licensing ontario's home inspectors

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Spring 2018

After decades of debate among home inspectors and our scattered professional associations, in April 2017 the Ontario government passed The Home Inspection Act to establish minimum standards for inspection, as well as qualifications for inspectors.

It should now be a legal requirement that home inspectors be qualified and insured in order to obtain a license, and that no one should practice the business of home inspections without a proper license.  No more casual inspections. No more inspections without service agreements in place, and a really, for real report written and delivered to clients after every inspection.

But hold on a sec…  the new law will not be effective until the government creates and implements a regulatory body or finds a pre-existing regulatory body ready to administer the law for home inspectors. 

Insurance requirements, standards of practice, a code of ethics and a disciplinary committee are but a few of the things which will need to be hashed out over the coming months – and these things don’t come for free.

Rumour has it, at least a million more dollars (on top of the three or four million already spent over the lifetime of licensing k’fluffle) is required to get this thing off the ground. And that’s with a buy-in of about $1500 from each and every identifiable home inspector in the province. (Good luck with that.)

The light at the end of the tunnel is but a flickering candle in the wind.  The current government doesn’t seem to be in the mood to spend money on this project, probably because home inspectors aren’t really, anywhere near the top of the list for consumer complaints, and moreover because the Government of Ontario is up to its armpits in debt.