Home inspector -- Frontline Home Inspection

Time passed by so fast! It's already 8 months since the last entry...But I have good excuse... We finally bought our first home! That's what I was busy for in the past couple months. Since most of the things are settled, I would like to be back to my blogging routine.

I would like to share personal experiences of using home inspector. As we shall agree, home inspection is very important when buying a house. The clause of satisfaction to the home inspection serves as a protection to prevent buyers from getting into a real trouble. An early discovery of any potential problems can also help haggle the price. Therefore, words from a competent home inspector may sometimes worth more than thousands.

So, how to find a competent home inspector? In Canada, you can start by trying to find one from the website of  Canadian Association of Home & Property Inspectors . To be a registered home inspector in Canada, individuals need to meet rigorous professional and education requirement followed by a review. Although being a "registered home inspector" does not guarantee to be a "good inspector" for many reasons, it is a good starting point to pick the right one from a rather small pool. This is the link to the list of home inspectors in your area (Canada only). If you are in selected metropolitan area (great Toronto area for example), you are also blessed with Homestars , an excellent website for find the right inspectors, contractor, and other home related trade man. However, Homestars seems to work best for great Toronto area with a bit limited information for other cities.

I phoned several inspectors before choosing the final one. Some of them didn't have time for the slot I wanted, and some of them had unfriendly secretaries...I picked Marco from Frontline Home Inspection eventually. Marco is listed as a registered home inspector and also receives pretty good reviews on Homestars. I think that he should be a right one.

He is punctual, and he is happily sharing what he found to us. It was a pleasant learning experience to have a professional explain to you what to check and why to check in a highly interactive manner. He is equipped with an infrared thermography device that can show us the temperature distribution in a room graphically. It provides clear indication of insulation and even ventilation quality. He was thorough and provided a comprehensive inspection. We actually used him twice. Why? Because he found some serious mould issues and pointed out something in need of replacement in our first buy (a conditional sale) and he provided us a cost estimate to fix these. We later decided to skip this deal, and moved on. We hired him again for our second buy, and fortunately, this time he gave us a green light.

In general, we were very satisfied with the service and help from Marco, and we will recommend him for home inspection without hesitation. We will definitely consider him for our next home.