Should I Have An Inspection Before Listing My Home?

2601 Addison Street Mckinney, TX 75071

I have had a few clients ask me if they should have an inspection before they list their home. It’s an interesting question, mainly because of the nature of home inspections. I can hire two inspectors to inspect the same home, and I will probably receive two different inspection reports.

Here’s a case in point. One of my clients hired a home inspector before we put his home on the market. After the inspection, he received the standard inspection report, and it was 35 pages long. That may sound ominous, but even if the inspector finds nothing, his report will take dozens of pages to tell you everything is OK. In this case, there wasn’t much to report, and the seller fixed everything the inspector found. A week later we put the home on the market, and it went under contract immediately. The buyer hired their own inspector, and a few days later, they sent us their inspection report. It was 32 pages long. Unlike most sellers, my seller agreed to fix almost everything on it.

My point? Even though my seller fixed everything after the first inspection, he still had items to address after the second inspection. If there had been a third inspection, my guess is that he would have had more items to address.

Here are a few things to consider about a pre-listing inspection. As a seller in the state of Texas, you are NOT required to have an inspection before you list your home. If you decide to have an inspection, you will have to disclose that inspection to potential buyers. That means you will have to provide them with a copy of the inspection report. Potential buyers will now have a free inspection report that will point out every little thing that is wrong with your home – before they even make an offer on it.

So if you did have a pre-listing inspection, did you fix everything in the report? If you’re like most people, you probably didn’t. Most people have no idea what an inspector will find, and the older the house, the more they will find. General home inspections tend to find issues that homeowners never even knew existed, and the list can be overwhelming. In addition to malfunctioning items, there are code issues. Building codes change almost every year, and inspectors have to note any issues that are not up to code, even though it was up to code when it was built, or even the last time it was sold.

And even after the buyer has reviewed your inspection report, they will almost always hire their own inspector. They may think you hired an inspector who wasn’t thorough enough, or they may have an agent who insists that they have their own inspection.

The best advice I can give you is to talk with your Realtor. There are issues that I just don’t have the time and space to go into on this blog. Feel free to contact me and I can go into more detail.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if it is worth your time and money to have your own inspection. Only you can decide.