S01E10 - Navigating Trust: The Precarious World of Home Inspections

Transcript

Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and I have some short home inspection topics to talk about. And I need your ear. So, let's dive in.

As a home inspector, I'm in a kind of precarious situation where I have new clients every day, and they're clients that I probably haven't worked with before. Let's just say that the churn of home inspection business is extremely high. So, these people that I've never interacted with before, I have to greet them. I have to make them trust me.

I have to potentially give them really bad news. But I have to give it to them in a way that works best for them all within 2 hours. I mean, that is a very impossible task. However, on the flip side, the realtors that we work with have been working with these individuals for months. I mean, months, sometimes years as they're trying to find the perfect investment property or whatever it may be.

As a realtor, you know your client, you know your client very, very well. And there's a lot of stuff that you can tell us, the home inspector, about your client. A lot of times what we end up getting is, well, we have a really difficult client or they're really hard to work with. And that may be accurate, but also it might be your perception of what is hard or difficult to work with.

Sometimes we have customers that really test us and so then we have to go into super duper detail until they're like, you know what? This guy actually knows what he's talking about and therefore I'm going to give him some space it he needs and then he's going to give me some type of a summary at the end, because that's what we've discussed.

So, with these clients, we're trying to figure them out. We're trying to understand what they need. But the realtor can really be a huge help if they say, this person is an engineer.

They need a lot of detail. Great. We can go into detail. If they say, you know, this person's a first-time homebuyer and they're really scared. Great. We can kind of step back a little bit

or bring topics up in a way that's a lot less scary and a lot more informational.

Whenever we talk about our core values and we have professionalism, first educator's mindset and integrity above all, the main two things here is that our professionalism and our ability to educate is really going to help reduce fear in this situation. However, the realtor really knows their client, and sometimes we take the cues from the realtors that actually show up to the home inspection.

Do I think realtors should show up for home inspections? Most definitely. There's so much important information. And since your realtor is the one who is writing up all of the documentation about what needs fix, what needs repaired, yada, yada, yada, then I would highly recommend that your realtor show up to the home inspection. Now, do they need to know?

We have some amazing, amazing realtors that do not show up to the home inspection, but we also have amazing, amazing realtors that do. It's really a personal preference, but a lot of the time these really good realtors know us. They know what we're talking about, and they'll even debrief with us even if they didn't show up for the home inspection.

so what are the realtors going to do for us? They might give us a look that kind of tells us we're going to simmer down just a little bit or, we're actually going to increase the intensity because these people are just yearning for this information.

And so, we're really going to follow the lead of the realtor. And sometimes by having a really good relationship with you and the realtor, that allows it to be that the realtor can take the lead and you're very comfortable just letting them take a lead as opposed to being like, no, this is the home inspection. I'm the home inspector.

I have to tell you what's going on, because that's not going to help anybody.

What's really going to help everybody is whenever you pay attention to the realtor who truly has a good relationship with this individual. Now, there are things that we can do as home inspectors. We can say, what are you concerned about with this house?

Is this your first time buying a house? Have you ever had any issues in the past with houses that you've owned? Do you have any skills such as electrical skills, HVAC, plumbing, anything like that? Do you like gardening? Do you like doing whatever? Finding out more about that client is great. And so, what is one way that we can find out more about our clients?

One of the ways is something called the Ford method. Ford, Ford. And so, what does that stand for?

the F, and Ford stands for family. So, we might ask questions about family. Then the O is going to be occupation. What do you do for work?

The R is going to be recreation. What do you do for fun? You love skiing and snowboarding in these beautiful mountains. And that's why you're buying a house. Great. We can have a conversation in the D. What are your dreams? What do you want this house to be? What do you want your future to be? And by being able to have this really quick and easy acronym to remind us, talk about family, occupation, recreation and dreams.

Well, all of that then allows us to say, Hey, you're a real person. I'm a real person. You have real fears, and I can help address those real fears. And that's really the best that we can do whenever we talk about our clients. We're trying to build trust with our clients, but they don't know us, and we don't know them.

But there are small things that we can do to try to bridge that gap. But the reality is, if you're a realtor who's working with a client and you know that your client needs to be I don't even want to call it handled but handled in just the right way, then let us know. Let us know how you want us to interact with your client, your customer, because for us, we're only going to see them for maybe 2 hours maximum. And I really want to make sure that they have the best experience possible because everybody deserves a good home inspection experience. That's a pod.