Inspector

A building inspector is a professional commissioned to look at your house and produce a written report on its condition or on a specific component. They do not do repair work themselves. The fee is for the inspection and the report; the answer the report contains does not change what the inspector earns.

The mechanism: a contractor’s quote is also their proposal for how much work to do, and a contractor proposing more work earns more revenue. The inspector’s fee is fixed regardless of what they find. They are the only professional opinion in the residential maintenance chain whose income is not downstream of the recommended scope. That makes their report a useful starting point for any decision involving more than one contractor, because the scope they specify is something three contractors can bid against rather than three contractors each defining for themselves.

Where it applies, three places where confusing inspector with contractor costs money. Setting the scope before a major job: an inspector’s specification (“20% of roof tiles, refit ridge cap”) is what turns “get three quotes” from three different proposals into three comparable bids. Signing off the work when it is done: an inspector returning while the scaffolding is still up catches sloppy execution while access is still cheap and rework is still the contractor’s problem to absorb. Planning maintenance on parts of the house you cannot see or reach yourself: the roof, the chimney, the facade, the structural elements, the things behind the cladding.

Sibling frame: contractor (paid to fix what is broken) and surveyor (more often used in pre-purchase legal context; in many jurisdictions the terms overlap). Confusing inspector with contractor is what produces the “single contractor’s opinion” problem the inspector exists to solve. See the when-to-hire-a-building-inspector guide for the three moments and the report-shape rules.