Should I attend my home inspection?

Simple answer, yes. But why? In order to understand our why, we must first identify the most common reason you are having your home inspected. You're buying a new home. Congratulations!

When purchasing a home, a home inspection is one of the most integral parts of the transaction, even though it can often be overlooked. The inspection is your only opportunity to truly identify the defects within your potential home. After-all, you aren't going to traverse the attic, army crawl through the crawl space or walk the roof during your preliminary visits to the home. Many times these are the very places the biggest issues exist. Without someone to identify them, you're left in the dark. Of course, that is until those issues begin to creep into the home's primary living spaces.

The home inspector will put all of the findings in his report, so I can just see them there, right? Well, yes. However, reading the report should be secondary to walking the home with your inspector.

How often have you looked at the pictures on an MLS listing and thought that you've struck gold? Only when you walk through the front door of the home do you realize that pictures can be deceiving. That is true of the pictures included in your inspection report as well. This can even be true of video.

The only way to feel the full weight of an issue is to see it for yourself. If your home inspector is trustworthy, he will want to show you himself! This is your time to be educated on the condition of your home. You don't want any surprises down the road. It can be scary showing up to the inspection not knowing what was found, but let me encourage you. Most defects are not world ending and almost all can be repaired.

So what if you can't go to the inspection? Sometimes this is the case because you're moving from out of town, you have work commitments, or something just simply came up. If this is the case, I would highly suggest that you get your realtor to take your place. If they have been selling houses for any amount of time, they've probably been to several inspections and learned a lot in the process. They will be able to convey the issues to you in a helpful manner.

There is one caveat. Although your realtor represents you in the transaction, you must also speak with the inspector yourself after the inspection. We've all played the telephone game, right? One person starts a sentence and then by the time it reaches the end of the line it becomes something completely different. This may not be the case all the time, but you can be confident in hearing the inspector's assessment straight from the horse's mouth.

Here at Aviate Inspections we do not encourage our clients to come for the full inspection. Some of the inspections can last up to 4 hours. Who wants to be at the house for that long? Usually, it's just us. That's why we encourage all of our clients to come for the last 30 minutes. Often times the inspection has been completed and we're working on completing the report. This allows us to send the report to our clients before they even arrive on site.

Within that 30 minute time-frame, we walk our clients through the home and show them the various defects while explaining the severity and need for evaluation by a repairperson. This educates our clients on the condition of the home better than any report ever could. Many times we are simply teaching them about the home and its attributes. We're not only there to find the defects. We also want you to fully understand how your new home works. The more education you get upfront, the more likely you are to not be surprised in the future.

So yes, you should always try to attend the home inspection if you can. If you can't, find ways to incorporate your realtor, and definitely speak with your inspector afterward. This is possibly the biggest and most important purchase of your life. Don't skip one of the most important steps. You will be grateful you did!