Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 20, 2009
Full Disclosure Home Inspection offers honest, objective service
Samara Litvack
“I’m a different type of woman,” says Melanie Moore, home inspector and owner of Full Disclosure Home Inspection.
Born on a job site in North Dakota, Moore says she’s kind of always known what she was supposed to do. Once her parents moved her back to their native Georgia, they raised her to become the son her father had never had. She helped him out on job sites and learned the tricks of the trade, keeping mental notes all the while, from her dad with one hand and from her mother, a real estate broker, with the other.
At age 17, Moore started (literally) building bridges. Her first real construction job was on the expansion of I-75 South, at the Rocky Face exit, and she’s been on a steady climb throughout the industry ever since.
She worked both light commercial and residential jobs, making her “bread and butter” in apartment building, and quickly learned the ins and outs of the construction business. Because of that knowledge, she was often asked to come look at properties and offer her opinion on the existing state of the structures and what should be done to bring them up to code.
“Structural, dirt, steel and concrete — that’s my thing,” Moore says, but there was a lot more to what they were asking. She learned about mechanical things, like oil furnaces and tube wiring, and eventually realized the possibility that her calling wasn’t construction. Perhaps it was actually home inspection.
“I’ve always had the ability as a woman in this industry,” she says. “This sounds so arrogant, but you have to be three times as good to be considered an equal and I’m OK with that. But you also have to be extremely honest.”
And honest she was. Moore approached her new career with a can-do attitude. She entered each job with the outlook that she knew exactly what she was doing, and if she didn’t know the solution to something, she knew how to find out.
“Admit that up front and they respect you for that,” she says.
Moore has been doing home inspections for seven years and she can’t imagine doing anything else. A self-proclaimed perfectionist, she says the industry is a perfect fit for her personality. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything. She’s unbiased and straightforward. And, above all, she has a lifetime of know-how to apply to each job she undertakes and a gut instinct to go with it.
Her company, Full Disclosure Home Inspection, does exactly what its name claims to do. Through her personalized, easy-to-read forms, Moore assesses the condition of a property, climbing under a home or scaling the inside of a wall in the process, and reports everything her unbiased eye sees that isn’t up to par.
“When you’re buying a property, everybody has a right to know everything that someone has knowledge of,” she says. And while homeowners often overlook basic shortcomings in their own homes because they’ve simply gotten used to living with them, Moore says even the slightest imperfections set off red flags in the eyes of a home inspector. And, while she may not be able to figure it out at first, she can always figure it out in the long run.
“You have to have a basic knowledge and you have to have an accelerated knowledge,” she says. “(If) something isn’t quite right, you’re going to investigate that deeper. You need to be able to see things that aren’t quite right to where it sets your gut off. If you try to know everything, you’re going to screw up.”
In addition to her inspecting, Moore prides herself specifically on her recording system, which she says often smoothes the process of a home sale. Her state-of-the-art, computer generated reports include multiple photos of a property and its issues and include illustrations pertaining to those issues, as well as why they are problems and what codes they violate.
“I include a lot of basic information on the home, such as photos and locations of all service cut-offs, to help create the client a ‘handbook’ on the property that can be referred to for years,” she says. “There are links provided that give national ballpark repair costing, as well as links for general information on all aspects of a home, whether they pertain to your property on the day of the inspection or not.”
Moore says her goal in giving clients these reports is to answer all their questions without ever having to ask them.
One service Moore is pushing with clients right now is the pre-listing home inspection. Often, she finds issues with homes in pre-closing home inspections that she is sure sellers, and often Realtors, would have addressed previously, had they known about them.
“Sellers benefit by seeing their home through unbiased eyes,” she says. “They get the opportunity to shop for pricing, getting bids to make corrections without chancing losing their buyer.”
With pre-listing inspections, sellers can also consider costs of repairs and include those considerations in pricing their homes. And by disclosing that information to prospective buyers and placing a “Pre-Inspected for Quality Assurance” sign in the front yard, sellers can also gain trust from their buyers before they ever enter the front door.
In closing, Moore adds that she is not a “deal killer.” While she’s not saying she won’t ever find issues on a property that will kill a deal (she has, and will again), she is saying that knowing up front the problems with a property may secure trust in sellers and Realtors, and will lay the groundwork for more solid transactions.
For more information about Moore’s pre-listing inspections, view samples of her inspection reports and learn about other services her company offers, visit www.fdhomeinspection.com.
|
|