City Wide Home Inspectors

When we sold our house, our real estate broker hired Mike / City Wide Home Inspectors to check out the house, I assume for evaluation purposes in listing the place for sale.

When Mike showed up, he was on time, professional, courteous, friendly and armed with the tools and experience to do a thorough job. There were no surprises, but he quickly identified every issue we already knew about, and he accurately identified and aged all the house's systems. There's no question in my mind that his work contributed to the quick, smooth sale of our home.

Fast forward a few days: After we made an offer on a new home that was contingent on a satisfactory inspection, we hired the only home inspector our broker referred to us, who was Mike.

Given the experience we had had with Mike a few days earlier, we thought we had made a wise, informed decision.

Mike's report to us painted the picture of a really good 32-year-old house with a few hundred dollars worth of issues that need to be tended to, but within minutes of us moving in, we started finding issues that were nowhere in the inspection report when they were easily and quickly identified by us just by walking around the home (see a partial list below, but don't get me wrong: we love our new home!).

That's when it hit me: Mike himself admitted to us when he inspected the home we sold that most of his business comes from the broker we used... not by referral, but by the broker actually being Mike's client. So when they referred him to us, even though his client relationship was with us, he likely still felt an allegiance to the broker, and he wanted to help them quickly notch a purchase on their books (we used the same broker for our sale and our purchase). In other words, without realizing it, even though I SHOULD have known, we hired an inspector with a conflict of interest.

You live, you learn.

Anyway, here are just some of the items that weren't mentioned nor in the report that probably should have been:

• many light switches wired upside down (up for off, down for on)
• one outside spigot leaks/drips
• 2 sliding doors don't operate properly (mechanisms inside don't let the doors slide)
• mentioned a couple of windows that needed minor fixes (one IGU replacement, one crank replacement), but in fact 7 main floor and 3 basement windows and doors are at the end of their useful lives and need to be replaced
• the inside frame of the skylight is starting to rot
• the irrigation system is inoperable (major leaks if shut-off is opened)
• there are rooms where there are no light switches for the lights in the room (e.g., the ensuite's switch is outside the ensuite)
• report indicated sunroom had a heat source but it doesn't, so it's a three season room, not an all-season sunroom as the report had us expecting.

Again, I assume no malice or bad faith on Mike's part, but I think maybe he was, strictly subconsciously, putting the interests of the source of most of his business ahead of ours, which is really our fault for accepting a conflict of interest referral.

As mentioned above, you live, you learn.

Mike was extremely friendly and knowledgeable when inspecting our condo. His prices are very reasonable. He showed up on time. I will use Mike to do all our future inspections.