2025 Home Inspection industry Predictions

So that's what we're going to talk about today . Hopefully , you have some of your own predictions , bi , and I have some of mine .

First of all , I think there's going to be an increased demand for home inspections , not a huge one , but more than this year . I think we're going to finally start to see better recovery . This year was a recovery year . 2024 . 2025 , I think we're going to see better recovery , and here's the reasons why Home building is still up .

I also think that interest rates are still going to fall to a certain extent , and I think it's been long enough that people that wanted to move to wait for the market to go down have just finally hit the point where they're like , oh , it's not going to get any better , let's just move . I'm seeing a lot of that happen in the market .

Do you agree with that or not ?

So it's not such a big jump anymore . They're kind of getting used to the deeper water and they know what they're getting into .

And then when interest rates go from for some people , 2.8% to 7.5% or whatever anybody was getting at certain periods of time yeah , that's a big leap , but I think status quo people are getting used to that , as you put it . I think that's a good way to put it .

I'm starting to see people just around me even say things like that Like it's not , the prices aren't going to get any lower . Let's go buy a house , and I've also noticed in my own market price drops . So , even though people are going back out and buying houses , sellers are still putting more houses on the market than they were just a year ago .

A matter of fact , I was just reading an article in Forbes that said houses are entering the market . There's not enough inventory still . That's still a problem , but houses are starting to enter the market at the same rate that they were in like 2019 . So it'll still take a while for the market to catch up .

Still more buyers than there are houses we're probably looking at , quote unquote normal market 2027 , I'm thinking . But I think we're gonna see a lot better market in 2025 than we did even this year , and this year was the first non stinky year . 2023 was awful , mm-hmm . 2024 , we did okay . Now 2025 it'll . It'll be a .

It'll be better than this year and a marked improvement , in my opinion . So cool . Yeah , sounds good do you have any opinions , or would you predictions , or you want me to go into my second one ?

The problem is we as an industry have not adopted it enough yet , and if we don't adopt technology like artificial intelligence and other things , it's going to get ahead of us . Um , it's going to get ahead of us and instead of us embracing it and owning our industry with it , other people in other industries will embrace it and push us out .

We really have a choice right now , and I'm not talking about you know . There's guys sitting there in their truck right now listening to those calls . I use AI all the time . I'm typing run the chat , chat , chat , chat , chat , gpt for an email right now . That's not what I'm talking about . I'm talking about actually utilizing that to push our industry forward .

You did something interesting one day a while back , so our app is actually one of only a couple of apps that has artificial intelligence built into it . You need help writing a comment , all this other stuff , and I've even heard home inspectors say , well , I wouldn't use anything with artificial intelligence in it .

I'm like , okay , that's a problem Because you pushed a picture into ChatGPT . One day you pulled it from an inspection forum and you popped it into ChatGPT . And what did you do ?

You're working in this section of your report on this item and this is a photo please identify any you know defects and produce a narrative . Any you know , uh , defects and produce a narrative . Um , the first few models it was kind of all over the place , super generic , you know , um , nothing that you could really put in a report .

But the latest models that they've just come out with the like the o1 preview , um , wow , uh , pretty amazing . So I took a picture , I think it was , of a ceiling with some water damage on it .

I didn't really tell it where it was , I just took a picture of it and it came back with a very detailed narrative that I then sent to you and you're like , oh , wow , cool , I know what your first impression was , but it was pretty complete .

The other one was of a deck , um , where there was a very convoluted construction to like the you know the how the stairs were attached to the deck . There were some extra boards in there and stuff . Structurally that wasn't right . And again it nailed the narrative . It got it down .

I sent that one to you too , so I don't know as a home inspector , could you tell right away that it was taken from AI or what were your thoughts ?

And once in a while I'll be like , can you give me context ? And it's like , yeah , because I just sent you this big gray screen and you don't know that as a picture of concrete . But it got really exact and it wrote almost exactly my narratives and it didn't . It didn't have access to my narratives . It was recognizing defects and putting them in there .

So when I tell this to home inspectors , they kind of freak out and they're like we're going to be out of a job . Here's the problem , here's the thing we're not going to be out of a job . This is going to make our job not easier . It's going to make it so that , just like electronic reports , like half my inspection is writing the report .

When we're writing reports by hand , now we offer electronic reports . Did that take away our industry ? No , I remember when we came up with electronic reports . People were like so now anybody can take pictures , put it in there and write something about it . It's like yeah , but you still need the home inspector .

And it elevated our industry , made it better and now we market our reports . This is going to be that way and I see it going a lot of different ways . So I see like AI models where you can take pictures . The person goes in and looks at the house and they can keep track of . You know which house they were looking at and the concerns they have .

Ai kind of gives them a good idea and then a home inspector can go and use that and say , oh , here's their five major concerns . Okay , they go in and they still do their whole inspection . Then AI is going to be upselling us because they're like oh man , that's an old sewer pipe , you really should get that looked at .

Of like oh man , that's an old sewer pipe , you really should get that looked at . It takes away the element of the agent being like oh no , everybody's house looks like that . Ai is going to be like yeah , no , that doesn't look good , man , you should have a home inspector put his own eyes on that .

It's going to be an incredible marketing tool and report writing tool , but it won't be If we don't embrace it .

They basically , it seems like they're making use of publicly available information to be able to produce sort of a mini report for an address , you know , based on the environmental situation or information they have historically about the property . And they're actually charging I think it was $99 for this report .

You know , now that is not coming from a company that was started or has home inspectors best interests at heart , so they're looking to go the same direction that everybody else is . So if somebody else comes up with a newfangled AI tool that does this , you know , here you go , take the tool , walk around your house , do a home inspection and it's nailing .

Let's say it's nailing like 50% of the stuff . It's nailing like 50% of the stuff .

If that company does not have the best you know is not aligned with the home inspection industry , they're going to look to profit off of that data for themselves or commoditize the home inspector and say , hey , here's a lead , we'll pay you whatever 200 bucks to come and do the inspection . That's the direction we do not want that to go .

We want to be able to leverage those tools for ourselves so that home inspectors can get more accurate , quicker , be able to offer richer services because of the technology . But that means that we got to own it .

Hey , what should be a proper baluster spacing ? What makes these not wide enough ? What's a baluster ? Are they ? Do they look high enough ? You know , in New York state did my home inspector take the proper whatever , I don't know , just asking questions about the defects . Man , that would be incredible . But we , like you said , we have to own it .

If we don't own it , there's going to be companies like Inspectify and I pick on them a lot on this show . This is my personal opinion , does not reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt , yada , yada , yada . I think that whole business model is stinky .

So now you're going to have a company , some tech guy from wherever going hey guys , I heard I could make a quick buck on home inspection . So he gets all this seed funding and he goes and he starts building these AI tools , like you said .

Hey , yeah , carry this around your house , they'll do almost a full home inspection , and then what they're going to do is they're going to get we're going to turn into the field inspection industry where you get some guy just doing it on the weekends , part-time , and they give you $50 to go and verify the information in the report , maybe take a few more pictures

. That's what will happen if we don't own it . And I see so many guys so afraid of the technology In fact , I'm not going to say who . It's . Another software , great software , but I remember the owner saying that they didn't want to embrace artificial intelligence , ai , because the users didn't want it .

And I'm like all that is is burying your head in the sand . We want it to make inspectors more money , and burying our head in the sand is going to do the opposite of that . Someone else is going to take it . We need to own it so that when people want AI for a home inspection , it's ours .

We own it as an industry because , unfortunately , it's coming , and it's coming faster than I expected it .

But these , these are tools that you can use , and if you're not going to use them , it's kind of , I mean , we go from paper , from from the days of pen and paper , to software . Uh , you know , I would imagine I wasn't around then . I would imagine there was a lot of resistance to that whole idea . But look where we are now .

If you didn't keep up with the times , you're back using pen and paper . You're out of business . So , yeah , ai is just that we're going to have to jump on board or somebody's going to beat us to the punch .

And then those guys ended up going out of business all of them and I'm not going to say who they were , but there was a group of inspectors that kind of owned my area and it wasn't long maybe four , maybe five years and then all of a sudden everybody's offering electronic reports . I was one of the first ones .

I remember agents always saying they're like what in the world are you doing ? Those guys are out of business . We don't want to go that way , especially if we're still in our prime working ages , if we're 30 , 40 , 50 years old and we're like I'm not touching AI man , that's kind of early to get pushed off to the side .

I share your views of that 100% , and I think you and I talk a lot about AI and how to leverage it , and I think we've got some cool ideas , because , at the end of the day , we're always how can we bring it back to the home inspector , whether it's something used by someone else , whether it's something used in an app like how do we make the home

inspector part of either that funnel or how do we use it to enrich their services that they're offering ?

One doesn't go through and people are like , oh , I knew it was going to go through . It doesn't matter , it just means that it's coming and there's someone pushing for it . Then it's going to just get packaged up with a different bill and different thing that goes forward .

The whole skipping home inspection things that happened from 2020 to 2022 and even still into now has pushed governments to regulatory AHJs and all those things to push for home inspections because it was costing them money . Politicians , constituents were angry . You had local courts and stuff like that getting inundated with cases .

Property values went down , tax values went down in some cases . When it costs people money , they're going to make new laws . So I think that's coming .

But interestingly , in the wake of the rising frequency of disasters , hurricanes coming through , there is now actually pending legislation , even in the state of Florida , from a government point of view , to enforce at least some basic level inspections . You know when a home exchanges or changes hands .

So yeah , it is interesting to see the different things driving those trends .

It's not going to do anybody any good . It's not going to help consumers or an industry . Yeah no-transcript , but there are a lot of places talking about it right now and even municipalities , so I mentioned AHJs .

So you're going to have local municipalities , like there's ones around me , that require certain inspections when you buy a house and it really kind of stinks , like there's one AHJ near me probably .

Yeah , you can't upsell a septic inspection as a home inspector because they're like , well , we already got one , we had to pay the town for it , and then that person moves in and , you know , poo is backing up in their house . So all we did was keep a home inspector from making money and doing a good job and the homeowner from getting a good service .

That's what I'm worried about .

stuff out the roof vent .

So I don't know . Well , you and I met with a couple of engineering firms actually , and they even said they're having a hard time getting engineers in the field because there's less people to hire . So what they're doing is they're a hard time getting engineers in the field because there's less people to hire .

So what they're doing is they're trying to get people out in the field to do the data collection and then they do the actual engineering work .

So that's creating a problem when you purchase a commercial property , trying to find engineers who predominantly own that industry for decades to come in and do an inspection , who predominantly own that industry for decades , to come in and do an inspection , and then most people , they hire a contractor , even the best commercial contractor they're not going to write a

great report . So we as an industry have made some incredible inroads , we are starting to own it , and I think 2025 , all the way into 2030 , are going to be the golden years of commercial property inspections , just like the early 2000s were , in my opinion , the golden years of home inspections . It was just like .

I mean , it was just a great time and then people muscled into our industry . I think the next five years , starting next year , is going to be just the golden age , if we're thinking about commercial inspections . Oh man , now is the time . Other people have paved the way for you Get in there , get it done before the low ballers get in there .

And they are starting to get in there , but it's usually the $1,000 and under property . So when you're doing a little pizza shop or a four family or something like that , they're not low balling these shopping malls . They're not low ball . They're not low balling these shopping malls . They're not low balling these hotels . So now's the time .

It's really going to be a good time . I think yeah .

But you know to what you were saying on on complexity , are we talking about specialized services that you can give that are unique to commercial properties specialized , specialized services Um , so like , um , cost of cures .

Um , uh , Rob Klaus , I think , also teaches a version of it , right , but there's a whole lot open to us in the commercial inspection industry that isn't available in the home inspection industry . So like , right now we're doing commercial septic inspections whole different beast , a lot of fun , great money .

So yeah , there's a lot of specialty services that are open to us in the commercial inspection industry .

I don't know if I agree with it , but I see where it's coming from . First one that I mentioned here is expanding use of remote and virtual inspections . That one made my stomach a little tight in a knot . What are your thoughts on that ?

thinking that technology is ready for that . I share the view where you can't replace a home inspector . You guys are licensed , certified , all the stuff that you see from day to day , these remote inspections . I think there's some . Wasn't there some legislation around some states that actually do not permit that to be done at all ?

So there's a sewer camera app that you can buy and as you push the sewer and I haven't tried it , I don't know if it works , but the fact that it exists makes you think about what's going to come up so you can push the camera down the sewer line and it'll start highlighting things in the sewer line and identifying them .

So it'll highlight some roots off to the side . It's kind of fun to watch . Obviously , they give it a perfect scenario . When you're in a pipe with a bunch of turds and black water and mud .

You know it's going to be a lot harder for it to see , but it starts highlighting things like it'll just make this thing glow off to the right and I'll say this is root intrusion , and then I'll highlight a crack that could barely be seen . So it looks like there might be a crack in this pipe and that's pretty insane .

It's not like I upload a picture and ask ChatGPT to tell me what it sees and write a report . It's in real time , as I'm looking at things , identifying issues . Here's the problem , though , for them , and the good thing for us .

We're irreplaceable , because you know what a person walking around with a camera can't do it can't turn on the heating unit , so somebody needs to do that . It can't show the homeowner how to use the heating unit and it can't find all the defects , and examples of it are .

Who's going to climb up into the attic on the far side and then slip up the chimney chase to find the mold issue ? You still need to hire somebody to go in and get into these places .

But in addition to that , I'm thinking about a specific inspection where a bunch of people had inspected it and it was , like you know , fell through for different reasons financing and they were selling it only a couple of years after they bought it , and all these people had inspected it .

And I'm not saying that I'm amazing or anything , but there's one wall had all these shelves on it . So I went behind the wall , behind the shelves , looked at the wall and noticed that there was a belly in the wall from bad grading .

On the outside it was CMU , so concrete block , and it ended up costing like eight grand to repair , which I thought was too cheap , but anyways different story I thought it was too cheap , but anyways . Different story . You can't walk around the house and hold up an iPad and take video and it say , hey , there's likely a belly behind that wall .

You can't replace us . There's lots of different circumstances where if you didn't hire a home inspector , you wouldn't have gotten that information . Holding up an app and taking pictures of those things are two different things . But you know what it does help with . It kind of helps with . Okay , you know , make sure I didn't miss anything .

Let me walk through the house and I'll identify these things . Makes a nice 3D model of the house like a Matterport or something . That's where that stuff is headed and then I can go through and do my inspection . My client gets a is headed and then I can go through and do my inspection . My client gets a better product and then they still get me .

I'm going to charge extra for that . It's not going to be a five , six $700 inspection . It's going to be a $1,500 inspection .

Is it possible that something similar could end up if we , if we have software that's smart enough ? Could that be a direction the home inspection industry can go in , that we can capitalize on , or is that unlikely to go in that direction ?

I think that business model is going to be tried , but I don't think the average homeowner is going to want it . No matter how much you train the market , that's not what they're going to want . They're going to want well , who's on the other end of this virtual inspection ? Why can't he be here ? I'll pay extra for that .

Now , are there going to be the cheapskates out there that want the virtual inspections ? Sure , yeah , but that's not going to be any different than the $199 home inspectors that we have out there . So I don't think it's going to change the dynamic of our industry a whole lot .

I think cheaper home inspectors will try to do that and just do , to be perfectly frank , junky virtual inspections , and I think the really good guys are going to use it as a tool instead of as a replacement . And that's where taking back our industry . Taking a hold of it and ownership of it is a big difference .

If it becomes a tool on our tool belt instead of our replacement , that's a beautiful thing . If it becomes a replacement , it's just going to hurt everybody . There's going to be so many junky inspections out there that are just going to hurt people that they're going to make legislation to say no . It has to be a person in person . You know it .

And if it does replace us , it's so far into the future most of us will be retired that are listening yeah , well , it is interesting , uh , to talk about , because I think what you said is is accurate .

Um , but yeah , there will be people who will try it , which will , but but then it would be a case of pivoting with that technology on your side to continue offering the premium services that home inspectors do . But yeah , it is interesting to think about it at least and see how these things . We won't be surprised when they show up , because they will .

So all this year they've been building . So guess when you get the 11th month warranty inspections at 11 months after , which is going to be all through 2025 . So we had quite a few houses built and I think that's going to be a little bit of a boon . I don't think it's going to be a huge one .

I do get a lot of feedback with guys saying they have a hard time marketing it and it does seem to be pretty regional . And it does seem to be pretty regional Like some regions accept it really readily and others don't . But I still think there's some potential there for it to have a little bit of a boost there .

But the last thing I want to mention is I did ask AI . See , as we talked about AI , I'm like I feel like we should ask AI about itself , and so this is the last thing that I mentioned . It says AI will revolutionize the home inspection process in 2025 .

And , interestingly , it brought out three points enhanced diagnostics so it's seeing itself not as replacing the home inspector , but as being a diagnostic tool , and that's the way I would prefer to see it as not as a replacement , but a diagnostic tool . A real time reporting .

I think that will definitely be something good , and we have we're working on something for that to make the reporting time just like crazy fast , as fast as you can inspect and think it's going to happen . And I'm not talking about microchips in our brains , Although how cool would that be ?

And then better consumer education , and and I actually like that too , because we talked about the potential for clients using ai to kind of assimilate the information we give them . That's that's . That's a great , great thing . So I view it as a tool and we talked a lot about ai but it's becoming a thing .

There's already companies out there salivating at our industry and some already working on exactly what we talked about today to take our industry from us . If we embrace it , it's going to work out really well for us . If not , it's going to get grabbed from us .

I don't know how much of it will be out in 2025 , but what I've seen by 2027 , there's going to be quite a bit more than we would expect , I think , out there .

Um , because we're trying to be very deliberate about we got to do something and and we want to take control of the process so that we're able to , you know , empower home inspectors with the technology . But , um , yeah , let us know if you think we're , we got our tin hats on and we're being crazy , or if you totally agree and are on board .

We'd be curious to hear what you think .

Also , don't forget to check out our app for home inspectors scheduling and report writing all in one easy to use app . Check it out now at inspector tool beltcom .