In the case of my brother and his wife, they bought a house based on “potential”. To put it another way, what do they say are the three most important things in real estate? Location, location, location.
The house they bought was a mile from my brother’s workplace, and 5 miles from my sister-in-law’s workplace. It had a reasonable amount of property, enough bedrooms to permit a computer room, plus two or three bedrooms for children (planned, but not yet concieved). And it was affordable–in part because no one else wanted it. My brother and his wife were willing to put forth some sweat equity in their new house.
They did have it professionally inspected, but most of the stuff about which we roll our eyes and ask “How could you be so disrespectful to this nice property?” isn’t really in the inspector’s domain.
And really, compared to some of the stories in this thread, my brother and his wife got off easy.
The bad wallpaper and bad paint jobs they knew about. The master bathroom needing work, they knew (fixing it turned into a saga in and of itself, but that’s not the fault of the sellers, it’s the fault of the guy my brother and his wife hired to do the work).
The filth? They kind of knew and kind of didn’t. It’s a bad sign when there are dust bunnies dangling from cold air returns in plain sight. But it doesn’t exactly tip you off to the massive amounts of grease which had floated through the air and deposited themselves on all concieveable surfaces. (The only problem with bodily function related filth was a stinky bathroom, which became less stinky with use. )
I’ve seen that show, and it’s more about the previous owners coming back to see the changes the new owners made. Sometimes you see the new owner complaining about stuff done to the house, but mostly it is about the old owner taking a tour of the house and commenting on their design choices and saying “it’s not the way I would have done it” (obviously…you lived there and didn’t do it that way!) It could be used to confront the old owner, but they don’t do it (the new owners are not around when the old owners come through.) So there’s no chance to ask “were you drunk when you did this tiling job” or whatever.
I did see one episode where a girl bought a house and discovered tons of stuff wrong about it - dead animals in the walls and ceiling, unsafe structural problems, fire hazards, the works. And the previous owners had little kids living there! Doug (the host) did point out some of the most horrendous problems that were found and the old owners did seem embarrassed by it. But the girl didn’t have an inspection done, so a lot of it was her own fault.
Heh, this just reminds me of just how different real estate buying is under different market conditions.
When I was buying my house, there was simply no way anyone could demand an inspection - either the seller provided one or you went without, so hot was the market (and I gather still is here in Toronto). There was no use demanding an inspection when you were competing against plenty of buyers in bidding wars.
For myself, we got lucky - the previous owners over-valued the place (really, they were penny-wise and pound foolish - they did not fix the glaring cosmetic problems or bother to “stage”) and had to reduce price - that was on friday; on saturday we saw the place and the very next day we made an offer to close monday … even so, we had someone bidding against us.
No way would we have been able to slow the process down and get an inspection without risking having lots of competing bids. That’s just how it was.