Who or what is a Certified Inspector?

Paul,

Good post! I hope that the legislature passes a law this session. I think the senate has it worked out now so it is a good law. It took about three years for them to get that far. It will provide some standardization in the field and there is not much now -- or so we hope it will provide that.

Personally, I feel that when push comes to shove, the quality of the inspection depends more on the dedication and work ethic of the person doing the inspection, along with the knowledge base, than with any one organization. At Bellingham Technical College we, the inspection instructors by our public presence, see a number of local inspections, often at the request of upset buyers. Of the four BTC instructors, two are ASHI (one ASHI and NACHI) and two are NACHI. My experience is that the consumer complaints are very evenly spread among ASHI, NACHI, NAHI members. I have seen some good work, and bad work, from all of them. It all boils down to the integrity of the person, there seem to be shortcuts some people manage to take, no matter what the initial qualifications or the intitials of the organization they belong to. And, by law right now, any working inspector had better have the WSDA structural pest inspector license. People try to get around it but many of those people have been fined or put out of business by WSDA in the past few years since they cracked down on illegal inspections.

Paul, what Steve said, and while we can all argue ourselves blue in the face about credentials, the reality is that those of us that belong to associations (and the vast majority belong to no association in WA) is that the Standards of Practice we follow are so minimal as to not "really" matter in terms of which association is better.  While I agree that in Principle the Certified ASHI inspector is going to be very qualified, the reality is that until you get your 250 inspections you can be out there inspecting with ASHI's blessings with NO testing of any kind.  What licensing will do is set the same "minimum" standard for every inspector in the state and then it will be the responsibility of the Associations to raise the bar and public perceptionthat hiring an ASHI inspector is a smarter thing to do.  I am both ASHI and NACHI certified and I can tell you from experience that passing the National Home Inspector Exam is not that difficult---it is also a "minimum" standard, and yet it is held up as a "gold-standard".  What isgood about it is that it is proctored---which the NACHI exam is not.  I would like to reiterate what Steve said, we see inspection reports prepared by all of the associations and know that there is a lot of room for improvement across the board.