Reply to I want to get an inspection on the house I’m buying

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[quote=Anonymous]Here's my 2 cents as an experienced home-buyer who just bought another house earlier this year: just do the pre-inspection or be willing to pay more for a house

In the past we've gotten burned despite having extensive "regular" inspections during closing -- ie 4 months after we bought a previous house water began to come in through a wall that had failed and was held together with caulk.  This incredibly shoddy work was missed by our highly rated and very expensive inspector.  Ending up costing ~20k to fix everything.

Having a full inspection is not some magic blessing on the well-being of a house.  It's simply one person's exam of your house.  They find a lot of stuff.  But not always.  And they don't have crystal balls.

Despite the above snafu, we were very nervous about waiving the inspection contingency when placing offers this time around.  But after not having offers accepted on several houses (with right to decline inspection contingency in place), we realized that if we wanted a real shot at getting a place we'd have to either a)  offer 10-20k (or more) than offers w/o contingencies or b) do a pre-inspection and waive that contingency

Pre-inspections basically look at the big stuff you wouldn't want to miss that can be very expensive to fix-- foundation, roof, heating/cooling, plumbing, electric, etc.

We paid a total of $1100 for 4 pre-inspections during this house search (including the one on the house we got) and the inspector we used charged us $500 to finish the full inspection (which we wanted) after we closed.

We used the info from these pre-inspections to inform our offers and we're glad we did as we would have bid way more on the house we ended up getting (and would have paid out as somebody else escalated 200k above our offer).  In this market a seller isn't going to agree give any/much cash back during closing for issues should things come up during a formal inspection.

Anyway, just one person's opinion.  YMMV.  Good luck[/quote]

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