Personally, I wouldn’t buy ANY house without an inspection, and that’s coming from someone who sees and sells houses for a living. There are too many x-factors and while inspections won’t rule out every possibility of future problems, they certainly lessen them.

I think of inspections as a way to hedge a bet. Homes are man-made products and, therefore, open to human error. Although less likely, even new homes can have problems that were missed by a contractor or city inspector, hence the old term, “Buyer Beware.”

The cost of a home inspection is small in comparison to the potential future costs of hidden problems.

Yep. Agreed. … I might buy a doghouse without having it inspected. But maybe not.

Here’s the rub from a Builder’s perspective…

There are some very good inspectors out there. Guys who stay up to date on code requirements, who know what does and does not need to be brought to code (on preowned homes) and who have good, standardized, objective assessment and testing methods. They stick to the core limits of what a good, thorough inspection is meant to do.

There are also a number of inspectors out there who are inexperienced and unfamiliar with newer building sciences that don’t necessarily have anything to do with code. Therefore anything out of the ordinary must be, by default, wrong or suspect.

Additionally, some inspectors, in the interest of justifying their fee (often in the event of finding nothing wrong within the usual parameters of an inspection), instead create a cosmetic punch list for buyers.

This is often a subjective list, based on personal opinion rather than any sort of standard, and usually a list of cosmetic issues, like paint touch-up, a slightly out of square corner, an imperfect joint in trim, or other similar, qualitative items that may not be of any real issue to the buyer. In some cases, the inspector creates issues that never should or would have been issues to begin with.

In my homes, we do a pre-closing walk-through with the client a week to ten days before closing. This is both an inspection and orientation to the home, and is when the client’s “punch-list” is generated. Clients also get to mark cosmetic corrections, usually paint-related, they’d like made with little stickers.

We then do a re-walk together the morning of closing together to verify this list was done to satisfaction.

If one of our clients wishes to have her own, private inspector do an inspection, she must request the opportunity well in advance so we can insure to have the home ready by that time, and it must be done prior to “our” walk through, when they can present any issues their inspector brought up. We limit those issues to any disputes of code, defect, or improper installation, but the cosmetic issues are left for us and the client to work through together based on their preferences and sensitivities to cosmetic issues.

But as for inspections on a pre-owned home? Always.