Should you attend the home inspection? Yes — though almost no rule says so

Yes — and here is how thin the backing for that is

Attend if you can. Two institutional documents recommend it and neither is from the inspection industry: the Massachusetts Division of Occupational Licensure consumer fact sheet, which says “While not necessary, it is recommended that the buyer be present for the inspection,” and North Carolina Cooperative Extension publication FCS-436, which says “If you decide to hire a professional inspector, be there when the inspection is done. Follow him or her around. Ask questions. It is important to know what is being checked, why, and the condition of each area.”

That is the entire institutional record. Neither the ASHI Standard of Practice nor any state standard of practice reviewed for this site — Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Oregon, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arizona — contains any provision on who may attend an inspection, whether the client may be present, or what the inspector must do if they are. The question that half of all buyers ask is, as a matter of regulation, simply not addressed.

What the two sources actually are, and how much weight to give them

Take the dates seriously, because they are part of the finding.

The Massachusetts fact sheet is published by the state agency that registers home inspectors, which makes it the strongest source available: a regulator telling consumers to be present. It carries no date on the document, and it gives no inspection duration and no guidance on timing or etiquette. It is one sentence of advice inside a page about how to verify a license.

FCS-436, “Inspecting a House,” by Sandy Zaslow and Glenda Herman, was published on 1 September 1995 and reviewed and revised on 31 August 2022. It is a land-grant university extension publication, which is a genuinely independent voice on a subject otherwise written about almost entirely by people who sell inspections. It is also, in origin, a 1995 consumer guide, and should be read that way: the advice to follow the inspector and ask questions is evergreen, but the document is not current regulatory guidance and does not claim to be.

So the honest position is that attending is well advised and barely codified. If an inspector tells you that you may not attend, they are not breaking a rule — and if an inspector encourages you to attend, they are not following one either. It is a term of your agreement with them, which means it is worth settling before you book rather than discovering on the day.

What attending gets you that the report does not

A report is a written record of condition. It is very good at that and structurally bad at four other things, and those four are what the visit is for.

Location knowledge. Where the main water shut-off is. Where the gas shut-off is. Which breaker feeds the garage. Where the furnace filter goes and which way the arrow points. Where the crawlspace hatch is. None of that is a defect, so none of it is required report content anywhere, and all of it is the kind of thing you will want at 11pm in your first winter.

Weight. Reports flatten severity. A written line reading “recommend evaluation by a licensed electrician” looks identical whether the inspector is mildly curious or genuinely alarmed. Standing in front of the panel while they explain what they are seeing tells you which it is — and you can ask directly, which is a question no document answers.

Scope. You can see what was not reachable while it is still in front of you. If the inspector says the attic hatch is in a closet full of the seller’s belongings, you can decide on the spot whether to ask for access and a return visit, rather than reading an exclusion three days later with a contingency deadline closing.

Follow-up questions. The report answers the questions the inspector anticipated. A conversation answers yours.

When to arrive: not at the start

Arrive for the last part of the inspection, not the beginning. This is the single most useful piece of practical advice on the subject and it is nowhere in any rule.

An inspector walking a roof, crawling a crawlspace or working through a panel is doing the part of the job where interruption costs the most and where a client has the least to see. The part you want is the walk-through at the end, where findings are explained in front of the things they concern. If you arrive at the start, you will spend most of your time waiting and the inspector will spend part of theirs narrating instead of inspecting.

Ask the inspector when to come. If they offer a time, take it. In Massachusetts there is an additional reason to be considerate about this: 266 CMR 6.00 requires the report to record the on-site inspection start and finish times, so the clock is literally running on paper, and conversation is inside it.

One exception. If the property is vacant and you have never been inside it alone — a foreclosure, an estate sale, a long-empty listing — arriving early and walking it yourself while the inspector works the exterior is worth the time, because you will never again see the house empty and lit with someone qualified on site.

What not to do while you are there

Do not operate anything. Not the panel, not the shut-off valves, not the garage door, not the furnace. The standards are specific about this for the inspector — InterNACHI’s standard says the inspector is not required to “operate any valve” or to “insert any tool, probe or device into” the panel — and a client turning things on and off during an inspection creates liability for damage that is unambiguously yours.

Do not ask for repair costs. It is outside scope essentially everywhere. InterNACHI’s exclusions list “the cost of repairs”; the Arizona board’s standards say inspectors need not report “the methods, materials and costs of corrections.” An inspector who gives you a number is guessing, and a guess from an inspector reads to a buyer like an estimate from a contractor.

Do not ask whether it is up to code. Also outside scope nearly everywhere. Texas rules do not require inspectors to “determine code compliance,” and the guidance accompanying them states plainly that “TREC does not require inspectors to inspect to any of the various building codes.” Our guide to what an inspector may not determine sets out the whole boundary.

Do not bring an audience. Children, parents, friends and contractors all generate conversation, and conversation is time not spent inspecting. If you want a contractor’s opinion on something, get it afterwards from the report.

Do not start negotiating on site. You have not read the report, the inspector has not finished writing it, and anything you say in front of the seller or the listing agent is a position you have taken before you had the document. Wait.

Who else may be there, and whether that is a problem

Nothing in any reviewed standard restricts who may be present. In practice you may find your own agent, the listing agent, the seller, or a contractor the seller has invited. None of that is improper, and none of it entitles them to the result.

That distinction matters more than the attendance itself. The Massachusetts standards require the inspector to “Timely submit a confidential written Report only to the Client.” The inspection is a service you bought; the report belongs to you. A seller standing in their own kitchen while an inspector finds a problem has learned something, but they have not acquired your report, and in Massachusetts the inspector is barred from giving it to them. Louisiana’s board rules go further in a different direction, providing that reports “shall not be resold for any reason.”

A seller present is nonetheless worth managing. You do not want to discuss what you will ask for, what you are willing to pay, or how much you like the house in front of the person on the other side of the contract. If the seller is following the inspection, save your questions for the walk-through at the end and ask the inspector whether there is somewhere quieter.

The one genuine problem is a seller or agent who answers the inspector’s questions for them, or who disputes findings on the spot. That is not attendance, it is interference, and the inspector is the right person to raise it with — it is their inspection to control.

If you cannot attend

Plenty of buyers cannot be there — out-of-state purchases, work, a second inspection on the same day. Not attending does not weaken your position, because the deliverable was always the report. It does mean you should ask for three things explicitly.

A call after the report is delivered, not before. Read it first. A fifteen-minute conversation with the document in front of you is worth more than an hour of narration you cannot check.

Photographs of location, not just of defects. Ask in advance for images of the main water shut-off, the gas shut-off, the electrical panel with the directory visible, and the attic and crawlspace access points. Inspectors photograph defects by habit; location shots have to be requested.

The exclusions, in writing, in detail. Massachusetts requires the report to “Record the existence of obstructions and/or conditions that prevented the inspection,” and Illinois requires disclosure of systems not inspected with the reasons. If you are not in one of those states, ask for the same thing anyway. It is the part of the report you cannot reconstruct later, and the part you were not there to see.

What to do with this

Settle attendance when you book, not on the day. Ask whether you may attend, when the inspector would like you to arrive, and whether they do a walk-through at the end. If the answer to the first question is no, that is information about the inspector and you are free to act on it.

Then go, arrive late, bring nobody, touch nothing, and ask what you cannot ask a document. Read what happens during a home inspection first so you know what you are watching and what should have been accessible, and read how to read the report before the document arrives rather than after.

And keep the two sources in proportion. A state regulator and a land-grant extension service both say be there. Nobody has written a rule about it, which means the practice is yours to set — and a buyer who arrives for the last hour, asks where the shut-offs are, and leaves the negotiating until the report is in hand has got everything attendance has to offer.

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