The home inspection service industry is certainly not immune to the devastations imposed by today's economy. Home inspection as a service seems to be almost on the brink of going the way of gas stations, once called service stations. Indeed, the whole notion of serving our fellow man while making a living has been getting quainter for a couple decades now. But I will ever be a holdout for the position that bettering others is the only true measure of success, whether in life or in my chosen profession of inspecting houses. Otherwise, what's the point, or, more generically, what has society become?

Service in the home inspection business will never really go defunct because fulfilling even the most basic functions is a service. But I sense an attitude shift in collective consciousness away from appreciation for a benefit received towards assumption that everyone does the minimum he can get away with. Whether this is a short-term glumness stemming from economic necessity or a long-term cultural change is harder for me to detect. Will the halving of the number of real estate agents be a blip or permanent? Will helping people to buy and sell houses survive as a service? Probably in some form, but using a different business model. Will we get to the point where the vast majority sacrifice advocacy and expertise for the sake of lower cost (including home inspection cost), perhaps justified by the self-delusion that they are still safe, that nothing will go wrong?

The pest inspection service is sort of a strange beast in that members of rather different trades provide it depending on circumstances. A pest inspection may be part of a home inspection, in which case the person is a home inspector also acting as a structural pest inspector (SPI), or it may be a prelude to pest extermination, in which case the person is a pest control operator (PCO). Some thirty years ago, the quality of pest inspections, conducted almost entirely by PCOs, was also a mixed bag, and legislation passed in 1991 shored it up. Once home inspectors, assisting real estate transactions, became more prevalent, they incorporated pest inspections into their work. This introduced a different set of problems, and more recent legislation addressed them.

Now, structural pest inspection and home inspection are considered separate trades, at least in Washington State, and they are regulated by separate agencies. Each trade requires a license with its own set of requirements and fees. In the rest of this blog I want to look at how this dual licensing structure has played out in terms of the rigor involved in obtaining a license to inspect for specific pests and the consequent underutilization of the learned skills.