Home Inspectors are worthless for the most part do not waste your money on them

This Home Inspection Service
Needs Investigated and put out of business?
By Nick Markowitz Jr.
Fire Investigator

One of my industrial customers sons recently bought an older home here in Pittsburgh and before he bought the home he paid $500.00 to have the home inspected
To make sure there were no major flaws.
The inspector showed up inspected the home and gave him a report of some minor things which needed done took his money and left. His son moves into the house and starts noticing after a rain storm how the basement would start stinking really bad to the point he could not let his child down there to play he lifts the rug to find that the previous home owner in able to have a level floor had put 5/8 drywall boards on the floor.
Needless to say he will have to rip out the entire basement floor and level and fix it properly but the inspector should have questioned it because as soon as you step on it you can tell something is not right and it should have been further investigated. Then my friend’s son starts having problems with the plumbing finding the home owner had Mickey Moused the plumbing to make it work, again it was plainly visible to the inspector if he bothered to look above the basement ceiling and it was not caught.
Then one cold evening my friend’s son notices the front living room wall is getting dangerously hot he calls 911 and the fire Dept arrives and shuts down the circuit.
He calls me to the house and I find the homeowner once again had done a patch it up quick job on the wiring. He will need to completely rewire the basement because the wiring is so bad all of which should have been noted in the inspectors report and was not.
The homeowner next door to him is looking at a very expensive deck repair because the same inspector failed to notice the deck was not properly fastened to the house and is starting to pull away.
My friends son is looking at over $10,000 to get the home properly fixed. So what does the inspector have to say about it? Absolutely nothing. You see he has protected him self with an Exculpalary clause in the inspection contract and even thou he was grossly negligent in doing his inspection there is no recourse against him my friends son is out the $500.00 plus all the extra money it will take to fix all the problems he keeps finding.
So how does this person become a home inspector in Pa? He puts up a sign and joins an inspectors assoc goes to a couple of classes, he follows another inspector around for several inspections and then is allowed to go out and inspect. That’s it.
There is absolutely no state or other oversight to make sure he knows what he is doing.
And unfortunately this is the way it is with many occupations and businesses in Pa.
The home inspector does not even have meet the ICC requirements normal Municipal Code and building Inspectors must follow either and even with the new UCC with ICC codes in place the municipal inspectors in too many cases are not doing there jobs as well .As I have outlined in several previous articles. The bad part to this whole situation is most people moving into homes are already stretched for cash and are unable in many cases to get serious problems taken care of and are living with ticking time bombs.
As usual our state officials are very aware of the problem and have done nothing to correct this situation that is happening to new home and building owners .who are paying out staggering sums of money to correct problems left behind by previous home owners.
Do not waste your money on a home inspector hire a trusted contractor to come and take a look I have yet to find one home inspector who ever did his job correctly