Kansas to Connecticut: home inspector license reciprocity

Connecticut licenses home inspectors statewide through the Department of Consumer Protection under chapter 400f of the General Statutes, advised by an eight-member Home Inspection Licensing Board that sits inside the department. No one may examine and report on two or more systems of a one-to-four-family residential building for a fee without that license, although the statute leaves licensed architects and professional engineers outside the chapter altogether and lets electricians, plumbers, appraisers, insurance adjusters and other license holders keep working inside their own credentials. Connecticut reaches the license through a real two-stage route. A candidate first earns a Home Inspector Intern permit, which asks for a high school diploma or equivalent, a completed board-approved Home Inspection Intern Training Program of at least forty hours covering general home inspection, Connecticut license law, specialized practice areas and business law, and a named Connecticut-licensed supervisor who has agreed to supervise. The intern then performs at least one hundred inspections, the first ten with the supervisor present on site for the whole inspection and countersigning every document, keeps a signed log of them, and passes the licensing examination. The intern permit is a training credential rather than a second destination, so the full Home Inspector license is what an experienced inspector moving to Connecticut applies for, and section 20-492c lets that inspector skip the intern stage: on a written application and a $100 fee the department issues a license to anyone holding a valid license from another state whose standards it finds substantially equivalent to or exceeding Connecticut's. Either the Connecticut state examination or the National Home Inspector Examination satisfies the examination requirement, and the department's testing contractor is PSI. Connecticut requires no errors and omissions cover, no general liability cover and no bond from home inspectors, and it runs no guaranty fund for them: the department's Home Improvement, New Home Construction, Real Estate and Health Club funds cover other credential holders. Licenses expire on June 30 of odd-numbered years, renewal costs $250, and 20 continuing education hours are due each two-year cycle.

Kansas issues no home inspector license, certificate or registration, and neither does any Kansas city. The state's own index of what requires registration, licensing or a permit, published by the Kansas Business Center One Stop, runs alphabetically from accountants to well water contractors and names the boards of accountancy, barbering, cosmetology, healing arts, mortuary arts, nursing, pharmacy and technical professions, the behavioral sciences regulatory board, the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and environment, labor and revenue, the insurance department, the bank commissioner, the secretary of state and the attorney general. There is no home inspector on it. Kansas came closer to licensing this trade than most states that now license nobody. The Kansas home inspectors registration board was established in 2008, and from January 1, 2010 every individual performing a home inspection had to be registered by it; the board had five governor-appointed members, three of them inspectors with at least five years in practice and a thousand fee-paid inspections behind them, and registrants had to be at least eighteen, to hold a high school diploma or equivalent unless already in practice, and to show general liability insurance. The whole article carried a sunset and expired on July 1, 2013. Nothing replaced it, so a Kansas registered home inspector credential has not existed for more than a decade, and an inspector arriving from another state has nothing to apply for, no examination to sit and nothing to transfer. Because Kansas 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 municipal answer is the same. Kansas has no state construction contractor license at all, so cities and counties do that licensing, and those are the lists where a local inspector credential would appear if one existed: the Johnson County contractor licensing program, which serves the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area, issues Class A general, Class B building, Class C residential, and the Class D specialty licenses for electrical, fire protection, mechanical, plumbing, roofing, swimming pool and wood framing work, and nothing for inspectors; Overland Park's own directory of permits and licenses covers business and home-based business licenses, massage, pawnbrokers, precious metal dealers, taxis and car services, transient merchants, pools and spas, rental licensing, liquor, signs and special events, and nothing for inspectors; and Wichita's business license categories are adult entertainment, advertising, animals, cemeteries, entertainment, miscellaneous, lodging and residential, sales and services, security, special events, transportation and wells, again with nothing for inspectors. A general business license from the city or county clerk may still be needed simply to trade, and that is a business formality rather than a qualification. What binds a Kansas home inspector instead is the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. Section 50-626 provides that no supplier shall engage in any deceptive act or practice in connection with a consumer transaction, and lists as violations, whether or not any consumer was in fact misled, representing knowingly or with reason to know that services have characteristics, uses or benefits they do not have, that the supplier has a sponsorship, approval, status, affiliation or connection it does not have, or that services are of a particular standard, quality or grade when they materially differ; the willful use of exaggeration, falsehood, innuendo or ambiguity as to a material fact; the willful failure to state or the concealment of a material fact; and falsely stating that services, replacements or repairs are needed. An aggrieved consumer may sue for a declaratory judgment or an injunction and may recover the greater of damages or a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per violation, and the court may award attorney fees. Kansas has enacted no statutory standard of care for home inspectors since the 2013 expiration, so the written pre-inspection agreement and ordinary contract and negligence law set the duty owed. The adjacent credentials worth knowing are the roofing contractor registration, which the attorney general administers under the Kansas roofing registration act passed in 2013: no person may engage in the business of or act as a roofing contractor in Kansas without a valid registration certificate, and an unregistered roofing contractor cannot bring or maintain a claim in a Kansas court arising from that business, on pain of the same civil penalty. Alongside it sit the city and county contractor licenses for the trades that repair what a report finds, the Kansas State Board of Technical Professions licenses for architects, professional engineers, landscape architects, land surveyors and geologists, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment credentials for asbestos and lead work, and the real estate broker and appraiser licenses for the rest of the transaction.