Real Estate Investing Advice & Information

When any self respecting housewife invites company for dinner, she cleans the house to impress her guests. If you’re selling your home and are having it inspected, as you should, you’ll need to do some house cleaning, too. That’s not so you can impress your home inspector, but so he can do his job.

Many times home inspectors can’t fully do what they’re supposed to do because certain areas of the home are inaccessible, due to clutter. When it’s time for your home inspection, you want to get your money’s worth. You don’t want the report to say, “Inspection limited due to the excess possessions blocking access and view.”

This isn’t about being a neat freak. The American Society of Home Inspectors ASHI®, Standards of Professional Practice, says inspectors are not to report on components or systems which are not observed. Your inspector isn’t required to disturb insulation or move personal items out of the way. If you’ve got furniture or plants in places your inspector needs to see, like the doorway to a utility closet, you’ll have to move that stuff. Clear off any snow and ice if necessary as well. continue reading…

Let’s face it. Your basement is a hole in the ground, and you don’t want water getting into that hole. Grading and drainage are issues every home owner faces. Home inspectors find grading and drainage problems to be quite common.

If grading collects and holds water near a foundation wall it can cause basement flooding. That can lead to mold growth as soon as 48 hours after flooding, something you definitely don’t want. Of course, any amount of flooding can damage those valuable items you’ve stored in your basement, and you don’t want that either.

If you’ve lived in an area for quite a while, you maybe familiar enough to detect certain weather patterns, such as a wet spring that could cause flooding. You may already know you have to be on guard concerning water getting into your basement. However, aside from immediate flooding, water leakage over a long period of time will rot and damage wood framing structures and also cause damage to the foundation. That’s something to be aware of, too. continue reading…

By having a home inspection done before you have an offer on your home, you can potentially save a lot of money. This is a lesson we learned the hard way. We received an offer on a home we were selling. Since we didn’t have the home pre-inspected, the buyer paid to have an inspection company go through the property and check everything out. Shortly after that, we received an addendum to the offer with a request to lower the price or fix a “laundry list” of things the buyer wanted done to the house. This is a common strategy that buyers and their agents use to re-negotiate the price or have things repaired. Sometimes it can get very expensive.

In an agent listed real estate transaction, it’s usually the buyer that pays for a home inspection after they have made an offer. When you are selling by owner, you must use different strategies than a real estate agent would. A home inspection done by the seller before receiving an offer benefits the seller in two important ways. First, it provides a report via a neutral third party as to the condition of the property and second, it removes potential negotiating opportunities for the buyer.

When you have the inspection done ahead of time by a professional home inspection company, it allows you time to decide how you want to handle any surprises that come up in the inspection without the pressure of a buyer and the deadlines in their offer. You can fix minor things and adjust your price accordingly for any major repairs you don’t want to tackle. If you share your complete inspection report with the buyer, most of the time they won’t pay to have another one done. You can explain that you’ve already repaired or adjusted the price for anything found in the report. continue reading…