Wyoming to Florida: home inspector license reciprocity

Florida licenses home inspectors statewide under chapter 468, part XV of the Florida Statutes. There is no home inspector board: the Department of Business and Professional Regulation licenses directly and its Bureau of Central Intake and Licensure processes the applications. The license is personal and there is one tier, so a Florida home inspector either holds the license or does not; the only variation is whether it is on active or inactive status. A licensed home inspector must maintain a commercial general liability insurance policy of at least $300,000, and that is the only insurance the law requires. Florida writes no examination of its own and no law or rules paper; it approves examinations set by nationally recognized bodies and requires a 120-hour approved course from anyone qualifying by examination. The one-off grandfathering route for code-certified inspectors and Division I contractors closed to applications postmarked after 1 July 2012 and is no longer available.

Wyoming issues no home inspector license, certificate or registration, and no Wyoming agency regulates the work. Title 33 of the Wyoming Statutes, which is the state's complete list of licensed and regulated professions, runs to forty-nine chapters covering abstractors, accountants, architects, attorneys, barbers, chiropractors, collection agencies, cosmetologists, debt adjusters, dentists, funeral directors, nurses, nursing home administrators, optometrists, pharmacists, physical therapists, physicians, psychologists, real estate brokers and salespersons, surveyors and engineers, veterinarians, speech-language pathologists, radiologic technologists, real estate appraisers, geologists, water well drilling contractors, athletic trainers, midwives, dietitians and acupuncturists, among others. There is no chapter for home inspectors, and there is no chapter for general or residential contractors either. The Secretary of State's listing of every agency that files administrative rules shows the same thing from the other direction: it names the boards of accountancy, architecture, cosmetology, dentistry, geology, medicine, nursing, optometry, pharmacy and the rest, the Real Estate Commission, and the Department of Fire Prevention and Electrical Safety, but no inspector board of any kind. Nothing is pending, and an inspector arriving from a licensing state has no Wyoming credential to apply for, no examination to sit and nothing to transfer. Because Wyoming holds no 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 governs the work instead is general law. The Wyoming Consumer Protection Act, sections 40-12-101 through 40-12-114, makes it an unlawful deceptive trade practice to claim knowingly a sponsorship, approval or affiliation one does not have, to represent that a service is of a standard or grade it is not, to represent that replacement or repair is needed when it is not, or to engage in unfair or deceptive acts or practices; the attorney general enforces it and an injured consumer who has given the statutory notice and received no cure may sue for actual damages, individually or as a class. Beyond that the written inspection agreement and ordinary contract and negligence law set the duty owed, because Wyoming has enacted no statutory standard of care for home inspectors, no rule about what an inspection report must contain, and no limit on what an inspection contract may disclaim. The licensed trades sit around the edges of the job: any electrical work coming out of a report must be done by an electrician licensed by the State Fire Marshal's Office, and the adjacent credentials a Wyoming inspector might reasonably move toward are the real estate appraiser license, the real estate broker or salesperson license, the professional engineer or land surveyor registration, the architect license, and the water well drilling contractor license. Wyoming has no state contractor licensing at all; cities license building trades themselves, and the City of Cheyenne's contractor licensing regulations, the most developed municipal scheme in the state, cover only building trades and create no inspector class.