During his years in the residential construction industry, John Hagan has heard all types of questions and complaints from home buyers and sellers. A graduate of Purdue University with years of experience in engineering and custom home building, Hagan is now the owner of Hagan Home Inspections, serving the Triangle area in North Carolina. In this article, he lists the most important questions that people should be asking their home inspector at the job site.
First and foremost, as a home buyer you cannot ask your home inspector the right questions if you do not show up to the home inspection appointment. That is why I recommend that all my clients come to the appointment for the home inspection and walk around with the inspector as he does his job.
As we go along, I always ask my clients to please stop me and ask questions along the way. No matter how small or trivial the question may seem, I want my clients to ask me so that they know as much about the home they are purchasing as possible. Because of that, it can be difficult to say what questions a home buyer should ask his inspector. The majority of the questions that come up, and certainly many of the best questions, are things that pop up as we are walking around the property.
A few other pieces of advice:
If something doesn’t look right, ask. If you are walking around with the inspector and you see an item, or anything at all really, that looks odd, then ask about it. It is better to find out for sure whether something is in the right condition or not while the inspector is still at the property than to not ask and wonder about it later.
If you’ve never seen something before, ask. Many homeowners ask questions when they see things around the house that they have never seen before. Home buyers will oftentimes see things during the inspection that they don’t understand or that they might not even know about. For example, something might be coming out of the side of the house, such as a pipe, but the home buyer doesn’t know what it is. A good home inspector will be able to tell you what that is and explain its function.
The truth is that you want to know about everything in your house and its function. So as a home buyer, it is important to ask all those important questions as they come up so that you will have as much knowledge about the home as possible by the time the inspector is done with his job.
