Home Inspection

You may think a house looks great and you don’t want to spend the time necessary to wait for a full home inspection.  After all, during a real estate boom it can be pretty difficult to find a qualified inspector to come around and take a look at a home you want to buy.  Whatever your reasoning, throw it aside and realize that you may not be competent enough to determine these sorts of things on your own.  Do you know how to look for signs of structural damage?  Do you have what it takes to find signs of termites in a home?  It is amazing what sellers can patch up and hide when trying to get a house sold, so unless you have quite a bit of expertise in the area of inspecting homes then you need to leave this sort of thing to the experts.  If you don’t get an home inspection done and then the house winds up having many existing issues it is going to be near impossible to prove that the previous owners were aware of the problems.  You’ll be on your own to pay for the repairs, and you will feel awfully silly that a simple home inspection could have clued you in on these problems and would have most likely stopped you from buying the home in the first place.  Hindsight is 20/20.   

Sometimes when sellers are trying to make their home look even more attractive they will have a home inspection accomplished before the home even goes on the market.  Many times you will find the home inspection report sitting prominently displayed when you come for an open house, and in some cases the sellers will have already fixed any problems cited on the report.  This is a good scenario, but you must remember to approach this with some trepidation.  You don’t know if the home inspector is in reality a buddy of the sellers who made the home inspection look a little better than it should have looked.  Take a close look at the inspection and makes sure that the inspector works for a credible company, and also check to see if the company offers any sort of guarantees.  Sometimes house inspection companies will put a guarantee on their inspections, which states that the company will pay for any problems missed by their inspector for a year or more.  It is still best, though, to commission your very own home inspector to get an unbiased report on the home.    

If your mortgage loan is going to be backed by an organization like the Veteran’s Administration or the Federal Housing Association then you should know that they require their own inspectors to check out the home before allowing the financing to go forward.  This inspection, however, should never replace an home inspection done by a company that you hire.  You won’t receive a copy of the inspection from a VA or FHA agent, but instead will simply be told whether the home passed or failed the inspection.  Something as simple as there not being hand rails on a staircase can cause a home to fail a VA or FHA inspection, so keep this in mind while shopping for homes.