Every occasion for a home inspection

Overview

Almost everybody arrives at this subject with the same question, and it is the wrong one. Do I need a home inspection? assumes there is one product and one decision about whether to buy it. There is not. There are at least sixteen distinct moments at which somebody commissions an examination of a house, and those examinations are not the same examination. A few are the ordinary inspection at an unusual moment. Several are the ordinary inspection plus additions the occasion makes necessary. Seven are different products altogether, sharing a noun with the thing most people mean and very little else.

The useful question is which inspection, and when. This is the directory of all sixteen, arranged to answer it.

The verdict scale, and why it organizes everything here

Every occasion page here opens with a colored pill carrying one of three verdicts, before a word of prose, because that is the judgment a visitor actually arrives with: is this the same thing as a normal home inspection, or something else?

• Standard inspection. The ordinary scope, standard of practice and report, commissioned at an unusual moment. Three of the sixteen.
• Standard, plus additions. The ordinary scope with named ancillaries this occasion makes necessary. Six of the sixteen.
• A different inspection. Its own scope, its own standard or none at all, its own deliverable. Seven of the sixteen.

Read that distribution as a finding rather than a presentation device. Fewer than one occasion in five calls for the ordinary product unmodified; nearly half are not that product at all. The word is doing far more work than it can carry. A four-point inspection completed on an insurer's form for an underwriter who will never see the house; a phase inspection on an open frame with the drywall still stacked in the garage; a move-out condition record signed by a landlord and a departing tenant; and a buyer's inspection inside a live contingency have almost nothing in common. Different client, different question, different governing document, different consequence for getting it wrong. Most of the bad advice on this subject comes from reasoning about one of them using what is true of another.

The three that are simply the standard inspection

The buyer's inspection is the baseline the other fifteen depart from: the ordinary scope, after an offer is accepted and before the contract's deadline expires. The pre-offer inspection is the identical product bought a week earlier, before there is a contract to protect it. The pre-listing inspection is the identical product bought by the seller, before the house goes on the market.

Nothing about the examination changes across those three. What changes is the position of the person holding the report. The buyer under contract has a deadline and a right to act. The pre-offer buyer has the same facts and no remedy. The seller has no deadline at all, and a disclosure obligation the report just created.

The six that need the standard inspection plus something named

You may want additional inspections is not advice, and this site treats it as a failure to answer. An addition earns its place only when the general inspection's own written standard excludes the thing by rule.

• Buying a house sold as-is. The clause limits the remedy, not the examination, and the exclusions matter more because nobody will fill them afterward. A sewer scope or septic evaluation, a chimney evaluation where there is a working fireplace, an electrician where the panel is old or carries aluminum branch wiring, a structural engineer where the report notes movement.
• Buying a property to rent out. A sewer scope wherever the lateral is old or undocumented, because a failed line is an emergency call rather than a weekend project, and a four-point inspection where the property's age means a carrier will demand one.
• Buying a renovated or flipped house. A sewer scope where drain lines were moved, and a licensed electrician or plumber wherever the permit record shows work done without a permit. The permit history is the second report, because the finish has removed the symptoms a visual inspection reads.
• The new-build pre-closing inspection. A sewer scope or septic evaluation on a line nobody has run water through in volume, a radon measurement, and a written re-inspection after the builder's corrections.
• Inspecting an inherited property. A sewer scope, a specialist on the fuel-burning appliances and chimney, a wood-destroying insect inspection where the region warrants it — and one preparation worth more than all three: the utilities on and verified before the inspector arrives.
• The annual maintenance inspection. Fuel-burning appliances and chimneys by a specialist, on the one interval a federal agency publishes; a sewer scope periodically; and a four-point before you shop coverage.

The seven that are different examinations

In each of these the audience, the governing document or the deliverable differs enough that calling it a home inspection misleads.

• The four-point insurance inspection. Four systems — roof, electrical, plumbing and heating and cooling — on a form the carrier supplies, for an underwriter deciding whether to write a policy. It is governed by the fields on that form rather than by a standard of practice.
• Phase inspections during construction. Pre-pour, pre-drywall and final: examinations scheduled to milestones, each looking at work the next phase makes permanently invisible. No institutional standard defines the scope, so the scope is whatever your written agreement says.
• The 11-month builder warranty inspection. The deliverable is a dated, photographed defect schedule filed before the one-year workmanship period closes. The audience is a warranty administrator, and the test is whether an item is a covered defect provable in time.
• Move-in and move-out inspections. A condition record made by the two parties to a lease, proving what a unit looked like on a date so a deposit can be allocated later. The state deposit statute governs it, not a standard of practice.
• The final walk-through. Not an inspection in any sense: no inspector, no standard, no report. It is a contract-compliance check days before closing, comparing the house to a piece of paper, and treating it as a safety net is the costliest misunderstanding in the set.
• Foreclosure and auction purchases. The one occasion where there is frequently nothing to commission. With no interior access and no contingency, what remains is built from the exterior, the permit and tax record, and the title — and the title question decides more than the condition question.
• Inspecting a condominium unit. The engagement stops at a boundary drawn in a recorded declaration rather than at the walls of a building. A report silent about the roof is not a clean roof; it is a roof outside the scope.

Using the directory

Find your occasion and read its verdict first. Then two habits that serve across all sixteen. Read any report for the sentences saying a system was not evaluated or sat outside the scope, because that is where your risk is. And establish the deadline before booking anything: in a purchase it is a contract term rather than a statutory right, and in ownership it belongs to a warranty, a policy or a statute. Every page here names its clock and says who set it.

Every occasion below also carries a second coordinate: when in the transaction it falls. That is not a filing convenience. What you find before you offer is information you can price, what you find under contract is something you can still negotiate, and what you find at the walk-through is, in most cases, something you can only accept. The same finding is worth three different amounts depending on which window it arrives in.