South Bay Home Inspections

He did our home inspection and missed a 4 foot or greater rusted crack in the cast iron plumbing below our house. Our plumber said he could strike the pipe and the entire thing would collapse. When confronted, he would not take responsibility for his mistake. I asked other professionals in the industry and they advised that the home inspector should have crawled under the house and did a visual inspection of the pipes, which he obviously failed to do.

Randy at South Bay Home inspection missed critical errors on our home inspection, calling out the wrong material on visible plumbing (said inside was upgraded to copper when it was actually old galvanized) and failed to note a major code violation on the hot water heater. As a result of the code violation (water heater vent located in front of a window), SoCal gas would not give us service until it was fixed so we went almost a week without hot water while we scrambled to get estimates and work with a plumber to fix. Ultimately we had to get a new hot water heater installed because of the inspectors omission, costing over seven thousand dollars of unexpected additional costs out of pocket to fix. This was a clearly visible violation that any competent code inspector should have easily noted. I tried several times to discuss with Mr. Pierson but he was not understanding at all and denied any fault. There is unfortunately no board in the state of California that protects the homeowner from negligence of inspectors such as Randy, even the American Society of Home Inspectors agreed he was in violation of their standards, but could not seek legal council as it is just a code of ethics that the inspectors pay to subscribe to. Ultimately we had to take Randy to small claims court, where he once again denied any fault but fessed to the judge that he typically ignores known code violations such as this on the report... I do not wish anyone to go through the stress and financial hardship that we had to because of Randy's negligence and unwillingness to take responsibility, spend your money on a qualified inspector - it will pay for itself in the long run!