Start With the License
Home inspection has been a licensed profession in Florida since 2010. The license requires training, a state exam, general liability and errors and omissions coverage, and continuing education to keep it. That is the floor, and checking it takes half a minute.
How to Check
Go to MyFloridaLicense.com, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation site, and search the inspector's name or license number. Florida home inspector numbers begin with HI. Ours is HI 11755. The record shows current status, the expiry date and any disciplinary history. Do this before the deposit, not after the report.
What a license does not tell you: whether the person holding it will actually climb into your attic. Every Florida standard of practice allows an inspector to decline an area that is unsafe or inaccessible, and that clause is where a short inspection hides. The license is the floor. The method is the thing you are buying.
Five Questions Worth Asking
These separate inspectors far more reliably than price does, and the answers take one phone call.
The Questions
- Do you walk the roof, and what makes you decide not to?
- Do you take the dead front off the electrical panel?
- Do you enter the attic, or view it from the hatch?
- How long will you be at the house?
- Can I see a sample report from a house like mine?
What Good Answers Sound Like
On the roof: walked where pitch, covering and weather allow, with the method recorded per slope so you can see how each one was assessed. Concrete tile inspected from the edge and by camera, because walking tile breaks tile. On the panel: yes, opened, every time, because a panel you cannot see inside of is a panel you have not inspected. On the attic: entered wherever it can be reached safely, which on a Suntree house is where the roof-to-wall connection for your wind mitigation credit lives. On time: three to four hours for a typical 1,800 to 2,500 sq ft home. On the sample report: sent without hesitation.
Vague answers to any of those are the answer.
Reading Reviews Without Being Fooled
Inspection reviews are unusually easy to fake and unusually hard to interpret, because most people hire exactly one inspector in their life and have nothing to compare it to.
What a Real One Looks Like
It names something specific. A finding, a system, a moment on the day. "Found a hairline crack in the heat exchanger that two other people missed" is a real review. "Great service, highly recommend, very professional" is a sentence that could describe a dentist. Look for the ones that mention what happened after the report too, because that is when you find out whether an inspector picks up the phone.
Ours Are on Google
Read them there, where customers left them and where we cannot edit them. We do not offer discounts, gift cards or prize entries in exchange for reviews, and we do not write them ourselves. That policy costs us reviews. It also means the ones that exist were left by people who chose to. Judge them by the same standard you would apply to anyone else on your list.
What Suntree Specifically Requires
A community built between the mid-1980s and 2000 rewards an inspector who knows what to look for before arriving.
Whoever you hire should identify the supply piping at the water heater without being asked, because polybutylene is the finding here that can cost you an insurance policy rather than just money. They should be photographing the roof-to-wall connection in the attic for your wind mitigation form, since builders working here before the 2002 Florida Building Code were not consistent about it and the credit is worth real money every year. They should be reading data plates on equipment that may be original to the house. And they should know the difference between a screen enclosure that needs rescreening and one whose frame anchors have failed, because those look identical from the patio door and differ by thousands of dollars. The what to expect page lays out how each of those gets documented.
On Price
Fees around Brevard sit in a fairly narrow band, so a quote well below the rest is not a better deal, it is a shorter visit. The savings come from the same five places every time: the panel stays closed, the attic gets viewed from the hatch, the roof gets assessed from the driveway, there is no thermal imaging, and the report never states which areas could not be reached.
Our whole schedule is published on the cost page rather than quoted on the phone, which is worth asking of anyone. If you are buying, the buyer's page covers what to book and when, and the Suntree overview covers the housing stock itself.