Home Inspections

If you are looking for information about home inspections, it is probably that you are well on your way toward purchasing the home. You are taking an essential step in the home purchasing process because nobody should buy a house without a proper and thoroughly professional home inspection.

The general purpose of any inspection of a prospective real estate purchase is verification. The inspection will verify acceptable and standard living conditions of the dwelling that is for sale. Should there arise any major questions, it is up to the parties carrying out the deal to work out the issues.

Unfortunately, there is no uniform home inspection law in the United States. It has been left up to the several states to craft legislation regarding how a home is to be purchased. Some states have crafted legislation that calls for a home to be bought AS-IS, unless specific exceptions are listed in the purchase contract.

Therefore, it is up to the buyer to be savvy and include a home inspection contingency in the purchase contract. The older a house is, the more repairs it is going to need. In addition, different parts of the house, like the floors, roof, walls, structural support members and windows, have different life-spans. Hence, you should not look for a house that is perfectly built because it is not likely to exist.

Whether the home is brand new or built in the 1970's, it is likely that a home inspection will turn up a list of repairs that it is going to need. Another purpose of the home inspection comes into play here because it is meant to discover whether there are serious flaws or safety issues, or if the repairs are minor.

Once the repairs that the house needs are determined, the buyer can give the seller a request for repair. If the buyer issues a request for repair, the seller has to receive a copy of the inspection. You cannot expect a seller to honor a request for repair without a copy of the home inspection. It is then up to the seller to decide whether to honor the buyer's request. If the seller refuses to honor the request, the seller must decide whether to purchase the house, or if it would be better to walk away from the deal altogether.

Usually, negotiations take place again after a home inspection because a seller will not agree to fix everything that is listed in the home inspection. On the other hand, if you do not request for everything that is listed as needing repair in the inspection to be fixed, then the seller may be more acquiescent to your requests.

You have every right to be picky about any issues in the report if the home is supposed to be brand new. However, if the home is thirty years old, you should be willing to make concessions too. You should think about what you are willing to repair as a homeowner and what you would like the seller to fix. Lastly, a word of caution; if the inspection finds a wet basement, water accumulation in crawl spaces or foundation problems, you may want to walk away from the deal and look for a home without these problems.