I have a mixed experience with working with Mike on inspecting a house. So I guess I will provide my review as pros and cons:
Pros:
- Very friendly and on time on the inspection day
- Had a printer on the site to print the reports right away.
Cons:
- The service kinda misleading. When I talked on the phone, Mike mentioned that the $500 inspection fee would cover inspecting the pool. And so I assumed that he got a pool license to inspect as well or would get a professional pool inspector to do it. However, on the inspection day, he told me to get a professional pool service to inspect the pool (of course with additional cost). This had part of my mistake that I had not verified the service clearly with Mike, but I think he should not have said that the pool inspection would be covered in the inspection fee anyways. It's very misleading.
- There were quite a few problems missed by Mike. He had an apprentice with him on that day but it was like he let the apprentice did most of the jobs. He missed quite a few obvious problems that was later pointed by either his apprentice or myself (a leak problem in the bathroom, a broken seal window, several cracks on the wall, curving wood floor in the hallway, etc.). Even when his apprentice pointed out there was a window had broken seal and been getting foggy, he didn't even bother to check the rests. I later read the owner's disclosure and found out there were 3 windows with fog problem instead of 1. However, on the report Mike had only 1 window that was pointed out by his apprentice. In general, I was very disappointed with the inspection. When I agreed to pay $500 (which is expensive and above average price), I would expect the inspector to do a throughout inspection himself. However it seemed to me that Mike did not do much on the inspection. Instead he let his apprentice did most of the work and did not even bother to double check it. Even worse, I had not know anything about the apprentice until I came to the house when the inspection was almost done.
- The report is hard to read and to identify critical problems for fixing because all the notes are in B&W color. Although the important notes are bold but they are very long notes and there's no focus to highlight the problems. I used to work with other inspectors in the past and their reports used colored text to highlight problems and the critical problems are usually described in brief text for better focus and then more detailed explanation in a different paragraph. Mike's report was very hard to read for me.
- At the end of the inspection, Mike would sit with you to read through the items he and his apprentice captured and discuss with you on how you think about the inspected items. I think this is very time consuming, unnecessary and not objective because 1. the report should be well thought by the inspector before delivering it to the client and therefore the inspector should have spent more time on thinking about it, instead of trying to get it done quickly and delivered to the client right on site. and 2. having me inputting my opinion while writing the report made it less objective, since the main purpose of the report is for me to have a 2nd view from a professional, not with some of my thoughts on it.