Quick story: we had a beer with an real estate agent several years back and the agent came very prepared, with a notepad and a bunch of great questions written down and the first thing he said was, “Well, if I was going to buy another house, I would just want to bring out an electrician, a plumber, structural, environmental, etc. probably like 11 to 13 different professionals...” And we said right, “Except that will cost you about $3500. So instead, you hire a home inspector, for $300-$500, and they will tell you that you need further investigation from two of those professionals, but you don’t need the other nine.”
To take this thought one step further, it’s important to also understand that when you bring those trades people and other professionals in after the home inspection, they of course, will go deeper than the home inspector did. It’s common knowledge that if you brought in an environmental expert in or a structural engineer in, that their analysis will go deeper and be more thorough than that of the home inspector, but that is also true for electricians, plumbers, and roofers. Those trades people are also the ones who will tell you what requirements will be needed when you make repairs, or renovations: in order to be brought up to the most current building code requirements. A home inspector should always defer current requirements to the people that do those things for a living.
The only time this is not the case is when you hire the first company on the Google ad words, who shows up in the big truck, with the big vehicle wrap, and scares you into thinking that you need a whole new HVAC system, or you need a whole new electrical system, when in reality, you may only need a small couple hundred dollar repair.
If you’d like to see what is and is not inspected in a home inspection, check out: www.NACHI.org/SOP, and email us for a copy of the sample report so you can see the basic information that we deliver along with how we deliver the defects that we find.
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