The Case for Licensing

A threatening email recently landed on my desktop. It’s quite a story – and illustrates just how difficult it can be to trust the word certified.

In the year 2000, the state of Pennsylvania enacted a home inspection law requiring home inspectors to be certified by a ‘recognized national organization’.  Senate Bill 1032 did not specify any of the individual contenders by name. It described instead the criteria they would need to meet.

• membership certification procedures based on testing
• an apprenticeship program requiring 100 supervised inspections
• passing of a recognized accredited examination
• continuing education an essential and ongoing condition of continuing membership

And it was up to the Pennsylvania Home Inspectors Coalition (PHIC) to discover who measured up. So they asked each organization to submit proof.

First to get on the list were the National Association of Home Inspectors (NAHI) and the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI). In 2005 the American Institute of Inspectors (AII) was welcomed to the fold. However, the National Association of Certified Home Inspectors (NACHI) couldn’t meet the criteria. They offer neither accredited examination nor an apprenticeship program. They do have a membership certification procedure, but the demands of their testing are demonstrably far from rigorous. So easy, in the opinion of NAHI, that “a person with little or no home inspection experience or training can become certified by NACHI”. In fact, they say, NACHI has a number of  certified members who have never conducted a fee-paid home inspection.

Could such a shocking assertion be true? Is it really possible to receive some form of industry certification without ever once having professionally practiced in the field?

• I asked two unrelated computer geeks to submit to NACHI’s online certification test. One of them passed with little trouble: the other came very close. This last guy commented, “It is frightening that someone with my background could come so close to a passing grade.”
• Casey Larsen passed the test and became a NACHI Certified Home Inspector. Casey, at the time, was a 12 year old kid from Utah.
• Global TV News reporter Elaine Young took the certification test, passing with no trouble and is now a NACHI “Certified Home Inspector” she has never conducted a home inspection and claims she wouldn’t know how but who cares; with her new credentials she can now promote her services. Note: Nick Gromicko revoked her certification when Global aired the feature.
• NACHI, say the PHIC, “does not require enough field experience for would-be inspectors”.

After previously writing on these pages of my dismay that an apparent professional credential for home-inspectors should be of such questionable value, I received the following email from NACHI’s founder and executive director:

From: nick gromicko [mailto:gromicko@msn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 7:04 PM
To: inspections@theco.ca
Subject: Nick/NACHI

I don’t want to be mean by taking your home and turning it into a NACHI training facility, so I’ll give you 24 hours to remove all references to NACHI and to stop infringing on our trademarks and to remove everything libel from your site.

I sue for fun and profit, you can check to confirm, but I’ll give you 1 day before all hell breaks loose on you and your wife.

No offense, just giving you a warning so you can avoid losing everything to me.

BTW: You are wrong about NACHI’s entrance requirements:  http://www.nachi.org/rigorous2006.htm

Nick Gromicko
Founder, National Association of Certified Home Inspectors, www.nachi.org
Executive Director, Master Inspector Certification Board, www.certifiedmasterinspector.org
Author, Sell Your Home For More, http://www.nachi.org/sellyourhome.htm
President, Reports, Inc, www.neighborhoodenvironmental.com

This e-mail speaks for itself. I make no comment.

But whatever your own impression is from this email, these guys are certainly not to be taken lightly.

NACHI is, according to Gromicko, “the largest home inspection association in the world,” claiming over 9,000 members across the continent. And it is, indeed, in many ways an extraordinarily impressive operation which offers its membership the clear benefits of an aggressively efficient internet strategy bent on market dominance.

The organization has recently purchased, for instance, over 1400 websites and domain names which it is converting to home inspector websites for its members. Most of them are designed to function in a covert fashion – that is, they do not reveal any connection to the parent organization, NACHI, but each is made to interlink and consequently achieve high ranking on search engines. They have even contracted with Google so that inspection leads are fed directly to the nearest NACHI member. It is quite a thorough and comprehensive web-based niche-service and apparently successful business model with Gromicko as sole owner-operator.

Very slick.

However:

• While many of the membership are undoubtedly ably qualified to do a great professional job, NACHI itself is not an accredited Professional Association and neither is it constituted as such. A 2004 court judgement in fact ruled unequivocally that NACHI was not, and “has never been”, a national home inspectors association as required by Pennsylvania law.
• One may perhaps be forgiven for suspecting that Senate Bill 1032, while not identifying which national associations would be recognized, was designed to specifically exclude NACHI by virtue of the specification that a national home inspectors association must be operated on a not-for-profit basis and not run as a franchise. NACHI may claim to be not-for-profit, but clearly seems to operate a successful brand-identity franchise-style system.
• It is a business – boosted as representing “the best and most educated home inspectors in the industry” even while their certification procedure is far from rigorous. A lawsuit recently file by the National Association of Home Inspectors (NAHI) claims that NACHI’s use of the term “certified” constitutes false advertising.

The claims for alleged certification lie at the very core of these issues. My fear is that such cavalier use of the label certified, coupled with its implicit abuse of client trust, may serve only to compromise my chosen profession.

So, until there is licensing and standardized certification, I must sadly re-iterate my advice to be prudent when searching for a home inspector. You may find that any claims to be NACHI Certified could turn out to mean very little.