A colleague has been talking to me recently about a house that was sold last year and foundation problems that have shown up since the settlement. It's led us into a discussion about home inspections and some of the pitfalls.

In this particular case a home inspection was done and the inspector did tell the buyer that there were issues related to the foundation. The agent suggested asking the current owner to rectify in the home inspection addendum. The buyer agreed and they asked. The seller rejected this request. The buyer then chose to go ahead with the purchase anyway.

The inspector found the problem, mentioned the problem and noted the problem on his report. That's his job and it appears he did it and did it professionally. But none of what was said apparently raised the kind of red flags with the buyer that foundational issues would suggest.

So we've been talking about how home inspectors are trained to not be alarmist. Since buyers usually don't know a home inspector and rely on the recommendation of their agent to find one, the home inspectors rely on real estate agents for their business. They've learned to stay low key about anything they find in a house in order to continue to have business referred by real estate agents. There are plenty of agents out there who worry that a home inspector who is too aggressive in finding and highlighting potential problems put deals at risk.

And the truth is that a home inspector can do a disservice to a buyer by scaring them out of a perfectly good home that needs relatively minor repairs.

But the scales have perhaps tipped too far towards protecting the deal over the buyer. That doesn't mean all home inspectors are shady. It doesn't mean that real estate agents are trying to pull the wool over their clients' eyes to protect the deal. But it does mean that there are some natural inclinations to minimize issues and that we all need to be aware of these and make sure that alarm bells go off when they should!

Ideally buyers would always know a home inspector that they trusted and would hire him or her without needing the agent to give them a referral to someone. But since that seems unlikely to happen I guess we'll all just have to get a little more vigilant about making sure buyers get every protection possible.