eSigning Home Inspection Services Contract Made Easy

Digital signature home inspection services contract

hi I'm Mark Cohen I'm internachi's general counsel I've been the general counsel since 2004 and my job is general counsel is to provide top quality legal advice to internachi and to international members [Music] one question that I get often asked is concerns to a contract whether the inspector should have a written contract what should be in the contract and when they should have the contract signed so I want to just address those issues for a moment you should definitely have a written contract before you do any inspection and the main reason is this it's very important that you and your client are on the same page as to what you're going to do and what's going to be excluded if you don't have a written contract you are leaving yourself open for all sorts of claims by your customer that the inspector promised me this the inspector told me that and you don't want to be there you want to have a contract that makes very clear what what the agreement was the internachi pre-inspection agreement has a lot of things in that contract that are intended to protect the inspector and it makes very clear to the to the customer what's excluded from the inspection probably 99% of the claims against inspectors arise because the customer doesn't understand the limited scope of the inspection and you can prevent that by having a good contract signed and in advance that tells the customer what you're gonna do and what is excluded the other thing I would say about a contract is make sure that you get it signed before you do the inspection there are inspectors who will have a contract signed after they do the inspection or maybe they'll just put all the legal terms that they want in their report after they've already provided the report to their customer that's no good you can't tell the customer what the other terms of the contract are after you've already done your part of the contract you just just like you can't go to a car dealer and buy a car and then the car dealer tells you after you signed a document oh there's a whole much there's a whole other bunch of provisions you have to agree to so very important to get that contract signed and get it signed in advance of the inspection we have a great pre-inspection agreement but if you ever have questions about it or you want to modify it feel free to give me a call or send me an e-mail I'll be happy to look at your inspection agreement and answer any questions that you have about it [Music] you