If you are putting your home up for sale, should you consider having your own building inspection? Should this be part of your "pre-sale home improvement" process?
The answer is "Yes".
Contingencies in Contracts: Once a buyer makes an offer and you accept it, you have a contract. One of the most common conditions of that contract is, "offer contingent upon satisfactory building inspection." The buyer is going to have a professional home inspector go through your house to make sure there are not any hidden problems.
The last thing you want is to have your deal fall through because of an unknown problem uncovered by the buyer’s building inspector. This is especially true if it is a minor problem and could easily have been repaired ahead of time — if only you had known about it.
Many a transaction has fallen apart because of building inspection surprises.
Preparing for Sale: When preparing your house for sale, you are going to do lots of things to make it more appealing to potential buyers. You are going to clean up the yard, apply a fresh coat of paint where needed, get rid of all clutter in and around the house, have the kitchen and all bathrooms at their sparkling best, get the rugs cleaned, clean all windows, etc.
Why not spend the relatively few dollars and also have a building inspection? Find out the hidden problems with your home and correct them in advance. If you don’t, you can be assured that the buyer’s inspector will find them. When the buyer’s inspector finds a problem, it can throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Potential Problems: The buyer will ask you to fix the problems found by their inspector – or no deal. If you do not want to fix the problems, they will ask for a reduction in price or a cash credit at closing – or no deal. In some cases, the buyer may even cancel the purchase entirely, not giving you a chance to make any corrections.
If the buyer cancels the purchase, where does that leave you? It leaves you with a house that you will have to put back on the market – a house that has been stigmatized, let alone on the market for hundreds of days. Future potential buyers and their realtors will always wonder, "What happened with that first deal?"
An Item of Caution: Disclosure: If you hire your own home inspector and find problems, but elect not to repair them, be sure to tell your realtor. They should be disclosed to all potential buyers. In some states this is mandatory. Home sellers and their realtors who have known of problems but not disclosed them have successfully been taken to court for damages. Don’t be one of them.
Think of yourself. Isn’t it easier to identify and handle problems in advance rather than finding out about them later? If there is a problem that you decide not to repair, disclose it up front and indicate that the estimated buyer’s cost to fix it has been reflected in the offer price of your home.
Conclusion: As professional realtors, we have owned, lived in, and sold many houses. We have always paid to have a building inspection before we put any of these homes on the market. As a result, neither the buyers, nor I, were surprised by unknown problems. For every sale, that made the process of getting to the final closing a lot easier. 