I Inspected a Glenside House After Settlement. It Had $50,000 of Problems.

Most people call me before they buy a house. This one called me after.

He'd found a place he loved in Glenside. Popular listing, more than one offer on it. His agent told him the way to win was simple: go twenty thousand over asking, and waive the home inspection. No contingency, no inspector slowing things down, nothing that might give the seller a reason to take the other offer. He wanted the house. He did what his agent said. He won.

Then he moved in. And after a few weeks of living there, things stopped adding up. That's when he called me to do the inspection he should have had done in the first place. By then it was his house, and every problem in it was his problem too.

What the inspection actually found

Every one of these was in the report I wrote up after he already owned the place.

The foundation was moving. Not a hairline crack you note and move on from. Real, structural movement. Water was getting into the basement, and where there's water getting in and sitting, you get mold, which there was. There was a crawl space with its own set of issues. There was termite damage in the framing. And the siding was asbestos shingle, with no insulation behind the walls at all, which is its own headache the day you want to do anything to that exterior.

Any one of those is a serious finding. He had all of them, at once, in a house he'd already paid twenty grand over asking for.

About those listing photos

Every exterior photo in the original listing was taken with snow on the ground. Snow on the roof, snow over the grading, snow piled against the foundation.

Snow hides the condition of the siding, the way the ground slopes water toward or away from the house, foundation cracks, and settled walkways. Whether that timing was on purpose, I couldn't tell you. Either way, he bought the house without ever seeing the exterior clearly, and without an inspection to catch what the photos left out.

What an inspection would have saved him

An inspection on a house like that costs a few hundred dollars. Add termite and mold testing and you're maybe seven or eight hundred all in. He skipped it to keep his offer clean, and ended up roughly $50,000 in the hole on problems he could have known about before he signed.

The cost was never the point. A report in his hand before settlement gave him three options: take the price down to cover the repairs, ask for credits, or walk away from a house that wasn't worth it. Waiving the inspection took all three off the table at once.

"But the market's competitive"

I hear it constantly, and it's true. In a hot stretch, agents push waiving because it makes your offer look cleaner than the next one. A clean offer is good for getting the deal done. It is not the same thing as good for you, the person who's going to own the house and everything wrong with it.

You don't actually have to choose between a strong offer and knowing what you're buying. Ask your agent about an information-only inspection. You give up the right to renegotiate, so the seller sees a clean offer, but you still walk the house with an inspector and find out what's really there before you commit. You keep the knowledge. And if what's there is bad enough, you can still walk.

If an agent tells you the only way to win is to go in completely blind, it's worth sitting with that for a second. Whose risk are they asking you to carry? I inspect homes all over the area. Abington, Jenkintown, Glenside, the whole stretch of Montgomery County. And the buyers who get burned are almost never the ones who insisted on an inspection.

If someone's telling you to waive yours

Short version: don't. The longer version comes down to four things:

• The inspection and the contingency are two separate things. You can drop the contingency and still get inspected.
• Disclosure forms are not an inspection. They're a form the seller filled out.
• The serious stuff like foundation, water, termites, and asbestos is exactly what a buyer can't see on a showing and a seller has the most reason to leave out.
• The cost of finding out is a few hundred dollars. The cost of not finding out, in this case, was about fifty thousand.

This guy is fine now. He's working through it, one repair at a time. But every one of those repairs is a thing he could have negotiated, gotten credit for, or walked away from, if anyone had looked first.