With today’s ridiculously competitive real estate market, many home buyers are forgoing their rights to a home inspection in order to make their purchase offer more attractive. Of course, I don’t advocate doing this, and most real estate agents don’t like doing this either, but the market is forcing these compromises, in Minnesota and across the country. To help get a better understanding of the current market, and why home buyers might choose to skip a home inspection, please check out yesterday’s podcast on this topic, Buying homes without inspections.
Enter the Walk-Through Consultation
To help homebuyers who may choose to forego a home inspection, we’re now offering a Walk-Through Consultation. This is a consultation where we’ll walk through the interior and exterior of a home with a potential home buyer to share our observations, concerns, and insights with the home. Walk-Through Consultations will likely be scheduled last-minute, and they’ll be short, no more than a half-hour.
Our clients are expected to take notes, and we strongly encourage them to get a full home inspection if they purchase the home.
Walk-Through Consultation details
We sought advice from numerous real estate agents, home inspectors, our attorney, and our insurance company to help iron out the finer points of our Walk-Through Consultations. Here are the details:
Length: 30 minutes. The Walk-Through Consultation takes place with the real estate agent and client present during a showing, which is usually scheduled for 15 to 30 minutes. That’s the maximum amount of time for us to walk through the property, so we’ll be moving quickly.
Tools: A flashlight. Because this is not a home inspection, we will not be bringing a ladder into the home to inspect the attic, removing the electrical panel cover, using a combustion analyzer on the furnace, or any of the other jazz that we do during a home inspection. This would have the potential to make for some upset home sellers. We’re drawing a very clear line in the sand between a walk-through and an inspection.
What’s covered: We’ll cover as much of the home as we possibly can during this short window of time. I recently did a two-part blog post that gave a ton of advice on what home buyers can look for while going through showings. Check out my interior home inspection checklist and my exterior home inspection checklist for details. This is the stuff we’ll be focusing on, but the amount of stuff that we can cover will be limited by our time there, the size of the home, and the condition of the home. We’ll also cover specific client concerns, within reason and time-permitting.
Price: $200 for the first home, $100 for each subsequent home, provided these showings are scheduled back-to-back and the distance from one house to the next is less than 5 miles.
Coordinated by: Our office and the buyer’s agent. We will accompany the real estate agent and the home buyer on the showing, but we will not be setting up the showing ourselves. We will ask the buyer’s agent to notify the seller’s agent that a home inspector will be accompanying them during the showing, but will only be there to walk and talk. As noted, the home inspector will not be performing a home inspection.
What about home inspection standards of practice?
At Structure Tech, we talk a lot about the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI) Standard of Practice, which we follow with every home inspection. It’s important to make sure your home inspector follows standards such as these when performing a home inspection. A Walk-Through Consultation is not a home inspection, however. It doesn’t look, smell, or taste like a home inspection, which is why it’s not covered by any organization’s home inspection standards of practice. As its name implies, it is simply an on-site consultation by a professional, designed to help answer some of the known unknowns and to shine a light on some of the unknown unknowns.
