Home sellers accepted our offer! What now? Seeking home inspection advice, etc.

I am buying a house! (Yes, I am one of the four Americans doing so this year.)

We have signed an agreement of sale, but haven’t done the home inspection and all the rest. Please share any tips or advice you have for this stage of the process or home ownership in general.

Yeah, you’ll want to hire a civil engineer to do an inspection of the foundation, etc. Presumably your bank took care of the title search?

If the real estate agent recommends a home inspector, don’t use them. Some realtors have a preferred inspector because they skip a lot of stuff, or will downplay major problems, since if you back out due to a bad inspection report, the realtor doesn’t get paid.

No formal title search yet, but they will later in the process. I checked the records back to the 70s myself (because they are online) and everything is in good order back that far.

There seems to be a 50/50 split on whether to hire an engineer as opposed to waiting for whether the home inspector spots something that needs closer review. You lean toward hiring one regardless?

When you signed the agreement, did you make sure you wrote on the agreement the sale was contingent upon a successful home inspection?

We have a buyer’s agent (meaning she will get paid regardless of which place we buy, so long as we buy some place), so I’m a little less concerned about her recommending a bad inspector just to make the sale on a given place. I think her rep is probably worth more to her than getting her commission a few weeks earlier.

But even if we didn’t trust her, I’m not sure how we’d find a good home inspector. Even people who have used home inspectors don’t really have any reliable basis for determining whether they were good or not. Now if I could get peer recommendations from other home inspectors, then I would be interested…

Yes. It’s actually contingent on a ton of stuff. Very buyer-friendly.

I’ve been told that most realtors have two inspectors in their rolodex - The guy who give very easy inspections and never finds anything. They recommend that guy to the people who want to buy the house they are selling.

Then they’ve got the guy who give hard inspections and finds lots of stuff which someone can use to lower the price of a home. They recommend that person to the people they represent who want more house than they can afford.

Ask your person to give you the names of some who fall into the second category.

Appraisal is where our escrow got incredibly messy. It eventually had a very happy ending.

A condition of our contract is that the house appraises for the offer price or above. Zillow has it around 40k more than our agreement price, but we’re on the outskirts of a more expensive neighborhood, so I suspect that’s why the Zillow price is so much higher.

That’s pretty standard, since the financing is contingent upon the house’s value, and if it appraises for less you can’t get the loan you planned on. I’d be shocked at a purchase contract that did NOT include such a contingency, actually. Everything else might be negotiable but unless someone is paying cash, the deal can’t go through without financing.

We also have a contingency based on receiving our preferred financing (i.e., the rate we want). I think the full-value appraisal is sort of above-and-beyond given that the lender is only actually financing 80% of the offer.

The joys of buying in a buyer’s market, I suppose.


Does anybody know if one of the home inspector certifications is better than the others?

Actually no, it’s not above and beyond. If you’re buying a house at 100,000 dollars, and financing 80%, the lending believes it is funding 80% of a 100,000 house. If the place appraises for only 95,000, they will not want to fund more than 79,000 (which is 80% of 95,000).

You can get loans for more than 80% of the value of the house, but they’re harder to come by, these days, and come with unpleasant things like PMI.

In my mind, this is a downside of the buyers’ market - it’s a buyers’ market because places are plentiful and less expensive, which means there’s more of a risk of it not appraising for enough.

Interesting on your including “the rate you want” - I’d never seen that as part of the contingency. Usually it’s just a matter of “if you can get a loan for the right principal”, they don’t care whether you get 4% or 5%.

Huh. I suppose they build in some margin for the costs of foreclosure, etc.

I was surprised too. It’s very detailed, with the rate to the hundredths and a specific statement that there be no points, origination fees, etc.

Interestingly, this is all on the standard Agreement of Sale form used by realtors in my market, though it is structured as an election alongside the contingencies for radon inspection and the like.

I second this whole-heartedly. Don’t find the cheapest one either! You want one that will get down in crawl spaces etc.

Our last inspector was piss-poor and didn’t find half the problems that I did- and I was standing next to him for 90% of the time. I happily pointed them out to him- I’m sure he thought I was the biggest pain in the ass ever.

The people who bought our old place hired a guy who was spectacular. He found everything and was still there when we came home as he underestimated how long he would take, but it was great as he asked us about a few things (water staining on the foundation, new wiring, etc. ) that we were able to cross off of his list of concerns and we were able to put years for installations and improvements and additional information into his report that would be very useful to the new owners to know.

But find someone on your own not through an agent!!!

You will see how vested the agent is in getting the deal done once final negotiations take place! (Our agent paid to have a dead tree removed, to have a new fence put in, and to have some new insulated wiring to a panel done in order to make sure that her commission would be had! We began to think that we could have pushed even more!)

When we bought our current home, we used a buyer broker instead of a realtor and chose our own home inspector. We were moving from a city home to a country home and wanted someone who was familiar with that type of property. We found our inspector through the American Society of Home Inspectors since we didn’t know anybody in the area we were moving to.

Your home inspector should require you to be there on the premises while he or she inspects the home. We actually followed along while he inspected everything. He provided an extremely thorough report with photographs and a detailed description of every problem he found. We’ve now lived here about 8 years and his report was almost eerily correct (roof lasted exactly 5 more years as he predicted, chimney required rebuilding, water heater gave out after 2 years).

Just to clarify, a Realtor[sup]TM[/sup] is a real estate agent who belongs to the National Association of Realtors. A Realtor must be a licensed agent, but a licensed agent does not have to be a Realtor (but most are, it gives many advantages).

A Buyer Broker (we call that a Buyer’s Agent in my state) is an agent who represents the buyer, not the seller. He will probably be a Realtor as above. In my state, it is a matter of which document you sign as to how you are represented, and you have a choice before you begin negotiation.

Any agent should be able to give you a list of local inspectors, but state laws may prevent him from recommending one.

And if you are writing an offer, you should include the inspection requirement as part of it, or you might not be able to have one done after the offer is accepted.

It is part of almost EVERY offer I write as a Realtor (except cash offers). If you can’t get the loan for the terms you want, the deal can be killed (or renegotiated). Imagine if you were a buyer, had a budget for a 30 yr, 4% loan, and the only one you could get is 6%, 10 years! If you didn’t have a financing contingency, you would be legally obligated to buy a house you couldn’t afford.

I would also go to the city and find out what work has been done on the place over past years, and find out if it ever passed final inspection. You may be surprised to find (as we did) that the final was never done on some work. Also, before you go check this, try to find out if the owner has done any improvements to the place. If so, and the work doesn’t show up with the city as having been permitted and inspected, you’re going to want to have a professional look very closely at it.

<<FLASHING RED LIGHT>>
<<GIANT SCREAMING KLAXON>>

Here is what you just said: “As long as my agent isn’t a shyster S.O.B., everything will be fine!”

Do not use your agent’s inspector. There is an inherent conflict of interest there. It is very important the deal gets closed as soon as possible to the agent. Your finances could change, who knows what could happen, and she could lose the sale. Do not underestimate this factor.

I bought a house a year ago, and literally just called a few people out of the phone book, usually the businesses that looked to have been around for a little while. I also checked the Better Business Bureau. Ask the potential inspector questions, like “how many homes have you looked at in <this part of town> in the last two years?” If it’s a slab foundation house that was built in the 1950s and is made of brick, ask them how many of those they have inspected in the last ten years. Ask them how long a typical inspection takes to perform, and whether they can provide any references.

A random out of the phone book who works for you, not your agent, is likely to be as good or better than who your agent provides. You want the bastard who is going to write up every fault in the house, no matter how small. An agent is almost never going to recommend someone like that to you.