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me-vs-cat 9 hours ago

I'm glad you can't. Unverified comments would be such a nightmare that potential buyers should ignore them while not really being able to (not to mention sellers), while I distrust both the competency and alignment of Zillow or similar to have verified comments that are more beneficial than unverified comments.

I would like a way for serious problems to not be covered up, but I believe you're going to need to do this by tying it to a home inspector's license, such as obligating "severe problem" reports to a registry which anyone could query for a fee that would be nominal for any serious potential buyer. Perhaps 0.05% of the property's highest-ever sale price, or $100, whichever is higher? Maybe some of that fee goes to the home inspectors who did the reports, to encourage severe-problem-free reports. Still lots of problems and abuses to mitigate, the least of which is how to define "severe problem", but that has the potential to provide a net benefit, unlike comments on Zillow.

I would also not expect buyers to normally avoid their own home inspection by using such a report, it would simply be another fee -- which I dislike -- though as a nearly-instantaneous result, I see a way to structure it to fit after the contingent offer is accepted (or perhaps just before submitting the offer) and before hiring their own inspection. The buyers now have a chance to address their specific concerns about the severe-problem report by what they ask from their inspector.

You could provide aggregate statistics on home inspectors to show competency. "Within the past 5 years, Harry the Home Inspector has submitted [X] reports. Of those, [X] were also reported by other inspectors within [12 months] of Harry's reports, and Harry is [in the top third / above average / below average] when ranking for not missing severe problems that were reported by other inspectors." But now you have to track repairs that explain why one inspector didn't report what another did, have some way of vetting severe problems for being correctly reporting (or setup an appeal system...), you have to track the scope of inspections to know if a severe problem would have been expected to have been found, and it continues.

From my armchair continuing to think this through, I don't see how to control the complexity on any of this in a feasible way for what would need to be run by a government licensing agency so that society has a net benefit.

xnx 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Good points. Would be nice if inspections were public. Something like a Carfax for homes.