Georgia to Oregon: home inspector license reciprocity

Oregon certifies home inspectors statewide through the Construction Contractors Board, the same agency that licenses contractors, and the credential is called the Oregon Certified Home Inspector or OCHI. Anyone who advertises, bids or performs a residential inspection covering two or more of the listed systems must hold it. The certification comes in two halves and both are needed before you can work. The first is personal: 20 qualifying points of experience and education, a passing score on the National Home Inspector Examination and a $150 application. The second is the part that surprises inbound inspectors: under ORS 701.445 a certified inspector must also be an owner or an employee of a business that holds a CCB contractor license, and the certificate does nothing until the license holder files an OCHI Change form linking it to an active license. If you join an existing inspection firm that license is already in place; if you intend to work for yourself you must obtain a CCB license of your own, most often the Home Inspector Services Contractor endorsement, which is limited to home inspection work and carries a $15,000 surety bond and general liability insurance of at least $100,000 per occurrence. Oregon publishes no reciprocity and no endorsement route for an out-of-state home inspector license, so an experienced inspector moving here files the ordinary application; what does travel is the national examination and the years of inspection work behind it.

Georgia 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. The Secretary of State's Professional Licensing Boards Division supports the 42 licensing boards housed with that agency and publishes the whole list. Under Building and Contractors it names architects and interior designers, conditioned air contractors, electrical contractors, low voltage contractors, plumbers, residential and general contractors, and utility contractors; the rest of the list runs from veterinarians, athlete agents and auctioneers through cosmetologists, foresters, geologists, funeral directors, nurses and private detectives to used motor vehicle dealers and water and wastewater treatment plant operators. Home inspection is not on it. The same page lists the professions that are licensed in Georgia by some other agency - accountancy, certified nurse aides, dentists, engineers and land surveyors, installment lenders, insurance agents, lawyers, manufactured homes, pesticide applicators, pharmacists, physicians, real estate agents, vehicle tag and title, and water well contractors - and home inspection is not on that list either, so there is no other agency to be sent to. The Georgia Administrative Code says the same thing from the rules side: its department index carries the State Construction Industry Licensing Board and the State Licensing Board for Residential and General Contractors, but no home inspector department, chapter or rule. Because Georgia 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. What binds a Georgia home inspector instead is general law. The Fair Business Practices Act, O.C.G.A. sections 10-1-390 and following, exists "to protect consumers and legitimate business enterprises from unfair or deceptive practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce" and declares unfair or deceptive acts or practices in consumer transactions unlawful; it covers services bought mainly for personal, family or household purposes, and its own illustrations include passing off services as those of another and causing actual confusion or actual misunderstanding about the source, approval or certification of a service. A consumer injured by a violation may sue individually for injunctive relief and damages under section 10-1-399, after delivering a written demand for relief to the prospective defendant at least 30 days before filing; the court awards three times actual damages for an intentional violation, plus reasonable attorney's fees and expenses of litigation. The Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division enforces the Act separately whenever it finds a substantial public interest. Georgia has enacted no home inspector practice act, which means no statutory standard of care and no conflict-of-interest rule of the kind that bars inspecting a property you were paid to repair, so the written inspection agreement together with ordinary contract and negligence law sets the duty owed. Georgia does license the work on either side of an inspection: the State Licensing Board for Residential and Commercial General Contractors licenses the residential and commercial general contractors who take on building and remodeling that follows from a report; the State Construction Industry Licensing Board licenses electrical contractors, plumbers, conditioned air contractors, low voltage contractors and utility contractors, so any repair in those trades belongs to a licensee; and putting a value on the property is the work of an appraiser classified by the Georgia Real Estate Appraisers Board as State Registered, State Trainee, State Licensed, State Certified Residential or State Certified General. That appraiser board does offer classification by reciprocity to licensed and certified appraisers from every state, which is the recognition an inbound home inspector will not find anywhere in Georgia.