For many homeowners, the pre-inspection is their favorite part.
Admittedly, I learned this process from someone else, but when I first heard about it, everything clicked immediately, and I implemented it right away. Somewhere around the second or third year in real estate, I started ordering pre-home inspections for every single one of my listings, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Over the years, I’ve witnessed numerous occasions where my home sellers used it to their advantage. In the cases where I represent buyers, I’ve often thought to myself how many of the problems we run into could have been avoided if the homeowner had just had a pre-inspection.
When I first meet with a homeowner, one of the first things they typically bring up to me is what they want to get out of this process or things they do and don’t want to do.
At the top of that list is doing repairs on a house that they’ve been maintaining, repairing, and investing money into. They often perceive this process as selling an imperfect house as is at a fair price, and if there’s a way they can avoid doing repairs, they want to emphasize that’s one of their goals.
The idea of selling “as is”
In fact, if you look through enough listings, you’ll occasionally find someone saying that they’re selling the house “as is.” I always chuckle to myself at how ridiculous a statement like that actually is if you understand the framework around the home inspection process and then compare that with the idea of getting the most money for your house.
I’ll do another article on that one day, but if you’ve gotten this far, under no circumstances should you ever use that phrase when you’re trying to advertise a property.
Wouldn’t a pre-inspection just create more work?
Keeping with the theme of not wanting to do repairs, a pre-inspection would seemingly create more work for the home seller because now they have to do repairs before they have put the house on the market. Then the buyer is going to get another inspection, and they’re going to be stuck with a new list of things they have to do.
In reality, with very few exceptions, it saves the homeowner from having to do repairs before and after the house goes under contract and potentially saves them tens of thousands of dollars.
The key reasons a pre-inspection is advantageous for a home seller are:
- It allows you to do repairs using your own contractors or do them yourself.
- You can negotiate out of repairs at the time the offer is received because you know what most of them will be.
- Most importantly, a pre-inspected home allows you to sell your house for top dollar because the buyer is able to determine the condition of the property before they write an offer.
The chimney that looked like it was falling away
I’ll give you one quick example of a recent experience I had. I had some homeowners purchasing a property where the chimney was separated from the home, and there was a crack in the foundation that you could stick your pinky finger in.
We were able to negotiate money for repairs in the form of a large credit, only to find out later that the chimney was freestanding, built after the home was initially constructed. The gap was purely aesthetic and not structural, and the crack was only in the mortar between the cinder blocks and was easily filled in with a special epoxy. This was all accomplished for a few hundred dollars.
In my estimation, we were not the only people who noticed there was a huge crack in the side of the house and that the chimney appeared to be falling away from the house. To most people, this would be the reason they never wrote an offer.
Therefore, you could conclude that we were able to buy the house for much less than we would have if they had addressed those issues ahead of time.
Ultimately, we don’t know, but common sense says that if they had had a pre-home inspection for several hundred dollars, they could have either fixed it or disclosed that there was no ongoing issue. It would have saved everyone a lot of headaches, and the home seller would have likely made way more money.
I have dozens of stories like this.
Why my home sellers appreciate it
This process keeps my home sellers from being bullied in the process and keeps buyers from walking away in the middle of the home inspection process over the findings from the home inspection, which is the number one reason why deals fall apart.
My home sellers appreciate the pre-home inspection more and more as they continue down the home-selling process. For many home sellers, it’s their favorite part of my process.