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The Need for a Home Inspection When Buying a Home
If you’ll be financing this home purchase with a mortgage loan, your lender will want to be protected with an appraisal, title search, insurances, and a mandatory professional home inspection. They want to know what they are lending on and are getting as collateral, and what it is worth.
Even if you aren’t that picky or are fine taking a year to repair and renovate your new home, it is really important to know what you are getting into.
Why?
Discover flaws and urgent repairs
Identify items that may require building permits
Get peace of mind of what’s okay
Get an estimate to make needed repairs
Understand the true value of the property
Be alert to potential maintenance issues shortly
Without an inspection, you have no idea if this house is going to be livable, a giant money pit, or downright dangerous. Or it may be in a lot better condition than you thought. You just need to know.
When to Get a Home Inspection
Traditionally, a home buyer will order and pay for a professional home inspection right after they sign a real estate contract agreeing to the terms with the seller. Your purchase and sales contract will specifically detail how many days you have to inspect the property.
If you are buying a home ‘as-is’, with no repair contingencies (which is most common today), you should still have the right to inspect the property. You may also have a repair limit on the contract. This can be either a dollar amount or a percentage of the purchase price.
For example; you may specify you will buy the property as-is, providing the needed repairs found in the inspection do not exceed $2,000 or 2% of the purchase price.
If there are $3,000 of repairs to be made in this scenario, you may have just 7 to 10 days to find an inspector, arrange the inspection, get the report back, review it, and have your Realtor renegotiate to deal with this overage. You can back out of the contract. Or they may offer a $1,000 concession to help with those costs.
More recently, the trend has been sellers demanding that buyers have an inspection done before going to contract. They don’t want to be tied up in a contract with a buyer that may not follow through. In this case, you’ll need to get an inspection, then make your offer.
The faster you move the better as you don’t want to be spending on inspections on properties that are bought by someone else during the time you wait for your report.
Fortunately, home inspections are normally pretty fast, only cost a few hundred dollars depending on the home, and can be done in 1-2 days.
Agents C
View on Buzzpadd ↗If you’ll be financing this home purchase with a mortgage loan, your lender will want to be protected with an appraisal, title search, insurances, and a mandatory professional home inspection. They want to know what they are lending on and are getting as collateral, and what it is worth.
Even if you aren’t that picky or are fine taking a year to repair and renovate your new home, it is really important to know what you are getting into.
Why?
Discover flaws and urgent repairs
Identify items that may require building permits
Get peace of mind of what’s okay
Get an estimate to make needed repairs
Understand the true value of the property
Be alert to potential maintenance issues shortly
Without an inspection, you have no idea if this house is going to be livable, a giant money pit, or downright dangerous. Or it may be in a lot better condition than you thought. You just need to know.
When to Get a Home Inspection
Traditionally, a home buyer will order and pay for a professional home inspection right after they sign a real estate contract agreeing to the terms with the seller. Your purchase and sales contract will specifically detail how many days you have to inspect the property.
If you are buying a home ‘as-is’, with no repair contingencies (which is most common today), you should still have the right to inspect the property. You may also have a repair limit on the contract. This can be either a dollar amount or a percentage of the purchase price.
For example; you may specify you will buy the property as-is, providing the needed repairs found in the inspection do not exceed $2,000 or 2% of the purchase price.
If there are $3,000 of repairs to be made in this scenario, you may have just 7 to 10 days to find an inspector, arrange the inspection, get the report back, review it, and have your Realtor renegotiate to deal with this overage. You can back out of the contract. Or they may offer a $1,000 concession to help with those costs.
More recently, the trend has been sellers demanding that buyers have an inspection done before going to contract. They don’t want to be tied up in a contract with a buyer that may not follow through. In this case, you’ll need to get an inspection, then make your offer.
The faster you move the better as you don’t want to be spending on inspections on properties that are bought by someone else during the time you wait for your report.
Fortunately, home inspections are normally pretty fast, only cost a few hundred dollars depending on the home, and can be done in 1-2 days.
Agents C