You listed your house. Your Realtor brought in an acceptable contract, attorney review is complete. What’s next?
The buyer does the home inspection. That’s where the buyer hires a professional inspector to go over the house with a fine toothed comb and find every little thing that’s wrong. And then they demand that you fix everything. The inspector may find things wrong that you weren’t aware of. And if the list is sufficiently long, it may scare the buyer away. Then you need to start all over again.
Oh what to do?
This is what we recommend that all of our sellers do. Hire an inspector before you get to that point, and have the house inspected. This will give you the same information that a buyer would receive about the home’s condition, but you have a chance to correct the deficiencies beforehand.
Let’s face it – if the inspection issues are minor, many buyers simply offer a small credit to the buyer and let the buyer take care of it. But if a serious issue arises, you, the seller, will need to take care of it. I always tell people let’s imagine that the home inspection turns up a serious issue, such as the inspector says that termites have been eating away the back corner of the house, and if someone sneezes hard, the house may fall down. If something serious like that arises, the buyer will says you must fix it or the contract will be cancelled. And if they do cancel, the next buyer’s inspection will find it also. In addition, since you’ve been made aware, you must disclose this info to future buyers. You will need to get serious issues repaired.
So by having an inspection of your own performed, you have the opportunity to get in front of the issues and take care of business before losing a buyer. I think this is a good investment of a few hundred dollars.