Disaster Smart - Sellers Home Inspections
If you are putting your home up for sale, you should consider having your own building inspection? Home Inspections should be a part of your pre-sale home improvement process.
Advantages to the Seller:
o might make the home show better.
o gives the seller time to make repairs and shop for competitive contractors.
o permits the seller to attach repair estimates or paid invoices to the inspection report.
o removes over-inflated buyer-procured estimates from the negotiation table.
Advantages to the Real Estate Agent:
Advantages to the Home Buyer:
Common Myths About Seller Inspections:
Q. Don't seller inspections kill deals by forcing sellers to disclose defects they otherwise wouldn't have known about?
A. Any defect that is material enough to kill a real estate transaction is likely going to be uncovered eventually anyway. It is best to discover the problem ahead of time, before it can kill the deal.
Q. Isn't a home inspector's liability increased by having his/her report seen by potential buyers?
A. No. There is no liability in having your seller permit someone who doesn't buy the property see your report. And there is less liability in having a buyer rely on your old report when the buyer is not your client (and has been warned not to rely on your report) than it is to work directly for the buyer and have him be entitled to rely on your report.
Q. Don't seller inspections take too much energy to sell to make them profitable for the inspector?
A. Perhaps, but not when the inspector takes into account the marketing benefit of having a samples of his/her product (the report) passed out to agents and potential buyers who are looking to buy now in the inspector's own local market, not to mention the seller who is likely moving locally and is in need of an inspector, plus the additional chance of re-inspection work that is generated for the inspector.
Q. A newer home in good condition doesn't need an inspection anyway. Why should the seller have one done?
A. Unlike real estate agents, whose job is to market properties for their sellers, inspectors produce objective reports. If the property is truly in great shape, the inspection report becomes a pseudo-marketing piece, with the added benefit of having been generated by an impartial party.
Q. Don't seller inspections and re-inspections reduce the number of buyer inspections needed in the marketplace?
A. No. Although every inspection job an InterNACHI member catches upstream is one his/her competitors might not get, especially if the buyer waives his/her inspection and/or the seller hires the same inspector to inspect the home s/he is buying, the number of inspections performed by the industry as a whole is increased by seller inspections.
Contingencies in Contracts
Once a buyer makes an offer and you accept it, you have a contract. One of the most common conditions of that contract is, "offer contingent upon satisfactory building inspection." The buyer is going to have a professional home inspector go through your house to make sure there are not any hidden problems.
The last thing that you want is to have your deal fall through because of an unknown problem uncovered by the buyer’s building inspector. This is especially true if it is a minor problem and could easily have been repaired ahead of time -- if only you had known about it.
Many a transaction has fallen apart because of building inspection surprises.
Preparing for Sale
When preparing your house for sale, you are going to do lots of things to make it more appealing to potential buyers. You are going to clean up the yard, apply a fresh coat of paint where needed, get rid of all clutter in and around the house, have the kitchen and all bathrooms at their sparkling best, get the rugs cleaned, clean all windows, etc.
Why not spend the relatively few dollars and also have a building inspection? Find out the hidden problems with your home and correct them in advance. If you don’t, you can be assured that the buyer’s inspector will find them. When the buyer’s inspector finds a problem, it can throw a monkey wrench into the works.
Potential Problems
The buyer will ask you to fix the problems found by their inspector – or no deal. If you do not want to fix the problems, they will ask for a reduction in price or a cash credit at closing – or no deal. In some cases, they buyer may even cancel the purchase entirely, not giving you a chance to make any corrections.
If the buyer cancels the purchase, where does that leave you? It leaves you with a house that you will have to put back on the market – a house that has been stigmatized. Future potential buyers and their Realtors will always wonder, "What happened with that first deal?"
An Item of Caution: Disclosure
If you hire your own home inspector and find problems but elect not to repair them, be sure to tell your Realtor. They should be disclosed to all potential buyers. In some states this is mandatory. Home sellers and their Realtors who have known of problems but not disclosed them have successfully been taken to court for damages.
Think of yourself. Isn’t it easier to identify and handle problems in advance rather than finding out about them later? If there is a problem that you decide not to repair, disclose it up front and indicate that the estimated buyer’s cost to fix it has been reflected in the offer price of your home.
Wind mitigation,
safety, FORTIFIED, pensacola insurance inspections, four point inspection, underwriting,
risk management, Baldwin county, habitat for humanity, mobile county, jackson county,
pensacola wind mitigation inspections, wind mitigation inspection, inspections,
pensacola inspections, pensacola insurance inspections, mark taylor, pensacola
home inspection, home inspections, fort walton beach, gulf breeze, navarre,
destin, niceville, valparaiso, milton, pace, panama city beach, rosemary
beach, grayton beach, crestview, defuniak springs, state farm, chartis, pure, universal
property and casualty insurance, farmers, bankers, southern oak, tower hill,
nationwide, allstate, saw grass mutual, wilshire, coastal risk underwriters,
orchid insurance, insureance discounts, lower your insurance costs, Alabama insurance
discounts, Mississippi insurance discounts, florida insurance discounts
