Corrections are the main reason to write to this site, and they are genuinely welcome. If a page here contradicts a primary source, cites a code section that has been renumbered, describes a standard of practice that has been reissued, or states a state rule that is no longer the rule, telling us is the most useful thing a reader can do. We would rather fix it than defend it.
Where those questions should go instead. For anything about a specific property, contact a licensed home inspector in the state where the property sits — that state's licensing board or regulator publishes the roster of who is licensed there, and in states with no licensing requirement, the membership bodies publish their own directories. For a complaint about an inspector or an inspection, the state licensing board is the body that can act on it, and it will have a published complaint procedure and a filing deadline. For a question that is really a trade question — whether a crack matters structurally, whether a panel is safe, whether a drain line is failing — a licensed engineer, electrician or plumber can give you an answer that an inspection report deliberately does not.
Email us at [email protected], or use the form below, which simply opens a pre-addressed message in your own email program. Nothing you type is transmitted to or stored by this website.
Sending a correction
Include the page URL, the sentence you think is wrong, and where you can, the source that supports the correction — a state administrative code section, a statute, a standard of practice, an agency publication, a federal form. A correction with a citation attached can be checked in minutes and applied the same day. A correction without one has to be researched from scratch and sits in a queue behind the ones that can be verified.
Nobody is credited and nobody is blamed. The page simply changes, and its modified date advances because its content changed, which is the only thing that moves a date on this site.
Questions we can usefully answer
Questions about the material itself are welcome, and the ones we can actually act on tend to look like this: a page that contradicts a document you are holding; a mechanism described so compactly that it reads two ways; a state variation we have flattened into a general statement when it should not be; an occasion on which people commission inspections that has no page here; a passage that reads as advice when it was meant as explanation. All of those improve the site, and several of its pages exist because a reader pointed out that nothing covered their situation.
We are also glad to hear from inspectors, engineers, agents, attorneys and claims people who see this subject from the inside. Practitioner detail — how a particular standard is applied in a state we have only read about, what a report deadline does in practice when a transaction is moving fast, which findings reliably cause arguments — is the hardest material to source from public documents and the most valuable thing anyone sends us.
Questions we will not answer
Stated directly, so nobody spends an afternoon writing one: we will not tell you which inspector to hire or whether a named company is any good; we will not review a report, a photograph, a video or an estimate and give you an opinion; we will not tell you whether to terminate a contract, ask for a repair, ask for a credit, or proceed to closing; and we will not act as an expert, a witness or an intermediary in a dispute with an inspector, a builder, a seller or an agent. Those are decisions that depend on the property, the contract and the law of the state the property is in, and they belong to somebody engaged to look at your situation.
Press, research and citation
Journalists, researchers and attorneys are welcome to quote this material with attribution and to link to any page. The machine-readable entity map published at the site root lists the site's key concepts with their source passages attached, which makes it straightforward to check what a page is asserting and where the assertion came from.
If you are working on a story or a matter and need a mechanism described here in more depth, say so and we will point you at the underlying primary sources rather than at our own pages. Where we have looked for a source and failed to find one — and on this subject that happens with some of the most widely repeated numbers in circulation — we will tell you what was searched and what turned up, which is occasionally the more useful answer.
Suggesting a page
The occasions covered here were chosen because they are the moments at which people actually commission an inspection, but the list is not closed. If there is a situation that recurs in your work and has no page — a property type, a transaction structure, a deadline that catches people out — describe the shape of it: who commissions the inspection, when, what the scope has to include, and what goes wrong when it is skipped. Suggestions that arrive in that form are the ones that turn into pages.
Response times
This is a reference project, not a business, so replies are not immediate. Corrections with a source attached are prioritized, because they can be verified and applied quickly. General questions about the material are answered as time allows. Requests in the categories above will not get a substantive reply, since answering them would mean giving advice this site is not in a position to give.