Before You Hire a Home Inspector, Ask Who Gets Your Data

There is a whole economy built around your home’s data, and most buyers have no idea it exists.

We put a short version of this on Instagram last week (see the post here), and the response told us it deserved more than seven slides. So here’s the longer conversation, because this is one of the parts about buying a home where “just trust the professionals” isn’t good enough.

The report you think is private

When you hire a home inspector, you walk away with a document that describes your future home in more detail than almost anything else in the transaction. The age of the roof. Signs of old water intrusion in the basement. Knob-and-tube wiring behind the walls. A boiler that’s on its last winter. It is, in a very real sense, the medical chart of the house.

You paid for it. You assume it’s yours.

But that report didn’t get typed up on a legal pad. Your inspector almost certainly produced it through a software platform, and the company behind that platform has its own business model. Some of those companies are small and independent. Others are pieces of much larger operations with relationships, or outright ownership interests, in other corners of the housing ecosystem: insurance, mortgage, title, warranties, moving services.

And your data drives their success.

This is not a hypothetical

Take one publicly traded example. Porch Group owns ISN (Inspection Support Network), HomeInspect Pro, and PalmTech, and says its software “powers 40% of the home inspection industry.” The same company operates an insurance business, the Porch Insurance Reciprocal Exchange, under the Homeowners of America and Porch Insurance brands. It also sells a product called “Home Factors” to other insurance carriers, described as property intelligence on things like roof condition, piping type, and signs of water intrusion, which insurers use to “refine risk segmentation, and improve underwriting precision.” The company reported to investors that its data comes from “inspection, mortgage and title companies,” and in September 2025 it announced Home Factors had demonstrated a projected return of more than 20x for carriers, “unlocking over $95 million in profit opportunity.”

Read that again from the buyer’s side of the table. The inspection you paid for, documenting the aging roof or the old water stain, can become the raw material for a data product whose entire pitch to insurers is that it helps them find risks “that standard property data simply can’t detect.” That is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a business model, and it’s printed in press releases.

We’re not singling out one company as uniquely bad. We’re pointing out that the incentives are structural, and that almost nobody explains them to buyers who get coerced into the pipeline that’s slowly chipping away at data sovereignty and selling the intimate “medical chart” of your home to the company providing insurance and the broker closing your mortgage.

Imagine the information being shared without consent

Your inspection documents an aging roof, prior water intrusion, outdated electrical, or an old boiler. That information could potentially affect whether an insurer wants to cover the property at all, what they charge, or what repairs they require before they’ll write the policy. Multiply that across a mortgage lender who needs proof of insurance before closing, and a “private” report starts shaping the terms of your entire purchase.

Imagine the unequal impact

This is where we want to be blunt, because it’s the part the industry never says out loud.

A buyer with a cushion can absorb a surprise. If the insurance quote comes back higher, or the carrier demands a new roof within 90 days, they write a check and move on. A first-time buyer stretching to get into Sunset Park or Carroll Gardens with a modest down payment and a tight monthly number cannot. For them, a repair demand or a rate change can be the difference between closing and walking away from a deposit.

The people with the least room to maneuver are the most exposed to decisions made from data they never realized was being collected, let alone shared. That is the pattern across most of the housing market, and it’s why we don’t think “buyer beware” is an acceptable answer. Information asymmetry is not an accident of the system. It’s how the system makes money and capitalizes on the average person’s innocent ignorance about their own data privacy.

What we do about it

We can’t fix the data economy from a brokerage in Brooklyn. What we can do is make sure our buyers walk into an inspection as informed people rather than as data sources.

So, before you hire an inspector, ask them directly “What software do you use for your inspections? Who owns that company? What does their privacy policy allow? Who can access my inspection data? Is it shared with third parties?”

A good inspector won’t be offended. Many of them don’t love these arrangements either, and some have deliberately chosen independent platforms. If you get a shrug or a “don’t worry about it,” that is useful information.

Then actually read the privacy policy. It’s boring. Do it anyway. Look for words like “affiliates,” “partners,” “aggregated,” and “de-identified,” which is often where the sharing lives.

Informed buyers are harder to exploit. That’s the whole point.

If you’re buying in Brooklyn and want to walk through this before your next inspection, reach out. We’d rather have the awkward conversation up front than watch it show up on your insurance quote later.