I requested Rick Avery to do the inspection, on the recommendation of my Realtor. I was a little leery, as real estate agents can have their own motivations and the Elite Group web site clearly markets to real estate professionals. However, with an e-mail quote of $395 (and online quote of $375, more on that later) and a guarantee to refund 100% plus pay for an inspection by a third party of my choice (up to another 100%), I thought it was worth taking the risk using them to inspect the short sale property I am buying. Because of a garage conversion and a shallow crawl space, I had a quote from another inspector (highly recommended on Angie's List) for $650. So, worst case, I get a sloppy inspection, get a refund and $395 applied to another inspection, and I'm out $255 in the end. I needn't have worried. Rick is a licensed contractor as well as a home inspector, so he brings real-world knowledge to the job. Based on my e-mail describing the property, he knew not to schedule any other inspections for that afternoon. He arrived a half hour early, at 11:30am, and he, my Realtor, and I all left together at 5:45pm. I was distressed when I first got there, because he had started without me and I wanted to hear his thought process and ask questions, and the appraiser was there at the same time, and my Realtor also is very nice and very good, but talks a lot, so it was all very distracting. But after a short pow-wow we came to an understanding that I wasn't questioning his competence, I just needed to know what was going on in real time. He went through the whole house, the basement, the foul-smelling detached garage conversion that has had squatters pooping it and something must have died in one of the rooms, the 15" high crawl space, the roof, and put his head up into the equally shallow attic. He had my realtor turning on faucets while he was belly-crawling in the crawl space, identifying an active leak at one of the tub drains. He actually got stuck under there and had to back up and try again at one spot, but he made it everywhere except the farthest part of the crawl space under the master bedroom, which was blocked by plumbing as well as the HVAC flex-duct that filled most of the area under the house. After an initial impression during the frist walkthrough that the water heater and furnace were totally screwed up and not done right, he came back again when it wsa time to specifically examine those systems and determined that the furnace *was* vented (and the gas company had turned it on when they turned the gas on for inspections), and although the water heater wasn't vented (and was not on), there is a flue that it can be vented to [I later discovered the vent pipe that is supposed to bridge the distance, but it's a little too short]. He tested both the furnace and the air conditioner, and pointed a laser-aimed heat sensing devise at each heating register, confirming that hot and cold air both blew in response to changing the thermostat. He identified an assortment of plumbing issues, and a boat load of electrical ones. It seems the HVAC is the only thing that was actually done right. After detailing all of the things wrong with the house, he proceeded to tell me what I could do about them, sources for cheap building materials and appliances, half-way measures that would do the job if money was a real concern (it is), and reassured me that I could find someone to rewire the house for less than the $10-15,000 I was imagining [I'm still working on that one]. I came away knowing what other inspections/estimates I needed, and what I needed those inspections to focus on. Minor flaws: Rick was quite certain that the house is sided in cementitious plaster (stucco), not EIFS ("synthetic stucco"), but he was wrong about that. The house is enveloped in styrofoam, with a fiberglass mesh-reinforced cementitious middle coat and a colored topcoat. The garage, however, is stucco with matching styrofoam trim and painted with the same topcoat. He also thought the plastic water supply piping in the kitchen was polybutylene (notoriously problematic) and not fitted correctly, but the plumber confirmed that it is, as I has suspected, PEX (cross-linked polyethylene, which has not had any problems of note), and is fitted using an approved connection method. The computer-generated inspection report is quite terse, so I was very glad I accompanied Rick through all but the first 1/2-hour of the inspection. Also, the low resolution cell phone photos printed up only so-so, and the software appends them to the back of the report instead of inserting them near the descriptions of the issues they depict. The report as a whole, and the photos, primarily serve as reminders of what was shown to me in person. Finally, the RecallChek service is new. This caused two glitches: First, The Elite Group increased their prices $20 to cover that service, but the price increase is not yet incorporated into their online scheduling system. I initially contacted them via e-mail with a request for a price quote, and was quoted $395. When I went online to schedule after the short sale was approved, the online software quoted me $375. When it was time to pay, I was charged $395. No biggie. I more than got my money's worth. The second glitch was that when Rick entered the appliance model numbers, they did not appear on the inspection report generated at the site, and when I got the RecallChek report, they weren't given there, either! I hadn't written them down as he was gathering them, because I had assumed they would be in the report. The office staff at Elite Group was surprised that RecallChek didn't include them. On calling RecallChek they said as a rule they don't include the model numbers, because sometimes inspectors make mistakes reading them, and their software can make good guesses and look up the recall information heuristically, but it's a liability issue if they provide them to the customer. In the end, they did send me the model numbers (so I can look for user manuals), but it required some effort. On the whole, I was quite satisfied with the process and the information gleaned from the inspection. As a bonus, the Elite Group web site has an assortment of promotions that you can choose from as a reward for getting your inspection through them. I chose two movie tickets and a $10 gift card to Red Lobster - which reminds me, I need to find out whatever happened to them.
