California to Maryland: home inspector license reciprocity

Maryland licenses home inspectors statewide through the Maryland Commission of Real Estate Appraisers, Appraisal Management Companies and Home Inspectors, which sits in the Department of Labor's Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing and works under Title 16 of the Business Occupations and Professions Article and COMAR 09.36. There is one license and no junior tier: an applicant needs a high school diploma or its equivalent, 72 hours of an on-site classroom training course approved by the Commission and by a national home inspection organization, and a passing score on the National Home Inspector Examination, which PSI delivers in Baltimore, College Park, Hagerstown and Salisbury. Maryland sets no experience requirement and no supervised-inspection count, so an inbound inspector's years of practice are not what the file turns on. Before the license is issued the applicant must show general liability insurance of at least $150,000 with their own name on the certificate, and that cover has to be in place again at every renewal; there is no surety bond and no errors and omissions requirement. The Commission publishes a list of 28 states whose licensees may apply by reciprocity, which replaces the 72-hour course and the diploma evidence but not the examination, and it tells an applicant from any other state to file the original application instead. The Maryland Home Improvement Commission license that contractors hold is a separate credential under separate law and does not authorize home inspections.

California issues no home inspector license, certificate or registration, so an inspector moving here has no state credential to apply for, no examination to sit and nothing to transfer from another state. No board or bureau of the Department of Consumer Affairs regulates home inspectors, and there is no home inspector classification among the Contractors State License Board's A, B, B-2 and C classifications. What binds a California home inspector instead is the Home Inspectors chapter of the Business and Professions Code, sections 7195 through 7199: it defines a home inspection as a noninvasive physical examination performed for a fee in connection with the transfer of a residential dwelling of one to four units; it requires the inspector to work with "the degree of care that a reasonably prudent home inspector would exercise"; it makes it an unfair business practice to perform or offer, for an additional fee, repairs to a structure the inspector or the inspector's company reported on in the past 12 months, to inspect for a fee any property the inspector has a financial interest in, to offer a referral reward to the owner, broker or agent, or to take an engagement whose fee depends on the conclusions in the report; it forbids giving an opinion of valuation; and it makes void as contrary to public policy any contract term that waives that duty of care or limits the inspector's liability to the cost of the report. An action for breach of that duty must be brought within four years of the inspection. California does license the work on either side of the inspection, and section 7196.1 confirms the chapter exempts a home inspector from none of it: contractors through the Contractors State License Board, wood-destroying pests and organisms through the Structural Pest Control Board, where only a licensed Branch 3 (termite) field representative or operator may make the inspection and issue any statement about the presence or absence of those organisms, and architects, professional engineers and real estate appraisers through their own boards. Because California holds no home inspector examination, the National Home Inspector Examination has nothing to stand in for here, and any "certified" designation an inspector advertises comes from a private trade association rather than from the state; the Legislature names one such body, the California Real Estate Inspection Association, in section 7195.5, but only as a group the Department of Water Resources consults, not as a licensing authority.