John & Nancy Hill of Lynne Lake Home Inspections are located in the Wasilla, Alaska area that was recently made famous because of its former mayor Sarah Palin. They recount how an early home inspection home study course they felt was a disaster had a silver lining after all. UPDATE: John and Nancy have retired from the home inspection business.  Best wishes to you both!

"When we first started to look at doing home inspections after retirement from my education career, we looked for a home study course that provided some type of computer generated report writing program as part of the curriculum. The only one found in 1999 was a publishing company called Harcourt Brace that was providing a training course for home inspection. (no longer in business) The course was a disaster but with it came an early version 1 of 3D software that we began to experiment with. We struggled for a while until we found a one day training workshop being offered in California in the spring of 2001. This one day opened up the power of 3D and how we could adapt it to our way of writing reports.

When we provided reports to the first clients and realtors they were amazed at the detail and how easy it was to read and understand. Most reports at that time were the standard check lists being used by many inspectors that really didn't say much and appeared to be allot of boiler plate writing. The more we used the software, the better the reports became. We would spend time refining and rewriting standard picks and standard paragraphs for inserting in reports. It was an honor when we were selected to be part of the test drive program with 3D so we could try out new features that were being issued. The subscription program for automatic updates also helped bring in new ideas for reporting and with each new version we would be sure to bring in all the new features to make reporting quicker to write but still give each inspection the time it deserved. It is amazing that each year a new version would be issued which to us indicates the commitment to improving the software that 3D does. The reports issued to our clients are our best advertisement to market our business and 3D understands this.

Now that we have over 9 years using 3D software, our reports have really improved. With the full 3D package, we use the most of the features including the handheld PDA. It is so easy to update to new versions and if software support is needed, it is just a quick email sent to support for a fast response. There never has been a time using this software where a report was held up do to a computer malfunction, software glitch, or operator error in all the time we have used the software. We always try to steer new home inspectors to use 3D and try to tell them if they want a successful inspection business they cannot go wrong with the software.

When we look back to the beginning, maybe the training received was a success because it introduced us to 3D and without the software we would just be another check list using inspector. Our business has been a complete success and we owe much of this success to 3D"

John & Nancy Hill
Lynne Lake Home Inspections
Wasilla, Alaska