Home inspections are the best way to avoid purchasing a property with major problems. However, they’re not designed to catch everything, so home inspection problems can be vexing for the purchaser. There are many reasons an inspection can appear to come up short. An informed consumer should be aware of what they’re meant to find — and what they’re not meant to.
Intermittent Problems
Issues in a home can be intermittent — just like with your car, when a problem always seem to disappear when you go to the mechanic! The home inspector will only be there for a brief time, so not every trouble spot will be evident. Plus, some issues only happen when someone in the house performs an action, so there’s simply no way to find all of them. The conditions during the inspection may vary wildly from exact conditions when the home experiences trouble. Often, a problem requires an exact set of circumstances to make it occur.
Hidden Problems
An issue must have symptoms of the failure to be found. If there’s no evidence or if there’s no record of past problems, there’s simply no way for an inspector to expect future trouble. Anyone can locate issues with hindsight — that’s when most home inspection problems are discovered. Predicting problems is not the role of the home inspection; it’s to find ongoing issues that require an expert to interpret the signs.
Minor Problems
This is a common area of complaints about home inspection problems: Some minor issues are listed but many are not. Why do they bother to list some, while others are potentially worse and not included at all?
The answer is simple: Home inspections aren’t designed to find picayune problems. Virtually all homes are going to have issues requiring a few hundred dollars for a repair, and home purchasers should expect this. It’s the problems that cost several thousand dollars that lenders and purchasers worry about. The reason some smaller issues are listed is as a courtesy — any issue found while searching will be noted, even if it’s not enough to make the home fail.
Contractor’s Comments
This is the number-one source of dissatisfaction home inspectors experience: The inspector passes a home while a contractor tells you it needs repairs. Of course, contractord have a different interest in the process than the purchaser does: They make more money rebuilding than repairing.
Last Man in Theory
Another reason contractors hate to repair homes is because of the concept of Last Man in Theory. This means that whoever last works on something will generally be held liable if it fails at some point. For instance, if minor repairs are done on a roof and it then develops a leak, whoever worked on it last may be expected to repair it. Roof repairs in particular are very difficult and why so many roofers want to do a job from scratch, but the concept applies to all home repairs.
Last Word in Fact
On the other side, human nature makes purchasers more likely to believe the last bit of expert advice they received. For instance, if your home inspector passed the property but then a contractor indicated a problem with the foundation, most purchasers would believe what they heard last.
However, the home inspector is the only neutral party in the process, with no financial incentive either way. Inspectors benefit from being seen as independent and build their reputations by saving lenders and purchasers from costly mistakes.
Time Is Money
Home inspections generally cost a few hundred dollars (depending on the size of the home), not a few thousand. It’s not practical to expect inspectors to pull up carpet and look behind walls for deeply hidden evidence of trouble. Locating certain types of problems requires a destructive process that isn’t justified without other evidence of a problem existing. Home inspections are visual, not invasive.
Expected Risk
Purchasing a home comes with risk. The reason home inspections are required by lenders is to reduce the risk, not eliminate it. It isn’t expected to take the place of a good homeowner’s insurance policy — and in most cases, that policy would cover the needed repairs if you had your home inspected prior to purchase. The inspection is a key part of your due diligence to cover all the bases.
Home inspection problems can be aggravating to purchasers, but these inspections serve their purpose well. With a good inspection and proper insurance, you can eliminate all but the most unlikely risk.