Benefits of a Home Inspection
Buyers Benefits of a Home Inspection
- Reveals the need for repairs or replacements to the home components before you buy.
- Provides you with invaluable details about your new home including location of shut off valves, where utilities are located, and general house operation.
- Limits the number of surprises you may discover when you move into your new home.
- Reduces the number of contingencies in a sale agreement, which makes closing easier.
Sellers Benefits of a Home Inspection
- Gives you the opportunity to become aware of, and repair property conditions so they don't affect the buyers offer.
- Makes your home more attractive to buyers because they will know you are a committed seller.
- Reduces the number of contingencies in a sale agreement, which makes closing easier.
- Eliminates last minute repair hassles that could delay closing.
To the best of my knowledge, there have been no official studies to demonstrate the efficacy of home inspection. But one must ask whether such studies are truly necessary and how such studies could actually be conducted.
There are facts that require evidential proof, and there are those which are self evident. Any random sampling of home inspection reports would clearly demonstrate that significant defects are routinely discovered by home inspectors and that without a home inspection these problems could produce costly consequences for unsuspecting buyers. Many of the problems found by inspectors involve violations of established safety standards — fire safety, gas safety, electrical safety, etc. What more is needed to convince sensible people that inspection of government property is advantageous to everyone involved.
Unfortunately, it is typical of government bureaucracy to require documentary proof of the obvious. Until the paperwork is submitted, beneficial actions are routinely avoided and recommendations to implement positive procedures are summarily shelved. It recalls the days when the adverse health affects of cigarette smoking had not yet been documented. Never mind the countless smokers desperately wheezing with chronic emphysema or the fact that all smokers were inclined to be short of breath during physical exertions. Proven studies were needed: Otherwise, the observable was not factual.
So now we need a contingent of university statisticians to assure us that evaluation of real estate, prior to acquisition, is superior to buying a "pig in a poke." What can you say to such people? They are the ones who debate which exit door to use while their house is engulfed in flames.
Formal proof of the benefits of home inspection may not yet exist, but neither have there been studies to demonstrate the inadvisability of swimming in a river inhabited by crocodiles. In such situations, common sense precludes the need for exhaustive investigation. Your task, therefore, is to convince entrenched government types of that which is plain and obvious. Not an encouraging prospect, but I wish you well in this worthwhile endeavor.