Posts: 341
Threads: 64
Joined: Oct 2007
Please be AWARE!
There is NO Hawaii State or Hawaii County requirement or regulation for licensing or certification of "Home Inspectors" - NONE! You take a course (even online now) - pass a test - join an "Association" - pay their fees/dues (they might have their own test to take) and VIOLA - you are now a CERTIFIED Home Inspector! There is NO Hawaii governmental oversight WHAT-SO-EVER! Any requirement for a "Home Inspector" to be certified is strictly a "business decision" of a "Real Estate Company"!
County "Building Inspectors" are not "Home Inspectors"!
Posts: 14,120
Threads: 424
Joined: Aug 2012
Gosh, it's almost like licensing/inspection/permitting is a huge scam by and for the banking/taxation regime, backed with the "force of law" (unless you can afford the "inspection" and "certification").
Posts: 6,214
Threads: 354
Joined: Feb 2006
I guess that is another of those differences between IL & HI...IL - home inspectors are regulated (I do know that Building Dept. personnel in the 'collar counties' also were lic....but not sure if that was a state thing or a collar county thing...our last county even had counter clerks that were lic....but that was way over the top service... just think, you could get intelligent insight from not only the inspectors, but even the counter clerks! - here... "submit a engineered stamped plan for review" is the only thing from the counter.... and the inspectors...& I kinda wonder if any/all of them can even read a plan, just based on my limited dealing with them!)
I drive up a county dirt road lined with dumped trash that would not pass any highway construction / condition code anywhere outside the third world. I drive up my subdivision 'road', that is worse. There is zero electrical, sewage or water infrastructure within miles. Zero. Fire protection so far away as to be irrelevant. Same for police. I love it here, but as soon as I am on my own land, suddenly I'm supposed to pay people who make more in an hour than I used to make in a day big dinero to do things almost as well as I can do them myself to a code book hundreds of pages long, pay state inspectors to come and tell me I have to pay to rip-out/do-over construction because a crippled, blind midget might have issues if they lived in the structure, maybe my cesspool is 6 inches not deep enough and needs to be re-dug, etc. etc. to the tune of many thousands of dollars I do not have. Some of us live in the woods for a reason, the main one being that we cannot afford to live anywhere else or play the contractor game. So I'll hire a lawyer when the little white car with the county sticker cuts my chain and comes up my road to ticket me. Till then just leave me the F alone. I'm not on welfare of any kind, don't make noise, don't grow dope, I pay my taxes cheerfully even though they get misspent, and what I build and live in on my land is no ones business. When it is, poor people are screwed because all they want is your money and we have none. But blue skies, 5' surf and aloha to all.
