Inspection & Duty of Care

On a Georgetown rowhouse I inspected last spring, someone had repointed the front elevation with a hard gray mortar that looked crisp and new. The problem was everywhere around it: the faces of the old bricks were spalling off, popping and flaking in a way the untouched side elevation was not doing at all. The […]

I have watched buyers treat a home inspection report like a warranty, and then be shocked a year later when the thing that went wrong “wasn’t in the report.” A pre-purchase inspection is genuinely useful, but it is a visual, non-invasive snapshot of a house on one day, not a guarantee, and the gap between

I own a handful of older rentals, and the ones that eat my profit are never the ones with a dramatic emergency. They are the ones where a fifty-dollar problem sat ignored until it became a five-thousand-dollar one. A clogged gutter becomes a wet foundation becomes a bowed wall. The single best money move I

The first old house we restored taught me to slow down before fixing anything. We found a soft spot in a floor, and my husband wanted to open it up and start repairing that afternoon. I made us spend an hour first: photos, measurements, notes on exactly what we were seeing. Six months later, when

The trickiest liability questions I deal with as a property manager are almost never inside a unit. They are in the in-between places: the shared stairwell, the parking lot, the walkway between buildings, the retaining wall at the edge of the common grounds. When someone is hurt in one of those spaces, the first question

I have seen a lot of “we’ll just skip the permit” jobs over the years, and they all look like a good deal on the day. Cheaper, faster, no inspector poking around. The bill for that decision does not arrive then. It arrives years later, at resale, or when a related failure turns into an