The field of Home Inspections is only about 30 years old, and exactly what it is we do still confuses a lot of people. Most people interact with us when they are in the midst of a tumultuous real estate transaction, a confusing time for anyone, so their idea of our job description is vague at best.
Home inspectors evaluate all of the mechanical, structural, and electrical components of houses. They use a few tools, their experience, and intuition to profile the condition of houses and condominiums. Some of us do this for commercial properties as well.
Most of the time people hire us to evaluate properties they are trying to purchase, but increasingly folks are hiring us to inspect their homes before they put them on the market. The idea is that a thorough inspection will reveal problems up front and make the transaction go more smoothly. Occasionally, someone who inherits a property will hire me to go through it with a fine toothed comb and tell them everything that’s wrong with it. Armed with that information, they can decide to keep the house, rent it, or sell it, depending on what is wrong and how much it will cost to repair.
A home inspection is not an appraisal, though the two are often confused. Home inspectors determine the condition of the house. Appraisers determine their value.
The work a home inspector does is also very different than what your Town Building Inspector does. In most cases, the Town Building Inspector spends less than 30 minutes in the houses he or she looks at. They’d love to spend more time policing the builders, but they’re all overworked. The Town Building Inspector is checking to make sure that the house being built (or added on to) meets the Massachusetts Building Code.
A few words about “The Code”. Our State Building Code is OK as far as codes go, but building a house that just “meets the code” is nothing to brag about. A house that “meets the code” is the cheapest, worst house you can legally get away with building. The building code is not a detailed instruction book on how to build a house. You’d be surprised by how thin the residential portion of it is, and how much is doesn’t say. Rather than try to cover every conceivable variable a builder might encounter, it is written in very general terms, analogous to the US Constitution –only we have the Supreme Court to interpret and instruct us on the application of the Constitution. Builders get to interpret and apply the Code for themselves. True, the Town Building Inspector does oversee them, but how much oversight can they provide in the 30 minutes they have to oversee a house that takes 90 days to build?
Some people hire home inspectors to evaluate the houses they are having built as well. We typically spend three hours inspecting an average sized property, but if clients want their homes inspected in multiple stages (once the foundation is placed, after it is fully framed, and finally at 95% completion), it can take much longer. This is not a “code compliance” inspection, though. Only the municipal building inspector has the authority to determine what complies and what doesn’t. Home Inspectors are more concerned with “what will work over the long term” than “what passes”. Remember, you can still pass the code with a D-, and nobody wants to take out a 30 year mortgage on a D-.
We don’t tell people to buy, or not to buy, in fact, that’s illegal. We just tell them what’s wrong with the house, period.
Over the last 20+ years, I’ve probably inspected around 4000 homes ranging in price from about $40K to $12 million. I used to say that I’ve never seen a problem that couldn’t be fixed, and I guess that’s still technically true, but I saw one a while back that could be the exception to the rule. It’s what builders might call a “scraper” which means, it was in such bad shape, it should be scraped off the foundation, and a new house should be built in its place. These situations are rare, but the lot is often worth more with the house torn down.
The problem with scraping this house was: it had no foundation from which to scrape it.
The house was a shack, built a couple hundred meters from shores of the Quabbin Reservoir maybe 40 years ago. The poor person who lived there had moved into it when her parents built it and now that her parents were gone, she lived there alone. Actually, that isn’t quite true. She had an overfed, overprotective Rottweiler there with her. When I stepped inside, she told me that the dog wasn’t used to company, and didn’t like men and the dog reiterated it with a low growl through bared teeth.
The house was small. It had four rooms, one of which housed a half dozen or so caged birds and some reptiles. There was no evidence that a single surface in that house had been painted –or even cleaned- since day one. The air in that house gagged my client and me and we both kept making excuses to go outside to retrieve one “forgotten” item or another. The air outside wasn’t much better because the entire house was surrounded by about a 30 meter wide ring where the dog went to do his thing and nobody cleaned up after him, either.
The roof was old and leaky. The fusebox was dangerous and antiquated. There was no bathroom, no toilet, no tub, there was no septic system. There used to be an outhouse years ago, but the woman didn’t walk much these days and relied on a bedpan and daily visits from a home health aide. The kitchen sink was the only plumbing fixture in the house and its waste pipe simply emptied out onto the ground outside.
There was an old kerosene heater that was in decent condition, but that was about it. The best thing that ever could’ve happened to that house was my client. She bought it dirt cheap, cleaned it up, applied a few band aids while using it as a weekend place, and will tear it down and build something nice in a few years.
The point being, my job was to provide my client with relevant, accurate information that would aid her in the decision making process, not steer it. It was a disaster, but it was exactly what she was looking for. So, armed with my report, she bought it and is probably making plans to spend the weekend there as you read this.
That’s what home inspectors do.
Jim Morrison
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Morrison Home Inspections
"Each house tells a story. We write 'em down."
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