Why Sellers Should Get An Inspection

Here they are:

1.  It saves you money.  Yes, the cost of the inspection is $400-$500 up front  but you will almost always save more than that in repairs.  Many sellers imagine that their home needs no repairs, but that is wishful thinking and is almost always wrong.  A professional inspector will almost always discover a laundry list of things that need to be fixed.  If you have the inspection done before you have a  buyer you can do a lot of the repairs yourself.  Even if you hire someone to do the repairs you can have a handyman to them for less than a full general contractor.  Once you are in contract the buyer or the lender is almost always going to require them to  be done by a licensed general contractor.  Believe me, you will save money.
2. It decreases your risk. If the buyer of your home discovers a problem after moving in they often want you to fix it.  They may threaten to sue you for non-disclosure.  If you have had a pre-inspection completed before you market your home, and if you disclose that inspection to the buyer you have proven that you gave a good faith disclosure.  You not only disclosed what you know on the state disclosure form, but you hired an inspector to look at your home to find what you didn’t know.
3. You can sell for more. A pre-inspection report sitting on your table during a showing always increases the comfort level of a prospective buyer.  If a buyer is more comfortable with your home they are willing to pay more for it.

To drive the point home let me tell you about two sellers right here in Wasilla who just today found out about problems in their home that each wish they had known beforehand. In each case the buyer was having the home inspected as part of their due diligence period before they closed on the home.

In the first case, the inspector found a problem with the foundation.  The buyer and seller were both in tears because it now seems obvious that the transaction will not close.  The buyer made plans to move into the home by the end of November and the seller desperately needs to sell the home to move out of state with her family.  Now it’s back to square one.  If a pre-inspection had been completed the seller would have been able to disclose the problem and perhaps fix it before marketing, or built it into the deal to be repaired during escrow.  It is such a large issue at this stage of the transaction that it is likely the transaction will not close.

In the second case the buyer finished their inspection and discovered so many little things wrong with the home they decided to terminate even thought the seller is willing to make all the repairs.  Almost all the repairs are minor, but there are a lot of them.  Now the seller is going to do the repairs themselves using the buyers inspection as a guide.  But they have lost this deal and need to find a new buyer.