Why You Should Be at Your Home Inspection

A buyer in Delaware County did not come to her home inspection. That is unusual. Most buyers are there, and the ones who are get more out of the day than they expect. I always tell people the same thing when they book. Come. Follow me through the house.

I inspected the home and wrote it up the way I always do. The seller had disclosed around $40,000 in past structural repairs in the basement. There were settlement cracks on the exterior and settlement in the floors inside. All of it went in the report, in writing, with photos.

That report is thorough. But a report you read alone at your kitchen table is not the same as standing in the basement while the inspector points at the crack and tells you what it means.

What you get by being there

When you walk the house with me, you see the findings with your own eyes. You watch how the inspection actually works, which tells you a lot about whether it was done right. You ask questions in the moment, in front of the thing you are asking about, instead of three days later over email. And you start learning how your house works, where the shutoffs are, what to keep an eye on, what is normal for a house this age.

None of that fits in a PDF. The report is the record. Being there is the understanding. The buyers who walk every inspection are almost always the ones who feel in control of the decision afterward.

What an inspection is, and what it is not

A home inspection is a visual, non-invasive look at the readily accessible condition of a house on one specific day. That is worth saying plainly, because it sets the edges of what an inspection can do.

I do not open walls. I do not pull down ceilings. I do not lift nailed-down flooring or move a seller's stored boxes and furniture. If a problem is sealed behind a finished surface, it is not visible, and a visual inspection cannot report on what it cannot see.

This house made the point later. After the sale, during a renovation, a wall and a ceiling came down. Behind them were a cracked waste stack and a framing issue that had been closed up inside finished surfaces. Nobody could have reported those during the inspection, because nobody could see them without taking the house apart. That is a latent defect. It is not a gap in the inspection. It is the line between what is accessible and what is hidden, and every honest inspection lives on the accessible side of that line.

Two things that make you a smarter buyer

Attend your inspection, and understand what it covers. Those two habits do more for you than any clause in a contract. I inspect homes across Media, Drexel Hill, and the rest of Delaware County and the Philadelphia suburbs, and the clients who get the most out of me are the ones standing next to me, asking questions, while I do the work they hired me to do.