Hawaii 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.

Hawaii issues no home inspector license, certificate or registration. The Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs licenses occupations through its Professional and Vocational Licensing Division, and the division publishes the full directory of what it issues: boards for accountancy, acupuncture, barbering and cosmetology, boxing, chiropractic, contractors, dentists and dental hygienists, electricians and plumbers, elevator mechanics, engineers, architects, surveyors and landscape architects, massage therapy, medicine and osteopathy, the motor vehicle industry, motor vehicle repair, naturopathic medicine, nursing, optometry, pest control, pharmacy, physical therapy, private detectives and guards, psychology, real estate, speech pathology and audiology and veterinary medicine; and programs for activity desks, appraisal management companies, athletic trainers, behavior analysts, cemeteries and pre-need funeral authorities, collection agencies, condominium property regimes, dispensing opticians, electrologists, employment agencies, hearing aid dealers and fitters, marriage and family therapists, mental health counselors, midwives, mixed martial arts contests, nurse aides, nursing home administrators, occupational therapy, port pilots, real estate appraisers, respiratory therapists, social workers, subdivisions, time shares, travel agencies, athlete agents and veterinary technicians. Home inspection is on neither list. The Legislature looked at adding it: Senate Bill 2403 of 2018 would have required licensure for home inspectors and established a board of home inspectors, but the Senate Housing Committee deferred the measure on February 13, 2018 and no home inspector practice act has been enacted since. An inspector arriving from another state therefore has no Hawaii credential to apply for, no examination to sit and nothing to transfer, and because Hawaii holds no home inspector examination the National Home Inspector Examination has nothing to stand in for here; any "certified" designation an inspector advertises comes from a private trade association rather than from the state. What binds a Hawaii home inspector instead is general law. Section 480-2 makes unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce unlawful, and section 480-13 lets an injured consumer sue for the greater of $1,000 or threefold damages plus attorney's fees and costs, with a $5,000 floor where the consumer is an elder. The Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act at section 481A-3 separately reaches causing a likelihood of confusion about the approval or certification of a service, claiming a status or affiliation one does not have, and representing that a service is of a standard, quality or grade it is not. Hawaii has enacted no statutory standard of care for home inspectors, so the written inspection agreement and ordinary contract and negligence law set the duty owed, and the Regulated Industries Complaints Office takes complaints only about work a board actually licenses. Hawaii does regulate one inspection closely, and it is the one most often ordered alongside a home inspection. Under chapter 460J, identifying an infestation, inspecting a structure to identify one, and making inspection reports, recommendations, estimates or bids about it are all pest control, which no one may perform, offer or advertise for hire without a pest control license; the branches are Branch 1 fumigation, Branch 2 general pest and Branch 3 termite, each earned by examination. Section 460J-19 requires the written termite inspection report to be on the board's PC-9 form and to carry the date of inspection and the name of the inspector, the name and address of whoever ordered it, any party in interest due a certified copy, the address of the property, a general description of the building and the location of visible infestation, and it forbids guarantees or warranties on the report; section 460J-20 requires any later document expressing an opinion on the presence or absence of termites to refer back to that report. So the wood-destroying-pest part of a Hawaii pre-sale inspection is licensed work with a prescribed report form, even though the rest of the home inspection is unregulated. The other adjacent credentials are the Contractors License Board's general engineering, general building and specialty licenses under chapter 444, which define a contractor by the construction work performed rather than by examining and reporting on a building, so there is no inspector classification there, but every repair that comes out of a report belongs to a licensed contractor; alongside them sit the Board of Electricians and Plumbers, the Board of Engineers, Architects, Surveyors and Landscape Architects, the Real Estate Commission and the Real Estate Appraiser program.