Inspections: What’s the deal when you buy your Albuquerque home

(Transcript Snippet): “Tracy:

So Tego we had a question this week. Yes. I’m sure you have stats, but let’s get to our question of the week question was

Tego:

You go, go ahead inspections. Yeah. If you’re a home buyer, you know, what’s the deal with inspections? What, you know, what, what can I do? What can’t I do? What should I do when, when you, when you buy a house? And so let me just clarify this. When, when you make an offer on a home, you, uh, one of the stipulations of the contract is you have this contingency where you can do inspections on the house. Right? Right. And so what, what is a buyer allowed to do inspection wise trades?

Tracy:

Good question. So I’m sure a lot of our listeners will wonder the same thing since we had this question. So our purchase contract says you’re willing, you’re able to do any inspections that you want. You know, one of the things that’s interesting is when you walk through a house, typically you’ve only been in that house once for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. And, you know, visually what you think the house condition is, but you weren’t handed a report that says we just had it inspected. Typically here’s all the conditions. Here’s the seller’s disclosure. A lot of times in this market, we’re making an offer only on a visual of what we’ve seen by walking through the house for a very short time. But the purchase contract gives the buyer, the option to do any inspections they want, right? Within a timeframe. You’ve got you put in the contract, how many days, or by what calendar day, you’re going to complete your inspections. And then the contract says, you have the opportunity to request repairs, which is a second negotiation. Or you can say, I’m not comfortable with the condition of the home. I’m not moving forward. And we’re going to con not go, go forward and buy the house.

Tego:

So that’s like a due diligence period. Another term for the same thing, basically it’s a contingency in the contract and it’s probably the largest contingency in our, in our purchase agreements. And the appraisal contingencies, there’s appraisal contingency, there’s there’s document, you know, inspection, contingency, there’s title contingency. There’s more, but this is that generally, it’s the one where there, there tends to be the most, um,

Tracy:

Affected. So, so that brought up another question we had. So I’m going to piggyback on a different question we had from, uh, a client, a listener was what’s the difference between an appraisal inspection and our home inspections, because they thought the appraiser did all of these, uh, in, in checking these things out for them. And really the appraiser is doing a high level review of the house, similar to what the buyer did when they walked through it. That says, uh, yes, the house appears to be in good shape. I’m going to tell the lender, it’s fine. But the different types of inspections are bright.

Tego:

Well, hold on, hold on. I think we need to wrap up what you just said. You, you went through that really quick. And I think it’s when, when you’re getting alone, you’re going to hear the term, uh, the, the, the lender or the people you’re working with on the loan side say, oh, we’re going to get the appraisal inspection. And you’re going to hear from your realtor, your realtor is going to say, oh, we’re doing the inspections. Well, they’re not exactly the same thing they kind of are, but they’re not. Yeah. I mean, the appraisal inspection is the third party appraiser going out and looking at the house on behalf of the bank. Um, it’s not a full, you know, top to bottom home inspection. And so, so the, the, the home inspection that we talk about in the realtor world, the full home inspection is the one where you actually get somebody out there for two, three hours, go through the house top to bottom, you know, electrical HVHC cabinets, doors, appliances, roof. Um, let me see, I’ve got the list here. It goes on and on, right. Windows, doors, uh, fireplace grounds, and drainage, um, make for, you know, smoke detectors. I mean, it’s, it’s as simple as making sure that all the drawers open and close properly,

Tracy:

But there’s a lot of inspections in addition to that full home that a buyer can do, right. There’s w uh, radon. Yep. Um, if there’s a well or septic system, those types of things, the, um, the, uh, roof inspection could be separate, even though it’s a part of the full home inspection. So that’s what a home inspection is all about. Right? It’s whatever inspections the buyer thinks they’re important. And most of us realtors have a list of typical inspections that buyers do on the houses. Right. He goes counting all the different ones on our,

Tego:

He said, 18, 19, we’ve got 19 different, you know, types of inspections on this worksheet. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so it could be things like the, the duct. So if it’s a house that has in floor duct for the heating and air conditioning, you know, in a concrete slab, you may want to have those inspected and make sure that the integrity is there.

Tracy:

That would be a camera inspection. That

Tego:

Would be a scope, right. Be a camera scope, you know, you could do a scope of the sewer line, right? Yeah. So there’s a lot of options. It’s one of those things that you really need to talk with your, your realtor about, you know, what’s out there, what options, and, you know, certain properties may have certain, um, red flags that realtors may know of that you, you might want to address. Right.