Home Inspectors Editing and Proofreading Services

A buyer reads an inspection report containing forty-one items and cannot tell which three should change their offer. The roof is at the end of its life, a socket is missing a faceplate, and there is something about the drains that the inspector could not see and thinks somebody should look at. All three appear in the same list, in the same typeface, with the same weight.

We edit what home and building inspectors produce — inspection and survey reports and their findings, condition rating and categorisation systems, limitations and scope statements, further investigation recommendations, cost indication and urgency documentation, pre-purchase and pre-sale report formats, defect descriptions and photographic annotation, client-facing explanations of report structure, terms of engagement and scope agreements, and follow-up and clarification correspondence. Our editors work on the report a buyer will make a decision from.

The report's categorisation is what makes an inspection useful, and its failure is treating every finding as a finding. A buyer needs three groups: things that should change the price or the decision, things that will need money within a few years, and things to fix when convenient. We work through reports so each item is placed in one of those groups explicitly, with the group stated before the description, since a numbered list in survey order is read as a ranking and it is not one; so the recommendation to investigate further is separated from both a defect and a clean bill, because this is the category that most affects a buyer's risk and it is routinely buried among minor items — an unviewable roof void or an untested drain is an unknown, not a pass; so cost indications are given as ranges with what they include, given that a buyer with no figure assumes either nothing or everything; so urgency is expressed in time — this winter, within five years, at the next redecoration — rather than as high, medium or low; so the limitations are stated per area rather than in a general clause, naming what was not seen and why; so the difference between a defect and normal age-related wear is made explicit, as a fifty-year-old house is not defective for being fifty; and so the summary lists the three or four things that matter and nothing else. Reports written this way get used in a negotiation rather than skimmed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including reports, client information and property details. We are editors rather than surveyors or inspectors, and we offer no view on condition, defects or costs. What we can do is make the three things that matter findable.