During recent inquiries of various errors and omission insurers I have discovered some require that the contract be signed before the inspection. I have had several insurers in the past and none have required such a stipulation. My normal procedure is to of course have the contract signed by the client during inspection. However, many of my clients are out-of-towners and consequently do not attend the inspection. I send them the contract with the paper copy of the report and ask them to return it signed. I've looked at the last hundred jobs I've done and discovered nine contracts missing. Two are authentic bad debts which I naturally have sent the collection wolves after them. Of the remaining seven, in at least three of them the deals of gone down and I am not sure about the remainder. In the last five years, I have only had one client not sign the contract when it was presented on site.
Being a sole proprietor, having the contract signed before the inspection will prove troublesome. I'm fairly certain if I decided not to perform some inspections because the contract wasn't signed, I will lose some jobs. The only way I can figure out a way around this is to get a second phone line installed in my home for this specific purpose. Some of my rural clients simply don't have access to a fax machine.
To what lengths do other home inspectors go to have the contract signed before the inspection? Does anybody know of any way to achieve a binding contract by the use of the Internet? Of course the document can be faxed and I understand that is legal. The signed contract also be scanned and sent via the Internet in this fashion. However, many people do not have access to a scanner. There's no way I'm going to ask the conflicted real estate agent to sign it. Does anybody have any ideas?