Why There Is No List Here
Every page you will find titled with this phrase was written by one of the companies on it. Ours would be no different, which is exactly why we are not writing one.
What actually separates inspectors on this island is not reputation in the abstract. It is whether they know what an elevated house on A1A is doing, because most of Brevard is slab-on-grade and an inspector who works the mainland all week may never have crawled under a beach house. That is a competence question with a specific answer, and you can establish it on the phone in five minutes.
Six Questions for a Beach House
These are deliberately not the generic ones. Every inspector has an answer ready for do you walk the roof. Fewer have one ready for these.
- Do you go underneath an elevated house, and what do you examine there?
- What do you check on the pilings and their connections?
- Will you tell me what is enclosed below the required flood elevation?
- What do you do with hurricane shutters and their hardware?
- How does an elevated structure change the wind mitigation form?
- Where do you stop and send me to a surveyor or an engineer?
The third question is the one that finds people out. An enclosure built underneath an elevated house, turned into a room by a previous owner, is a genuine insurance and compliance problem that transfers at closing and reads as bonus square footage on a listing. An inspector who has never thought about it will hear the question as being about storage. One who works this island will tell you about flood vents before you finish asking.
What Good Answers Sound Like
Underneath: yes, every time, examining piling and pile cap condition, the hardware and connections tying the structure to its supports, corrosion at exposed fasteners, and the utility runs exposed to weather because there is no slab to bury them in. On enclosures: what is down there, what it is being used for, and whether it has vents or finished walls, reported plainly either way. On shutters: tracks and hardware operated rather than admired, because corroded shutters that will not close are both a safety item and a lost insurance credit. On the wind mitigation form: opening protection and roof attachment explained in terms of what they do to your premium.
And on the last one, a straight answer. A good inspector names the boundary before you reach it: flood zone and elevation to a licensed surveyor, structural verdicts on a piling to a Florida-licensed professional engineer, and any work planned seaward of the state's coastal construction control line to the Department of Environmental Protection. Anyone who claims all of that falls inside a home inspection is telling you something that is not true, and it is the single clearest signal you will get.
The License, Briefly
Florida has licensed home inspectors since 2010, and the number is public. Search a name or a number at MyFloridaLicense.com and you get status, expiry and any disciplinary history in about thirty seconds. Ours is HI 11755.
There is no separate oceanfront or coastal certification in Florida, so treat any implication of one carefully. Association memberships such as InterNACHI or ASHI mean continuing education and a code of ethics, which is worth something and is not a substitute for the state license. Our licensed inspectors page goes through what the license covers and where it stops, including mold and wood-destroying organisms, which are separate licenses held by other people.
Reading Reviews Without Being Fooled
Inspection reviews are easy to fake and hard to interpret, because most people hire exactly one inspector in their life and have nothing to compare it against.
What a Real One Contains
Something specific. A finding, a system, a moment on the day. "Went under the house and found two pile connections rusted through" is a real review. "Great service, very professional, highly recommend" is a sentence that could describe a dentist. Look for what happened after the report as well, because that is where you learn whether an inspector answers the phone a week later when your contractor has a question.
Ours Are on Google
Read them there, where customers left them and where we cannot edit them. We do not publish selected quotes on our own pages, we do not offer discounts or prize entries in exchange for reviews, and we do not write our own. That policy costs us reviews and it is the only version worth showing you. Apply the same standard to everyone else on your shortlist.
On Price
Fees around Brevard sit in a narrow band, so a quote well below the others is buying fewer hours rather than a cheaper hour. On an elevated house the first hour to disappear is the one spent underneath, and that is the hour the structure is in. Our whole schedule is published on the cost page rather than quoted on the phone, which is a fair thing to expect from anyone. What tends to turn up here is on the common issues page, and the Melbourne Beach overview covers the island itself.