I'm going to say that the vast majority of homeowners are not paranoid enough when it comes to buying their home. It is a huge investment and comes with very high transaction costs yet most people seem to make the decision based solely on superficial aesthetics.
What would you recommend noobs do, when buying a house? I guess hiring an expert would be the recommended approach, but all “experts” I have seen were all almost as superficial as I was - one literally assessed the wrong house. I’d pay good money for a good one, but it’s hard to find.
Find an aggressive home inspector that isn't associated with your realtor, preferably one with general contractor experience and someone who is older. Like it or not, older folks have seen more things go wrong in more ways and can spot problems that younger folks might not be familiar with.
I have certification of an inspector with various home things… Flooring, roofing, general home inspection.. no one wants to pay what it’s worth so I don’t practice that, it’s just fun for learning about the building trades
Further - if you never have a problem the value of the inspection is zero. If you do have a problem the value of an inspection after the problem has occurred is minimal. The value of an inspection that prevents a problem is something - but how to quantify that is difficult.
Depending where you live local/state/fed government will keep maps.
Topographic maps, flood risk maps, wildfire risk maps, maps of services nearby (substations, transformer locations, storm drains etc), easements, special planning/protection zones, surrounding area zoning etc.
These should all inform your decision. I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves, are too near substations, are in flood risk areas etc
I had a structural engineer come and look at a house I was thinking of buying. It cost me $500. I didn't buy the house, and that $500 was some of the best money I've spent.
Selling a house in Denmark requires the seller to acquire a “condition report” from a certified inspector. The report is valid for 6 months and costs around $1000. This also ties into the optional “owner transfer insurance” which covers serious defects / building code violations undetectable by the inspectors. The insurance lasts 5 years and costs $2000-$5000
In the US afaict inspections are a plus but not required for sellers to provide. Lots of people were waiving their right to inspection in order to make their offers on houses more attractive to buyers. Kind of a stupid thing to do, but people had low interest rates and were desperate to buy
The same way you hire a company for any service, start by searching for local structural/construction engineering firms and then call a few and ask if they’ll do an inspection on a residence.
If you personally know any architects or general contractors in the residential market, they should be able to recommend someone.
1895 house in Oakland with a soft story condition and a dining room that was cantilevered out over the aisle. It was listed for something like $850k in around 2018, so kind of cheap! But correcting the soft story and the rest of the framing would have been astronomically expensive. He guessed something like 400-500k, and now having experienced home renovations, I am fairly certain he was in the ballpark.
>I've vetoed houses because they back onto nature/wildlife reserves
Why is this a bad thing? To a naive person, it might seem like a good thing, because you get to look out into a forest rather than someone else's yard.
Essentially because nobody was allowed to trim/maintain the trees due to it being a natural habitat. It's nice to look at but when a 60m tree falls in a storm and wipes out your house it's not great. The reserve was also on the north side of the property and down here in the southern hemisphere that means that every year as the trees grow your house gets more and more shade with accompanying maintenance issues.
I should add that people may weigh that up and be happy to live there, but people should be aware of the risk/benefits before they buy. Natural light/property orientation and shading is a major issue that most people forget about.
Here in Western Australia there are online floodplain maps which show the extent of a 100-year event. Very usful when you see somewhere nice but wonder why the house and outbuildings are all crammed in the front quarter of the plot...
get a Chinese feng-shui expert; cheaper than pros and reap benefit of thousands of years of real estate wisdom. /s but not really /s lol there are some methods in it's vast amount of madness
Generally speaking, if inspectors did their jobs well, almost nobody would ever buy a house, due to the prevalence of existing issues and the cost of remediation. I've found that there is a duality of thought among homebuyers, where most want a "perfect" condition house, but also don't want to pay for a perfect condition house. At the same time, home sellers also don't want to pay any more than they absolutely must in order to sell the house, so you end up with inspectors as these not-entirely-impartial middle-men whose job is mostly to CYA while not identifying too many problems that could create a reputation for them that might limit future realtors & home sellers from using them.
It's all pretty silly, really, especially considering the hottest markets, where you either want a house or you don't, and if you you'll probably pay top dollar with no contingencies and possibly not even your own inspection... since the seller knows if you don't buy it someone else is in line right behind you. Most of the time, houses sold this way aren't in significantly worse shape than those that are fully inspected and repairs made before the transaction.
Overall, this has led me to believe that, in most cases, pre-sale inspections don't really benefit anyone, especially since it's so difficult for buyers to seek E&O recourse/damages against either an inspector or seller after the sale closes.
I think it depends on who is paying the inspector. When we bought our house, the realtor we were working with connected us with her best and most rigorous inspector. He found fifty pages worth of stuff that was wrong, but most of them were fairly minor.
We took that list back to the sellers (who were then legally required to provide a copy of that report to other future buyers), and we simply waived the little stuff. We wanted them to fix the big stuff. They didn’t want to do that, so they came down on the price by a considerable amount. He saved us tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, given the problems we’ve had since then which the inspector didn’t identify, we would have paid back more than what he saved us — Except for insurance coverage. USAA is really good about paying out on claims, when many other insurance companies would weasel out.
We love this house, we love this neighborhood. If we had to do it over again, I think we would have pressed harder to get even the minor problems fixed or to get the seller to come down even further on price. But I think we probably would have still bought this house.
I don’t blame the inspector for anything he missed. Most of those problems were well disguised, until such time as there was an actual catastrophic failure. He couldn’t have known. If I knew his name and contact details, I would recommend him to future buyers in the Austin area.
