, he'll have him dig big holes and lift the lid and all that stuff. First of all, if you have kids and you can teach them how to inspect, man, that's just one of the most beautiful things I can think of. Beside that, though, when they got to the site, he said they opened the lids, they had dug it all up, opened the lids, and the whole system was flooded, full. It was a bunch of stuff going on, instant failure. So all together 30, 45 minutes and they got paid a substantial amount of money for 30 to 45 minutes. So his young son hopped in the truck with him and said, we made how much in 40 minutes? And Jay, who I love, says to him, what we did was we just saved our client $25,000. That was a beautiful shift in mentality, and Jay texted me, he's like, you gotta make that a podcast. And that's what I'm doing, because it is a really great thought, a shift from how much we charge versus the value that we bring. 

First of all, that shapes every bit of our business. It shapes every bit of our pricing structure, the services we offer, the tools that we use, everything is shaped by the value that we bring. And it really, I mean, that trope exists for a reason, that the $199 inspector is really probably not going to do as good a job as the $700 inspector. It's not a matter of a commodity of this toaster cost more than this toaster, and it's the same toaster, very different levels of service. When we charge $700 for home inspection, we're like, we bring value, and then we also feel the pressure to bring that value. I have updated thermal equipment. I have better sewer scopes. We had Beau Brown on last week, and he talked about, after the podcast, he trains dogs to find mold, you know, whatever it happens to be, bringing value is the most important thing. If we go on an inspection, we save that person, and I hear inspectors say this all the time. I like to give people a good service for a cheap price. It doesn't work like that. You can't use the same high-quality ingredients in a cake for a $10 cake as you can for $100 cake, and that's why $10 cakes, yeah, they sell, but people seek out those $100 cakes for special occasions, for really important things. 

We have to remember that we provide a service that is completely dying. They're talking about a resurgence in the trades, but those are 20 somethings. There was a long 25, 30 year period where there were not many people in the trades or very good at the trades, and so there's a huge gap right now. It's probably the algorithm giving my feed preference, but I see it all the time. Millennials and Gen Xers, they make fun of it because there's this huge, huge age gap. So, if we know something about how a home is built and we can communicate, we are becoming a very, very rare type of person in the world, and a very important one. I think Dwight Schrute from The Office said it the best. He goes, 'I don't tip anyone because I could do their job, except for my urologist. I can't pulverize my own kidney stones.' But that says a lot about business. Can people look at a house and find their own issues? Yeah, but how many times do we go on site after people looked at their own house, even people who were into construction, and they missed very large issues, expensive, hazardous issues. All the time, weekly, if not daily, if not almost every inspection. We provide a valuable service with specialized tools and specialized training to do our job. We bring value. We bring incredible value. 

When we find a dead roof, like, oh man, this roof is just completely shot. Oh, we wouldn't have known that otherwise, you know. The seller said it was five years old and ended up being 50 years old. Whatever. That roof is 40 grand. We didn't bring our value by giving them $199 inspection. We brought our value by saving them 40 grand, even if they negotiate with the seller and they only get half, we just saved them 20 grand. And the more that we have that mentality, the more we bring that to inspections with us, the more we bring that in our attitude, how we approach the inspection. People feel it. And I love Jay, because sometimes he'll have a ticket that he'll charge his clients $1,400 for a morning's worth of work, and Jay is just like, I'm bringing you value, and this is how, and he can very clearly explain it, and then people hand over that money and give them a great review for just a few hours' work, because he brought value. 

So I know that I sit here and I preach, raise your prices. What I really mean is raise your value. We all need to raise our value in our own mind first. What do we actually do? We provide a service, we bridge the gap between technical and normal human. That's a very difficult thing to do. If we devalue that, if we don't think about that, we'll see it in our business, we'll see it in the quality of our inspections, we'll see it in our low price, we'll see it in how we go about our inspection, or even the insecurity. We should have a whole podcast about our insecurity as home inspectors. Oh, the agent, what if they stop referring me? Or, oh, this client, I don't think they're going to pay that. Don't ask. Say, okay, it's $300 to add this on. Most clients would be like, cool. He seems confident. He knows what he's doing. He brings value. So quick change of how we think, focus on value and not on price, because we as an industry bring probably some of the highest value to the real estate transaction than anyone. So just our quick tip for today. And thank you much, and listen in to our next episode.

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.