The following is the reply from TREC legal:

"As a licensed professional inspector, any sort of inspection or property condition consultation performed for a buyer or seller is considered an "inspection" if you are providing a written or oral opinion as to the condition of improvements to real property, regardless of what you call it. Therefore, any such service is subject to Chapter 1102 of the Texas Occupations Code and the TREC Rules.



Inspections of one-to-four-family residential property (for a buyer or seller) must be reported on the TREC REI 7A-0 form, even if you do not intend to do a "typical" Standards of Practice inspection. (As you know, there is no required form for other types of properties.) However, that does not mean that you must always provide the full Standards of Practice-type service every time someone wants to hire you to provide energy efficiency inspection services. Section 535.227(c)(2)-(4) of the TREC Rules (the departure provision) clarifies that you may provide a more specific type of inspection by agreement with your client. By agreement with your client, you may depart from the Standards of Practice in full. However, there is no provision for "departing" from the standard form, so the REI 7A-0 must still be used even if you depart wholly from the Standards of Practice. It would be fine to note in the Additional Information section of the standard form that the energy audit is a part of that report but in a separate computer file.



Please feel free to forward this information to anyone else who may find it helpful.





Devon V. Bijansky

Staff Attorney

Enforcement Division

(512) 465-3960

fax (512) 465-3962"



Don't misunderstand my previous post. In order to protect the client TREC legal has rendered an opinion on this type of service and in general any and all inspections, audits or any other service a home inspector will be performing for a perspective buyer or seller. In other words, if a homeowner is thinking about selling his home later (or maybe just to reduce his energy consumption) and decides to get an energy audit the inspector has to provide the client both reports. The reason, I believe is we are licensed as home inspectors. I'm just wondering - what about those who are not licensed as a home inspector?

Anyway. Just some more thoughts to ponder.