Getting a home inspection is money well spent. The overall cost of a few hundred dollars is nothing compared to the overall cost of the home — but it’s your most valuable home-buying tool. A good home inspection by a professional is worth the price of admission. It’s why I started a home inspection company – so that I could be sure that there were guys out there inspecting to MY standards. There are also a lot of good inspectors out there to choose from.
If an inspector checks out a house and finds problem after problem, you know this is a property to walk away from. Without that inspection, you could wind up with a lemon that surprises you each year with a new problem.
Getting a good inspection
Your uncle Sal who worked a few months of construction in the ’70s is not the guy you want to perform your home inspection. I’m sure Sal’s great, but you want to hire an experienced inspector for your home — they’ll do a lot more than tap on the pipes and eyeball the back deck.
Beyond a good knowledge of residential construction, what else do you want to see from your inspector? In every home, I want my inspectors to perform an indoor air quality test (IAQ). This will identify any pathogens in the air like mould or mildew spores. IAQs can count the exact number of mould spores that exist in a home. Every home will have some degree of mould spores — but your inspector can tell you when the levels are high enough to be concerned. Don’t forget to do a separate test for radon.
You’ll also want an inspector who can perform thermal imaging — which uses a special infrared camera to detect temperature changes behind the walls. When you see temperature fluctuate behind the wall, it could mean you’ve got a case of bad insulation, making the home harder to heat in the winter. Or it could tell you there’s moisture behind the walls, and that means you could have a mould problem.
In older homes, you may also want to test certain materials for asbestos. Now, if you don’t already own the home, this could be a tough sell, as it tends to require taking a chunk of material from the home and sending it off to a lab for analysis. A seller probably won’t be too keen on ripping out a piece of the tile — but if you’re assessing a home already in your possession, it’s something to think about.
What inspections lack
A home inspection isn’t totally foolproof. For one, they can’t assess every single part of the home — they inspect based on the conditions of the house. What does that mean? If you’ve got a crawl space on the home, they can usually inspect it, but if the crawl space is wet, they won’t be checking it out. Why? It could be infected by mould or animal waste, and they won’t expose themselves to it.
They have to make sure they keep their health and safety in mind. For that same reason, if conditions on the roof are unsafe due to weather, they’ll skip that during their inspection too.
Finally, they won’t move major pieces of furniture like bookshelves or dressers to inspect the wall behind them. Unfortunately, some homeowners may try to cover up issues like water stains, or mould by clever furniture placement. This is why you always ask for an air-quality test with any inspection.
Knowing this, are they still worth the money? To me, yes. A good home inspector can still give you a pretty good idea on the state of the home. Even though they can’t check every little thing, the information they do provide you is extraordinarily valuable. Don’t take the inspection for granted.
Generally, I like to recommend that you actually go to the home inspection and walk through the property with the inspector to ask questions and hear their findings firsthand. In this time of social distancing, that might not be possible, but that doesn’t make an inspection useless. After the inspection is complete, they’ll provide you with a massive report on their assessment. Take the time to read it. It might be long, but it will tell you everything they found about the house. Trust me, the report is worth its weight in gold.
To find out more about Mike Holmes, visit makeitright.ca
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