I hired Eric Womer / ESW Home Inspections, LLC to inspect our 4,000 square foot - 5 bedrooms, 5…read morebathrooms - new home just prior to our one year of ownership expiring. I contacted him because my neighbor had used him and thought he was ok. In retrospect I should have done much more research.
Once Eric completed the inspection, he sent us his report where he listed a total of 5 items that needed repair. Four of those 5 items we had not only known about prior to his visit, but we showed them to him. And those same four items were also included on a long punch list that we had reported to the builder months before. The one item, however, that we did not know about - nor did we care about - was that the pool coating had lines.
I want to mention here the inspection done by Eric Womer / ESW Home Inspections, LLC DID NOT INCLUDE him going up on my roof. Instead he sent a drone. Also note there are all types and qualities of drones and just because a home inspector says he uses a drone for the roof that doesn't mean that the drone is a good one!
A few months after Eric Womer's inspection, we had an issue with our one year old clothes dryer that stopped working. The error message on the dryer was that the vent needed to be cleaned. I emailed Eric and asked him where the vent was because I looked around the house and couldn't find one. Eric emailed me pictures and I went outside again, this time looking at his pictures to find the vent. I soon realize that the pictures he sent me were of someone else's house!
I then hired a roofer to see if the dryer vent is on the roof and not only did the roofer tell me that Eric Womer should have seen that there was a flap and a screen on the vent and that the screen should have been removed when we closed on the house, but the roofer went one step further and he inspected my roof where he found 11 cracked tiles! The roofer also said that based on the tiles that were cracked it was obvious that the people who installed the gutters cracked the tiles (which was prior to closing). When I asked Eric Womer why he didn't list on his report that there were 11 cracked roof tiles, he said that there were no cracked roof tiles when he inspected my house and that my roofer must have cracked them when he walked on the roof looking for the dryer vent. Unbelievable!
I paid Eric Womer $500 to have my house inspected. I paid a roofing company $3,800 to have the tiles replaced. (Upon the roofing company's inspection there were actually a total of 16 cracked tiles). I did ask Eric Womer for a refund of the $500 I paid him, and his response was "... i am more than properly documented on my side, I will not be issuing any type of refunds."
Aside from the total $4,300 this entire fiasco cost me, what concerns me most is all the other items that Eric Womer missed because of his grossly inadequate and poor inspection, all the other items that I could have had the builder fix because at the time it was prior to our one year of ownership.
Do yourself a favor when hiring a home inspector. Don't rely on one person for a referral - ask around. And make sure he/she goes up on your roof and walks around. If they say they use a drone you have no idea the quality of that drone.