Fennell Engineering, Inc.

Call fifteen structural engineers and get nowhere; call Sean Fennell and have stamped plans that evening. That 2019 account is the most extreme version of the thing customers keep describing about Fennell Engineering — speed, arriving at the moment speed is worth money. The firm works out of Andover, and BBB files it under Professional Engineers rather than home inspection. That distinction matters when you are hiring. This is not the top-to-bottom inspection a buyer books before closing; it is the specialist you bring in when something structural is in question — a sagging floor, a cracked beam, a column someone wants to remove, a garage a car drove into. Home buyers are the loudest group here. A reviewer in July 2025 had him analyze a property before purchase and walked away from the sale once he surfaced problems that were not obvious, reckoning the report saved tens of thousands in repairs. In an April 2019 account, another buyer got an urgent assessment inside 24 hours and an official report a few hours after that — "it really saved the sale". A realtor listing a South End brownstone in 2021 had a written and video report back within hours of the site visit. The same words recur across eight years: responsive, on time, explains it in plain English, non-alarmist. The two complaints are worth reading, because they describe the same trait from the other side. In March 2023 a caller left a one-star review saying he never got to finish his question — he was told there was no time and was hung up on. And a client writing in May 2019, after a first job he rated highly, spent three weeks on unanswered calls, texts and emails trying to book a second before finally being told the firm was too busy. Neither faults the engineering itself; both are about a small shop's bandwidth. Google's 4.7 across 29 ratings sits a touch under the 4.9 the directory listings carry, and the one-star sits on Google. Most of the writing about this firm is old. Nineteen of the thirty-three accounts predate 2020, and 2026 has produced only a couple. What is there runs consistent, but it is a lighter current trail than the total volume first suggests. The right call when you need a licensed structural opinion quickly — before an offer, after damage, or before taking out a bearing wall — and you want a stamped drawing set a building department will accept. Reach him by phone early, get his availability confirmed in writing before you build a schedule around it, and if construction rather than engineering is involved, ask which entity is doing it: one insurance-assigned reviewer describes the rebuild crew under the name Fennell Restoration.