As a home inspector, you can’t help but to take note of current real estate trends. House flipping is emerging as one of these trends. Much of the time, house flippers are savvy enough to understand that they need a home inspection before buying, but others may still need some convincing. Even the most seasoned house flippers rely on home inspectors.

The truth is that house flipping takes time, which just as good as money. House flippers want to know that they are making good investments, and this knowledge comes from a professional and a comprehensive home inspection checklist.

When house flippers fail to spot defects in a home, they see a cut in their potential profits. In fact, one house flipper claimed that buying a 1,200-square foot house with a bad foundation cost him $30,000. The key is to show house flippers that an inspection can be the difference between a makeover and a total rebuild.

The truth is that most of a home’s details can’t be seen in a walkthrough of the home. It takes a close inspection to find those looming electrical, plumbing, and foundational issues.

Unfortunately, many house flippers believe that they are capable of fixing a problem but underestimate the scale of the problem. Providing a thorough home inspection list can help house flippers determine if they need to hire contractors to fix issues involving drywall, foundation, plumbing, electricity, and more.

A home inspection can reveal exactly what needs to be done by finding the root of the problem. One mistake house flippers often make is that they approach the transaction as a homeowner rather than as an investor. Your goal is to show house flippers that they need to consider the integrity of the home from foundation to attic.

Your role as a home inspector is to provide the buyer with information about the home, but your stamp of approval provides their buyers with peace of mind. Home inspection may also be used to address lending concerns. Financial backers may not be willing to put up funding without a proper inspection of the house.

Flipped houses in the United States accounted for nearly 7% of all homes sold in the first quarter of 2016. House flippers tend to buy and sell more than one house in a short period of time, meaning that you may be able to count on flippers as repeat customers. With house flipping on the rise, it is becoming more apparent that flippers need to be part of a greater team in order to find success.

With winter on its way, the risk and number of home fire incidents will probably creep up. They always do. Although the National Fire Prevention Association says the number of home fires and related injuries and deaths have steadily declined for the past few decades, one fire is still one too many.

In your role as a certified home inspector, you can educate your community about home fire safety. Whether you reach an apartment dweller, longtime homeowner or someone buying their first house, any fire that you can help prevent makes the effort worthwhile.

Here are a few ideas for ramping up a fire safety campaign this fall.

If you use social media, you’ve got the perfect venue for educating people in your market and around the world. If you don’t, what are you waiting for? Every week, you could post one fire safety topic that’s relevant and valuable for your audience.

Here are a few timely ones for cold weather:

Whether Tuesday, Thursday or Monday is your Fire Safety day, stick with it. Each week, post about changing smoke alarm batteries, repairing known electrical issues in the home, getting rid of old dangerous space heaters and anything else that comes to mind. Your audience doesn’t have to be a homeowner to need fire safety tips.

Does your area have a certain concentration of fire safety issues? Maybe there are more older homes with outdated wiring. Or maybe people tend to burn leaves in the fall, which means a fire could get out of hand. Ask your local Fire Chief to give an interview to learn what matters to your community.

At no other time will you have greater access to home buyers than during and immediately after a home inspection. Naturally, you note all defects, such as a bad outlet or overloaded circuit breaker box, that affect the fire safety of the structure. But while you have the customer’s attention, use that time to offer one-on-one advice.

Unlike advising a customer to replace a roof, no liability can come from a personal conversation about fire safety. Customers already view you as an expert. Reading about why they need a chimney sweep and repair technician might not resonate as much as seeing creosote buildup and broken firebricks in person.

You’ve got several chances to make a difference in the fire safety statistics throughout your community. Everyone, even renters, can benefit from what you have to say. And who knows—some of them could become customers!

So read up on new fire safety technology and spread the word. Write up a fire-safety sheet to hand out to all of your customers. Winter will be here before you know it. If your knowledge only saves one home and family from a house fire, all of your efforts will have been worth it.

Is your home inspection reporting software up to snuff for the next season? If not, there’s no reason to put it off. Report Form Pro is a straightforward, convenient solution that gives your customers the results they expect. It also frees you from syncing your device to a computer later. Just finalize the report and send it from wherever you have a mobile device signal.

Everyone tells you to get active on social media. It’s a great marketing tool for home inspectors, but used the wrong way, it can have the opposite effect. If you’re too responsive, you’ll spend more hours than you should in front of a computer or mobile device. But if you’re not responsive enough, your audience will drift away.

What is that magic combination and how can you get it? Avoiding these common newbie marketing mistakes is a good start.

It’s easy to jump into every channel you can find when you’re getting your social media sea legs. After all, if one channel is good, all of them must be fantastic. That’s not usually how it works.

Every platform has a certain type of audience, so each one has the ability to reach a different type of person. This article at Entrepreneur breaks down the popular channels. But if you try to use them all, you’ll spend more time than you should in social media and not enough on the job.

Learn what the different social media options is about. LinkedIn, for example, is a professional social site. Facebook is personal, but that also means you have an incredibly broad reach, especially using some of their new business tools. Pick one or two platforms and work out from there. That’s what Dave Kogan says at the ASHI blog.

You want to be friendly. That’s what social is all about. A dull presence will do nothing for your engagement with followers.  But a too-friendly social media presence can make your home inspection business come across as unprofessional. That’s probably the opposite effect that you’re going for.

Businesses that use social effectively have mastered the art of the business casual voice. Think of it as the khaki pants and Polo shirt of words.

A friendly conversational style with your social media audience helps them develop a connection with your business. Just be careful about responding to negative comments in kind or sharing too much about what you had for lunch.

There’s an icon on every Facebook business page that tells visitors how quickly the page owner responds. The quicker you are to respond to visitor messages, the more professional you’ll look to your audience. Not only that, your response time could be the difference between getting a home inspection appointment and the potential customer contacting someone else.

Timeliness also applies to social media posts. If once a day is all you can manage, stick with it. If you start off with a bang and then lose steam, your audience could fall away.

Every channel has a better time for posting and a better mix of posting schedules. for Facebook, once or twice a day is fine for a small home inspection business. Twitter needs three times as many posts per day. Now Marketing Group explains more about schedules plus gives insight into the best times of day to post on each channel.

There are different schools of thought about using a personal social media account for business. Some say one account is plenty for anyone. Forbes says you should never mix business with personal life. It’s just too risky and complicated.

It’s easier, at least at first, to use a personal account to raise awareness of your business. But soon, the lines between family and work start to blur. Separating the accounts once you’ve started to build an audience will cause confusion. You might also lose some valuable posts and customer interactions in the shift.

If you stick with one or two social media accounts at first, opening a business page for each of them will be much easier to manage. As your comfort level increases, then you can safely think about adding more.

We get it. One of the biggest attractions about being a home inspector is driving business as you see fit. But sometimes, guidelines exist because they work. You can use social media as little or as much as you like. You can even skip it altogether. The important thing is to use what’s known about each platform to get the best results. Just because you can use social any way you like doesn’t mean that’ll get you more home inspection customers or referrals.

Technology sure is advancing quickly in the home inspecting industry. Smartphones and tablets are nudging out clipboards, and even laptops aren’t as common on site as they were for a while. Who needs to climb a ladder when a drone can check out the roof for you?

While technology is great, it can’t replace one of the most important parts of a thorough home inspection: the human element. Here’s why a simple, old-fashioned inspection can be an advantage, not a deficit.

Technology should complement the skill set that you’ve got, not replace it. For years, home inspectors provided thorough inspections with little more than a flashlight, electrical tester and a few hand tools. It’s still possible, and those skills work as an underpinning that makes technology more useful.

What happens on site when an app fails or high-priced equipment breaks? If you’re comfortable working without technology, you can still get the job done. If you’re not, the inspection might be dead in its tracks.

Sure, a drone can get a great look at parts of a roof that you might never reach. But a certified home inspector should have the ability scale a ladder and walk the roof without skipping a beat. Experience writing inspection reports longhand means a buggy smartphone won’t slow you down.

You’ve probably heard it many times before, but it bears repeating. Most of your customers are probably buying a house. That’s one of the most stressful things that anyone can go through. A hands-on inspector who communicates well might be one of the few reassuring elements of the whole experience.

Terry Sun of SnapInspect says at LinkedIn that these are three of the “most revered qualities” that a home inspector can have:

Notice how they have nothing to do with technology? That’s because a great certified home inspector isn’t defined buy the gadgets they use. You can be a great home inspector without all of the bells and whistles.

It’s tempting to buy the latest and greatest equipment that promises to make your life easier. Just be sure that it’s really a benefit and not one more tool to collect dust.

A Flir thermal imaging device can broaden your home inspection horizons and grow your business. It’ll also set you back at least several hundred dollars, if not thousands. The same goes for a drone and many other trendy tools that catch your eye.

It pays to be prudent with technology. Before you invest, think about how it will (or won’t) complement your existing skills. You could get a lot of mileage out of a circuit tracer, which might cost $1,000 or more. But if you live in an area with high winds and lots of rain, a drone might rarely see the light of day.

A certified home inspector really only needs a few things to provide a simple, thorough home inspection: a flashlight, ladder, electrical testers, a few hand tools and a blank report to fill in. Nearly everything else is extra.

There’s nothing wrong with working in what some people might call the “old fashioned” way. That’s why Home Inspection Report offers a straightforward Word version of our inspection report. Print it out and use it on site with a pen and a clipboard, or take notes during the inspection and fill in the report on your computer later.

Home inspectors are seekers of truth, whatever the truth might be. If there’s a defect, you’ll find it, document it and furnish your customer with the details. As a certified home inspector, your report is the tangible result of your good work. It’s sometimes the only unvarnished opinion about the house that your customer is about to buy.

You might think that your reporting style is as good as anyone else’s, but are you sure? Here’s why the report is so important and how to up your game if your style needs a little boost.

Inspecting Gets the Attention but Reports Last Forever

The home inspection industry puts a great deal of emphasis on the process of carrying out a home inspection. How do inspectors work? What do they look for? Do they open closets and shimmy through crawl spaces?

With so much focus on the inspection, the report is still the real star. It’s the product of navigating attics and walking roofs. It’s the written representation of the house from top to bottom, which customers can read, reflect on and revisit whenever they need to. With a solid reporting style that’s informational and easy to read, customers get the information they need without unnecessary confusion and worried phone calls.

Ironically, though, many inspectors enter the field with little or no report writing training. Working RE magazine says, “Most of us are not trained and experienced as technical writers, so although we know a lot more about houses than our clients, we may not know more about writing.”

Defect Information is Already Confusing; Reports Should Clarify It

Reports should be written with their intended audience in mind. Some details about material defects are complex and confusing. If you were chatting with another inspector, you might use industry terms and jargon. Some home inspectors pack reports full of it, but your customers need something a little more straightforward.

Conveying technical information to laypeople takes skill. The goal isn’t to oversimplify or “dumb down” your findings, but to clarify them. Working RE says the inspector’s job is to make the report and everything in it easy to understand.

If your reports read like a trade magazine, you might need to practice plain language writing. IEEE Professional Communication Society says plain language is effective communication that’s geared toward the audience, not the content of the message. Check out before and after examples of effective communication at plainlanguage.gov.

Home inspection reporting software can undermine your efforts to write great reports or it can support them with simple operation, intuitive design and a report style that looks great in digital format or printed out. It can tether you to an office or set you free to work in the field and send reports without ever plugging up to a computer. That’s what Report Form Pro offers in a simple app.