Home Inspection - from the seller's perspective
Christine McCarron
Helping women create wealth thru retreats, coaching, courses and podcasts
When buyers go through your home for the first time, they often do so with rose-colored glasses. They’re looking at the furnishings, the open space, the way the sun bathes the kitchen. The home inspection process forces them into the darkest, dingiest parts of the home and points out many potential problems. For some first-time buyers, this is enough to make them want to cancel the sale. If this is their first time going through the process, they may mistakenly believe that another house will be more “perfect.” For all buyers, it can be a wake-up call and as the seller, you’re likely to find yourself back at the negotiating table.
If you paid a home inspector to review a home and at the end of two hours, they said: yup, looks great, you’d likely be asking for a refund. That’s why, even with new construction, the inspector will take the buyers through the home, explaining how the systems work, telling them about regular maintenance they should perform to keep things working well and certainly pointing out anything that could – now or in future – be a problem. It can be overwhelming for buyers who aren’t handy or are new to homeownership.
In a previous article, we talked about the home inspection contingency. If a buyer finds problems in the home that will cost more to fix than the threshold they’ve set in the contingency, they can cancel the sale and get a full refund of their deposit. You may think that means that if the number is high, say $5,000, you’d only hear from them if there are major defects in the home. In reality, there’s nothing stopping the buyer from trying to renegotiate regardless of what the home inspection reveals, and most will ask for at least something.
What to do?