Category: Pre-Purchase Inspections

Thirty-one years assessing building permits for a metropolitan council taught me one thing that surprises most homeowners: demolition approvals get held up by paperwork far more often than by the actual building coming down. I had a call two months ago from a couple who’d bought an old bungalow in Adelaide’s western suburbs planning a knockdown rebuild, and their contractor had already scheduled machinery before anyone had checked what was actually underneath the house or what the block’s soil classification meant for the new build’s footing design.

Continue reading Pre-Demolition Inspection: What to Check Before the Machines Arrive

I carry a pin-type moisture meter into every subfloor and roof cavity in Christchurch, and the number I get out of it is the part clients trust least, oddly enough. They’ll accept “there’s a stain here” without argument, but show them a reading of 22% on a bottom plate and half of them assume the meter is broken. It isn’t. Timber moisture content is one of the few numbers in a building report that means something specific and testable, and it’s worth explaining what the scale is actually telling you, because termite risk and rot risk both live inside that number.

Continue reading Moisture Readings: What the Numbers Mean

On my third house purchase in Texas, I sat across from a seller’s agent who insisted a $9,000 price reduction over “some cracks in the garage” was excessive. It wasn’t the cracks. It was a post-tensioned slab showing a pattern the inspector tied to a plumbing leak that had been running under the foundation for months, with moisture readings in the adjacent wall to back it up. That’s the difference between a defect that reads scary and one that actually moves a number — and after three of these deals, I’ve learned the list of what genuinely changes a price is shorter than most buyers think.

Continue reading The Five Defects That Actually Change a Price

A client in Adelaide once called me at 9pm the night her building report landed, convinced the deal was dead. Twenty-two pages, photos of every crack, a section called “Major Defects” she hadn’t reached yet. When we went through it together the next morning, the actual major defect was one item: a section of guttering discharging against the slab edge. Everything else was routine wear the report was simply obligated to note. She’d read it top to bottom in the wrong order, and that order is most of the problem.

Continue reading Reading an Inspection Report Without Panicking

A buyer in a prewar building on the Upper West Side once handed me a list his brother-in-law had drawn up after buying a house in another state entirely: fifty-some line items, half of them things no home inspection touches. Radon testing wasn’t on it. Termite activity wasn’t on it. But “check if the ghost stories are true” was, in his handwriting, only half joking. I get some version of that list often enough that it’s worth writing down, plainly, what a pre-purchase inspection is actually built to catch, and where the boundary sits.

Continue reading What a Pre-Purchase Inspection Actually Covers (and What It Doesn’t)