Depends on where you live.
The bank will often send an inspector for a loan, but it’s literally him just walking around and validating there is a house and it’s not in shambles. He’ll look at things like the roof from the outside and when it was redone, but isn’t going to hop into your crawlspace to look for signs of water damage.
Then you have the “private” inspection company that you can pay to check your home for yourself. These companies are know to cost a lot of money, often detailing things they can’t be sure are “risks”. They’ll go in the crawlspace and note all sorts of things.
On my house the expensive private inspection said “the roof here is kinda saggin and there’s a bump there, it could be anything”. In the same report he accidentally shows a picture from under the roof where you can see there was a repair and some extra framing, causing the small “bump” that is purely aesthetic. Didn’t mention that part.
Getting someone to look at it post purchase is likely going to be much cheaper, and I’m definitely not recommending people don’t get inspections when buying houses if they don’t know what they’re doing.
ericbomb@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The housing market was silly for awhile. Lots of homes basically had a clause of “If inspection done, no sale”
seaQueue@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, that’s a trap. We signed a letter of intent on one place and had an inspector run through it before we committed to an offer - it’s fortunate that we did too, there was serious water damage to the house that the owners were trying not to disclose.
The shit thing about the market for a couple of years is that properties were marked up by 40-50% over about 5y and many of them had next to no work done, or they got the Lowe’s sale flipper special and looked terrible after.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I was looking during that rush, and did my own inspections. Every single place, I asked questions that resulted in a “NEXT!” from the seller. Never even got to the point where I’d have called in an outside party.
Ended up buying a new build instead; still had things the inspectors missed, but nothing huge.