Never Skip the Home Inspection, and What to Do With What It Finds

There are a handful of things in this business I'll give you two sides on, because there genuinely are two sides. This is not one of them.

Unless the house is brand new construction, I don't think anybody should buy a home without having a home inspection done. I can't overemphasize that, and I say it with all the love in the world. A purchase this size doesn't make sense without having somebody qualified go through the property first.

Buyers push back on this occasionally, and the reason is almost always the same. The seller handed over a stack of disclosures, the seller seems like a straight shooter, and the house shows beautifully. All of that can be completely true and still leave you buying something you don't fully understand.

So let's go through what the inspection is actually for, and then the part buyers handle worst, which is what to do with the report once it lands in your inbox.

An honest seller still doesn't know what they don't know

In a California purchase you're going to receive disclosures from the seller. Two of the big ones are the Real Estate Transfer Disclosure Statement, which is the seller's written statement about the condition of the property, and the Seller Property Questionnaire, which walks them through a longer list of specific questions.

Here's the thing people miss. A seller can fill both of those out completely honestly, thoroughly, to the absolute best of their knowledge, and you can still end up with a report full of items they never mentioned. Not because they hid anything. Because they didn't know.

Think about what a disclosure actually is. It's a statement of what the seller is aware of. And a seller lives in the house. They don't live under it or on top of it. Nobody spends their Saturday in the crawl space. Nobody climbs up to look at the far slope of their own roof.

That gap between what an owner knows and what a property is doing is exactly the space a home inspector works in. A good one will find things the seller genuinely didn't know about, and I've watched it happen more times than I can count.

The two places things surface most

If you asked me to name where the surprises come from, I'd give you the same two answers I've been giving for years: the roof, and, on a raised foundation, the space underneath the house.

A raised foundation means the house sits up on a perimeter footing with a crawl space beneath the floor, rather than on a concrete slab poured directly on the ground. Plenty of California housing is built that way, and it's not a defect. It just means there's an entire area of the property holding plumbing, framing, ductwork, insulation, and moisture that essentially nobody has looked at. Sellers usually haven't. Buyers touring on a Sunday certainly haven't. An inspector will.

The roof is the other one, and it's worth being precise about, because this is where buyers talk themselves into trouble.

"It isn't leaking" is not the same as "the roof is fine"

Take a composition shingle roof. It can be deteriorating in areas not visible to anybody standing in the yard or walking through the house. To see those areas you'd have to physically get up on the roof or send a drone up over it. If the seller has never done either of those things, and most owners never have, then the condition of the roof is not something they're in a position to tell you about. Not out of any bad faith. They just haven't seen it.

Now take a tile roof. Some of the tiles are cracked, or a few are missing outright. That roof may not be leaking at all today. It's still an issue, and it's still something you want to know about before you own it.

That's the distinction I want you to carry: not leaking and fine are two different findings. A roof that isn't leaking yet can still have a real repair or replacement in its near future, and the difference between learning that in your contingency period and learning it during the first big storm after you move in is one you will feel.

Now read the report properly

Here's where I see buyers fumble a good process. The report comes back, it's long, it's full of photographs, and it uses words like "deficiency" in a hundred places. People skim it, get either alarmed or numb, and move on.

Don't do that. Sit down with your real estate agent and go through it. Out loud, item by item.

What you're doing in that conversation is sorting every finding into one of three piles:

• Things you can live with. Every house has them, including new ones. Cosmetic items, ordinary wear, small things you'd rather handle yourself on a weekend.
• Things you want repaired before you buy. Real items with real cost or real consequence attached.
• Things that change whether you want the house at all. These are rare, and they're the reason we do this.

Most reports produce a long first pile, a short second one, and an empty third. That's a normal outcome and a good day. But you don't know which pile anything belongs in until you've actually read it and asked about it.

The request for repairs, and the two ways to ask

Once you know what's in pile two, your agent fills out a request for repairs. That request can go one of two directions, and the choice matters more than most buyers realize.

Ask the seller to have the work done. The seller hires the contractor, the work gets completed before closing, and you receive the property repaired.

Ask for a monetary adjustment in lieu of the repairs. Instead of the seller doing the work, you and the seller agree on an amount that accounts for it, and you handle the repairs yourself after you own the home.

It's been my experience that a lot of buyers prefer the second one, and their reasoning is sound. When you hire the contractor, you control the quality of the work. You pick who does it, you decide the scope, and you're the one inspecting it when it's finished. A seller on their way out the door is, understandably, optimizing for done rather than for excellent.

Neither approach is right in every case. If a repair has to be completed before your lender will fund, for instance, that shapes the answer. Talk it through with your agent, and remember this is a request between two private parties, so its shape is open for discussion.

Then the seller responds. They can agree to what you asked, agree to part of it, or decline entirely. All three are legitimate answers to a request, and any of them can show up.

The contingency clock is what actually protects you

If the seller declines, you have a decision to make. You can go forward anyway and take the property as it stands, which buyers do all the time and with open eyes. Or you can cancel.

And this is the part I want you to hear clearly, because everything above depends on it.

Your ability to walk away comes from the inspection contingency period written into your purchase contract, a specific window of time to do your inspections and act on what they show. A buyer who cancels while still inside that window generally has the right to have the deposit returned under the terms of the contract. But the contract governs, not my summary of it, and contingency and cancellation provisions vary. Read yours. Have your agent walk you through your specific timeline and your specific cancellation terms in writing, early, before you're in a position of relying on them.

Which brings me to the practical instruction that follows from all of it: schedule your home inspection immediately. Not in week three. Not once the paperwork settles down. As soon as you're in escrow.

The protection is real, but it's on a clock, and a contingency period does not care why you were late. The report is only worth something to you while you can still act on it.

The other common way a good deal comes apart

Since we're on the subject of things that end an otherwise excellent transaction, I'll flag the other one.

The appraisal. Your lender orders an independent opinion of value, because the property is the collateral and has to stand on its own. If that opinion comes in under your contract price, somebody has to account for the gap. You can ask the seller to reduce the price. You can cover the difference yourself. You can meet somewhere in the middle. And if neither side is willing to move, that deal can fall out of escrow too, with a well-qualified buyer and nobody at fault.

Same lesson as the inspection: order it as fast as you possibly can. I walk through the appraisal and the rest of the escrow timeline in the escrow post in this series.