Meet Jeff Bond

Jeff Bond in front of a skate shop in San Francisco
Jeff, between inspections.

My name is Jeff Bond. I am a licensed industrial engineer, a licensed general building contractor, and a listed Soft Story and Earthquake Brace & Bolt specialist. I have been immersed in Cal Poly's Learn by Doing philosophy since 1986, and I have been inspecting property on the front lines since 1989.

I choose to stay in the field. That means crawling the crawlspaces, climbing the roofs, and digging into the infrastructure of thousands of residential, multifamily and commercial properties across the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I don't just point out flaws. I diagnose buildings from the inside out.”

Why an engineer chooses to crawl

With a foundation in industrial engineering and decades of active construction, Jeff looks at a building as a set of connected systems. He knows how a property is designed to work, how it is built in the real world, and how each part fails when it is neglected.

Analysing a system on a screen is one thing. Understanding how it handles decades of shifting California soil, seismic stress and deferred maintenance is another. He specialised in field work because he saw a gap in the industry: buyers, investors and asset managers were making very large decisions on the strength of quick, checklist-style inspections.

A report from Jeff is a diagnosis. It follows the quiet chain of cause and effect behind poor maintenance, and shows how a small oversight in the past becomes wood rot, a failed mechanical system, or a large bill later.

From a call library to a platform

Inspect.Net did not start as a software company. It grew out of three decades of real California inspections, and out of the call library Jeff refined one report at a time. A call is the short, exact sentence that tells a buyer what was seen and what it costs to fix.

That library became the platform's registry: almost 600 coded defects across 17 systems of the home, each carrying the sentence a thirty-year inspector would write and the price range a real contractor would quote. When AI made it possible to hold software to an inspector's standard of proof, Jeff built the platform around one rule. It may only report what it can prove.

Jeff leads the registry himself. He decides which defects exist, what evidence each one needs, how severity is called, and what a fair local repair range looks like. Every code the engine is allowed to cite passes through his rulings first. See how the platform works.

Credentials

  • Inspecting since 1989More than 15,000 inspections of homes, multifamily and commercial property.
  • Cal Poly, San Luis ObispoIndustrial Engineering, since 1986. Learn by Doing.
  • Licensed Industrial EngineerSystems, lifecycles and operational risk, applied to buildings.
  • Licensed General Building ContractorA working knowledge of repair costs, materials and build quality.
  • State-listed seismic specialistSoft Story retrofits and the Earthquake Brace & Bolt program.
  • Published in the ASHI Reporter“Delivering Bad News About Potential Water Damage”, September 2020.

The road so far

  1. 1986Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Industrial engineering, learned by doing.
  2. 1989First property inspections, and a habit of getting into the crawlspace that never went away.
  3. 1992Inspect.Net, Inc. is founded in the Bay Area. Children and grandchildren of early clients still call.
  4. 2020Writes for the ASHI Reporter on delivering bad news about water damage, honestly and without alarm.
  5. NowThe call library becomes the Inspect.Net platform, open to other inspectors and their firms.
Off the clock: backpacking, the local food scene, and a skateboard that has seen better decades. A few photos, with captions