The Home Inspection Industry Is Stuck. Lucas Kirsch Wants to Change It.
THE FUTURE OF HOME INSPECTION
Home inspection has evolved. The way we inspect hasn’t evolved fast enough.
In a recent inspectagram interview, Lucas Kirsch, founder of inspectagram, professional home inspector and owner of a multi-inspector company, challenges an uncomfortable reality: the home inspection industry has incredibly knowledgeable people working inside outdated systems.
Inspectors are still taking hundreds of photos, writing reports after they leave the property, relying on memory, producing bloated documents and teaching new inspectors workflows developed for another era. Kirsch doesn’t think inspectors are the problem. He thinks the system is.
“The inspector isn’t broken. The workflow is broken.”
Lucas Kirsch
Knowing Houses Isn’t the Same as Knowing How to Inspect One
Home inspection education is packed with knowledge. Roofing. Electrical. Plumbing. HVAC. Structure. Building science. All necessary.
But eventually someone hands a new inspector the keys to a house and says, “Go inspect it.” Now what?
Knowing everything about a furnace doesn’t teach someone how to systematically move through an entire property. Knowing electrical doesn’t create an inspection workflow. Knowledge matters, but knowledge without methodology leaves the inspector responsible for assembling the process themselves.
“Knowledge will tell you what to look at, but methodology and process tell you what to do next.”
Stop Teaching Preference as Methodology
Ask 10 experienced inspectors how to inspect a house and you may get 10 different answers. Experience matters, but doing something for 20 years doesn’t automatically make it the best way to do it.
Kirsch is willing to challenge one of the industry’s most protected assumptions: experience and methodology are not the same thing.
“Don’t confuse preference with progress.”
Lucas Kirsch
If there’s a better methodology, prove it. Show the workflow. Show the results. Show that it produces better inspectors, better inspections and better communication for the client.
“I’ve always done it this way” isn’t methodology. It’s history.
Writing Reports at Home Shouldn’t Be a Badge of Honour
Inspect all day. Take a pile of photographs. Go home. Open the laptop. Scroll through the camera roll. Try to remember exactly what you saw hours earlier. Write the report.
Somewhere along the way, the home inspection industry accepted this as normal. Kirsch calls it what it is: an inefficient workflow.
The inspection and the documentation shouldn’t be two separate jobs. If you’re standing in front of the component, that’s when the information is freshest. Capture it. Document it. Make the decision. Move on.
“You finish the inspection while you inspect.”
Lucas Kirsch
This isn’t about rushing an inspection. It’s about eliminating the unnecessary second shift after it.
The Report Needs to Catch Up Too
The inspection is professional expertise. The report is how that expertise reaches the client. Yet the industry still celebrates reports based on how much information they contain rather than how effectively they communicate it.
More pages. More photos. More narratives. More disclaimers. More isn’t automatically better.
The homeowner isn’t buying a textbook. They’re trying to understand the house they’re about to buy. People consume information differently today. They expect clear photographs, visual hierarchy and information they can understand without decoding paragraphs of technical language.
The goal isn’t to prove how much the inspector knows. The goal is to make sure the client understands what matters.
So We Rebuilt the Workflow
inspectagram wasn’t built by taking traditional inspection software and adding more features. Kirsch started with a different question: How should an inspection actually flow?
The answer became a methodology built around two core concepts:
Structure first. Observations second.
Baseline: Build the Visual Map
Most homes contain many of the same fundamental components. Toilet. Stove. Foundation. Cladding. Electrical panel. Heating system. Why should an inspector reinvent how those components are captured every time they enter another house?
Baseline creates a visual map through the inspection: find it, photograph it, rate it.
And not just when something is wrong. inspectagram deliberately captures the good, the bad and the ugly because an inspection should document the condition of the property, not simply create a defect list.
“Consistency creates confidence. Confidence creates speed.”
Blackbox: Capture the Observations
Not everything an inspector observes needs another photograph. Some things deserve photos. Some things need words.
Blackbox captures the small and medium observations surrounding the Baseline without filling reports with unnecessary images. Walk. Look. Inspect. Talk. The inspector decides what matters and technology helps transform those observations into clear, digestible information.
Not replacing inspectors. Removing friction around them.
AI Isn’t the Inspector
There’s plenty of noise around “AI home inspections.” Kirsch isn’t interested in technology pretending it can replace professional judgment.
“The knowledge and the judgment stay with the inspector.”
Lucas Kirsch
AI doesn’t decide whether something matters. AI doesn’t replace field experience. AI doesn’t inspect the house. The inspector does.
The opportunity is to use AI for what technology is exceptionally good at: repetitive work, organization and communication. As Kirsch puts it, “I’m the guy that decides what matters on this inspection.”
Technology should make a great inspector more effective. It shouldn’t pretend to be one.
The Report Should Build Itself From the Inspection
This is where the methodology becomes bigger than Baseline or Blackbox. Every part of the inspection becomes another layer of documentation.
Instead of finishing an inspection and beginning the separate job of constructing a report, the report is created by the inspection itself.
“This methodology defends itself and it’s 100% deliberate.”
Stop treating the report as homework after the inspection.
This Isn’t Theory. It’s Being Used at Scale.
Anyone can build software and claim they’ve found a better way. Kirsch’s response is simple: show the numbers.
He still inspects. His company uses the methodology every day. His Calgary operation alone has:
One Calgary team. One repeatable methodology.
inspectagram is being used across different states, provinces, climates and building practices. The information changes. The methodology doesn’t have to.
“If somebody out there has a better methodology, bring it. Bring your numbers. Let’s put them side by side.”
Lucas Kirsch
Twenty Years of Experience Doesn’t Mean Twenty More Years of the Same Process
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. And it should.
Kirsch isn’t asking veteran inspectors to throw away decades of experience. He’s asking them not to confuse experience with immunity from change.
Home inspectors understand obsolescence better than almost anyone. Knob-and-tube was accepted. Poly-B was accepted. Building materials, techniques and standards change when better information and better solutions emerge.
Why would inspection methodology be different?
Keep the knowledge. Keep the judgment. Keep the experience. Change the process when a better one comes along.
“Experience deserves respect. But experience doesn’t necessarily give you ownership on the future.”
The Next Generation Shouldn’t Inherit Our Limitations
Home inspection instructors aren’t simply teaching today’s students how inspections have historically been performed. They’re preparing the next generation of the profession.
“Your job isn’t to create inspectors that work exactly like you do. Your job is to prepare them to be better than you were.”
Lucas Kirsch
Pass on the knowledge. Pass on the judgment. Pass on the lessons learned from thousands of houses. But don’t force the next generation to inherit inefficient processes simply because that’s how the last generation learned.
“Learn everything you can from their experience, but don’t inherit their limitations.”
Home Inspection Is Going to Change
The question isn’t whether AI enters this industry. It already has. The question isn’t whether clients will expect better reports. They already do. And the question isn’t whether technology will change the way inspectors work. It already is.
The real question is whether the industry leads that change or resists it.
Knowledge will remain essential. Experience will remain essential. Judgment will remain essential. But the systems surrounding them can be dramatically better.
“Are we preparing inspectors for where the industry is going or are we teaching them to work the way it was?”
Lucas Kirsch
That’s the challenge. Not to abandon what home inspectors know, but to stop letting outdated processes limit what great inspectors can do.
Look at the methodology. Look at the workflow. Look at the reports. Look at the results. Challenge it. Test it. And if there’s a better way, show us.
Because “this is how we’ve always done it” is not a strategy for the future.
“Evolve or dissolve.”
Lucas Kirsch
A BETTER WAY TO INSPECT
Ready to Challenge the Old Way?
See the methodology behind inspectagram and how we’re rebuilding the home inspection workflow from the field up.
