Biography, Kevin M. O’Hornett

Kevin M. O’Hornett is the founder of PROSPEX , INSPEX, Inc., INSPEX of Boulder, Inc., and Residential Property Inspection. A Colorado resident since 1969, he started the first home inspection company in Boulder County, Colorado in 1983. He currently resides in the west Denver community of Arvada, Colorado. He conducted residential, commercial, and industrial building and building systems inspections in Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma from 1983 to 1995. He has forty-four years of experience in residential building construction, general contracting, roofing, design, construction, renovation, and consulting. He has been a technical advisor to three building inspection companies in the Denver metropolitan area and has consulted as an expert witness in construction, inspection, and roofing disputes and litigation in Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee, California, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Arizona. He has also served as an arbitrator / umpire and as an appraiser in homeowner insurance dispute resolution. Kevin is also an author, lecturer, consultant, and instructor in the fields of building inspection, radon gas testing and mitigation, environmental issues, and wildfire hazard mitigation.

Kevin has been granted a Private Occupational Credential Certificate from the State of Colorado Department of Higher Education, Division of Private Occupational Schools as a Trades and Industry Construction Trades Inspection Instructor and Program Supervisor. He has been approved by the State of Colorado Real Estate Commission and The State of Colorado Board of Appraisers to teach continuing education course work in the fields of Building Inspection, Building Structural Issues and Building Environmental Issues.

He is a former member and now a retired member of the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI). While an active ASHI member, he was also a member of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of ASHI serving on the Chapter board of directors for nine years. He held the position of Chapter president for two years and chaired the bylaws, standards and legal / legislative issues committees. In 1988-89 he co-authored the Rocky Mountain Chapter’s Standards. He has also written three marketing guides for home inspectors: The Home Buyer’s Guide to Home Inspection, The Home Seller’s Guide to Home Inspection, and The Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Home Inspection.

Kevin served on the board of directors of national ASHI for five years and chaired a long range planning committee task force as well as the education committee. During his tenure as education committee chair, he was responsible for establishing an ongoing ASHI seminar program to take ASHI seminars to cities in the United States and Canada. He has also developed and taught course work for ASHI chapters in both the U.S. and Canada. He has been certified by the ICC as a Uniform Building Code and an International Residential Code inspector and is a member of the International Association of Electrical Inspectors and the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials. He has served on the board of directors of the American Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists (AARST) holding the office of president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of AARST in 1988.

He has successfully completed course work at the Colorado School of Mines on Radon and the Indoor Environment and has been a guest lecturer at the school on the subject of the mechanics of radon gas entry into buildings. He has also been a guest lecturer on entrepreneurial skills at the University of Northern Colorado, on business formation and building inspection at Red Rocks Community College, and on radon gas testing and mitigation at the Colorado School of Mines.

Kevin has been certified as a Special Inspector for Structural Masonry by the Masonry Industry Quality Control Committee and approved as a HUD I FHA and VA certification inspector and a HUD / FHA 203-K, 203-B and 223-E loan program inspector. From 1992 to 1995 he served on an advisory board for Arapahoe Community College in Denver to assist the school in planning a two-year associate degree program in building inspection. He sold INSPEX of Boulder, Inc. in 1995, after having performed over 10,000 home and commercial building inspections, and retired from full time work inspection-related work. He has been a consultant to Commercial Building Inspection, Inc. in Denver, Colorado since 1998.

In 2002 he was approved by the State of Arizona as an instructor for the State’s home inspector educational curriculum and he taught an one hundred and sixty hour course on home inspection for Arizona SunTech in Phoenix, Arizona from June of 2002 to June of 2004. This course is required for all inspectors in Arizona as part of the mandatory State of Arizona program for certification of home inspectors. His courses averaged between one hundred and one hundred and ten hours of classroom work and included a full home inspector training curriculum, preparation for the four-hour EBPHI National Home Inspector Examination, and field training consisting of the complete inspection of thirty homes during the course of each four week session. Of the one hundred and seventeen students whom he taught and who took the EBPHI National Home Inspector Examination, over 95% of them passed it on their first sitting.

In November of 2004 Kevin started PROSPEX, a consulting, resource, education, training, and support service for home inspectors. Through its annual subscription program, PROSPEX provides home inspectors with real-time consulting and rapid support services for technical issues, report writing, marketing, document review, complaint review, and complaint management as well as technical information updates relevant to home inspection. To date, PROSPEX has assisted subscribers in successfully refuting over $1,000,000.00 in inspection negligence claims.

PROSPEX also produces and presents educational seminars for home inspectors throughout the United States. Kevin has recently completed a wildfire hazard mitigation and wildfire safety informational handout and checklist for home inspectors to give to customers purchasing homes in wildland and urban-wildland interface areas. This material assists property owners in assessing the condition of their properties and making them defensible against wildfires. He is currently reviewing the standards of various inspection trade associations to better assist home inspectors and attorneys in understanding the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in these standards and the potential issues and concerns regarding them.

"Kevin is part therapist, part educator, and part junkyard dog. He calmed both my own and my wife’s fears when I was threatened with possible million dollar plus litigation. Then he helped me write letters to both the parties involved that left no doubt in their minds that they were not only out of line, but were way out in left field. They went away with their tails between their legs. Both my wife and I sleep better knowing I can turn to PROSPEX, not just for this kind of help, but for technical and educational assistance too."
- B. V., Arizona


“I went through one of the big 3 national inspector training programs and knew that I still wasn’t prepared to present myself to buyers or Realtors as a competent inspector. Kevin changed all that. His patience and willingness to help me with both my technical and marketing skills made all the difference in the world. PROSPEX and Kevin are now permanent resources for me and my growing inspection business.”
- S. T. Colorado