Why a Pre-listing inspection makes perfect sense.

 

So you’ve decided to sell your house! You (hopefully) clean the joint up, hire a Realtor who helps you set an asking price, and now you’re off to the races. By and by, someone stops in, looks it over and decides, “Hey, I want to make this place mine!”

Maybe you dicker back and forth a bit, maybe you don’t, but in the end, both you and your potential buyer have finally come to an agreed upon price.

In comes the home inspector, whose purpose in life is to find the overall condition of a house. Let’s face it, the individual parts of the house that an inspector looks at are either right or they are going to be some degree of wrong. And yes, at risk of bursting your bubble, if an inspector is doing his or her job there can be any number of issues that may come up…even in your house. How can I say that with such certitude, being as I probably haven’t even seen your house? I have over 6000 reasons in 18 years of inspecting houses, and every single one of them has had some form of problem or another. So suffice it to say, if an inspector is truly doing their job, they will find problems in your house.

So why, you might ask yourself, would I as a seller go through the process of paying an inspector to find these problems; in effect, tear the band-aids off my own house? I mean, after all, isn’t the buyer just going to bring in their own inspector? Well…probably. And anything that inspector finds may then become a potential bargaining chip that will often create a whole secondary negotiation over the price of the home.

Having all that information upfront allows the real estate agent to “price the house accordingly”, not to mention presenting you with the option of repairing, replacing or simply disclosing the item or defect. For instance, if it has already been disclosed to a buyer that the roof needs to be replaced, they really can’t come back to you, the seller, after their inspection to renegotiate for the cost of a new roof. If it was already disclosed, then they made their good-faith offer based on the knowledge that they needed a new roof. Sure beats coming to an agreement, only to have that new roof rear it’s ugly head afterwards.

So do yourself a favor by having an inspection done before you list your house for sale. You’ll be glad you did!

Stay safe,

Tom Sherman