Getting Ready for the Home Inspection

When getting ready to buy or sell a house, a home inspection is usually a really good idea! If you’re the buyer – you want to make sure you understand what you’re getting into by purchasing a particular property. You want to be aware of existing problems or even potential problems your new home has. If you’re the seller, you want to know which of the problems you’ve been imagining actually exist and need to be fixed before you sell.

The home inspector’s job is to compile a “to do” list of items that the house needs to have addressed. Here are a few things your home inspector wishes buyers and sellers knew – to make doing his/her job more easily and efficiently, giving you the best most accurate report available.

Sellers:

  1. Clean the house. It’s important for a couple of reasons 1. If the buyers are in the house with the inspector, you don’t want them to lose that loving feeling they developed when it was originally shown to them. 2. You want to make sure that the inspector doesn’t have to move things out of the way in order to get the areas that need to be checked out.
  2. Make sure your pets are not underfoot. Pets are wonderful, but it will make the inspection much more efficient and accurate if the inspector isn’t distracted by all the cuteness, or worried about whether or not your pets are “sneaking out” of the house, etc.

Buyers:

  1. Don’t freak out! There is more than likely going to be an issue or two with any house, unless it’s brand new construction.
  2. You should be aware that not every issue needs to be fixed IMMEDIATELY! Water related issues as they relate to a house are usually the most critically important issues to take care of in an immediate fashion – usually before you purchase the house if you can get the sellers to fix it, or very soon after if you buy the house anyway.
  3. Almost everything can be fixed – it actually comes down to how quickly something needs to be addressed, and how much fixing it will cost.
  4. Inspectors do not have x-ray vision and have no way to see into the future. They can’t tell you anything about the house that isn’t evident in the moment.

Home inspectors are there to perform a very important service and to help make the real estate transaction run as smoothly as it can for both the buyer and the seller.