Some real estate agents give out free inspection reports on their listings to any buyer interested enough to ask for a contract.

They say this is professional service and shows that there’s nothing to hide. Well, there is an old saying:

“When a service is free, it’s probably worth the amount you are paying – nothing.”

So how on earth is this a professional approach to providing buyers with reliable information about the property?

In talking to agents who give out reports, we hear reasons like:

  • We’ve been working with this inspector for quite a while and they always do a good job.
  • If they want to keep our business, they’ll answer questions from buyers.
  • Buyers can pay a fee to have themselves covered by insurance.
  • It’s easier if all information about the property comes directly from us.

But while all of these reasons seem logical enough, agents should think about what exactly they are trying to achieve by giving reports away.

In many cases it’s about the agent wanting to be in control of everything. But if they think this approach is making buyers more confident about the property – they are wrong. They might also be making themselves and their selling client liable for the information provided in the report.

Most buyers are on guard with agents. Trust levels are low.

So when buyers are provided with some free information from an unrecognised source, how are they supposed to feel confident about that? And because the inspector is reliant on the agent for continued work, how can buyers feel like the inspector has their interests at heart and not those of the agent?

In one example, a large property agency provides free reports on its listings but at the top of the report buyers are seeing this:

What sort of message is that?

By giving a report to a buyer, the agent is effectively saying here’s information about this property that you can take into account in deciding whether to buy it.

But if the information is poor and unreliable, the buyer is likely to come back to the agent for an explanation (at the least). And the agent will say “you’ll have to speak to the inspector, it’s nothing to do with me”. And when they go to the inspector, they’ll get a response like “sorry, it’s just information about the property, you can’t rely on the report so I can’t help you”. Or alternatively, the buyer will be asked to pay for the inspector to be able to talk to them.

So where’s the consistency, where’s the professionalism, where’s the customer support?

If an inspection business is happy to have their reports handed around willy-nilly, it’s highly unlikely they will provide anything that resembles good customer service.

And even less likely they’ll want to be accountable for their work. I challenge inspection businesses using this business model to prove me wrong.

To emphasise this point, it’s worth letting you know what’s happened in the ACT where compulsory vendor reports are included with the property contract.

The quality of inspections has dropped dramatically because the inspectors are reliant on agents for their work. Reports are scant on detail and important areas of the property are not inspected properly and are instead disclaimed in the report. Some more professional inspection businesses are now refusing to do these inspections because of the conflict of interest and pressures from agents. They get work from buyers who want their own inspection done.

This is a problem with the structure of the system that aligns the inspector with the agent/vendor and doesn’t take into account the needs of the buyer, who needs to trust the information in the inspection report.

Having said all that, it is possible to provide quality, reliable information for buyers that also provides complementary benefits to vendors.

We’ve done thousands of inspections using our Open Access model and know it improves the buying and selling experience for all parties. And because our inspectors don’t deal directly with agents, we don’t suffer conflicts of interest. If an agent tries to influence the content of our report, we just won’t deal with them. Quality is too important to us.

The key advantage we have over other businesses is that we care more.

You can find out more about our Open Access service here.

You can order an inspection report here.

Best Regards,
Michael Ferrier

At EYEON Property Inspections, we help you buy and sell with more confidence.