A short YouTube video (Andrew Lam, Lamb Team at RE/MAX) advising home sellers to obtain pre-inspections—both general home and structural pest inspections—before listing. He explains what each inspection covers (safety/honey-do items, GFCI outlets, garage door sensors; wood rot, fungus, termites), recommends licensed/insured inspectors and contractors, and argues pre-inspections give sellers control and reduce buyer renegotiation leverage.
Chapters
Hi, this is Andrew Lam with the Lamb team at RE Max and wanted to welcome you to our video blog again today. And I had a couple of questions from home sellers recently, basically about the home pre inspection. Number one, what is it? And number two, should I get one? So I wanted to answer those for you today. And before we get into that, I'd like to direct your attention to two links on the blog. If you're a home buyer looking for homes on the market right now, you can get a backstage pass to the MLS by clicking the Search all homes link. And if you're a home seller, we would love to get a free home value report to you. You can click that link free home value report, and you'll be getting one right away. It's immediate and it is pretty accurate, but it's a range. So give me a call, let me know if that range works for you or if you would like something more specific. But if you're just looking to maybe battle your tax assessment or figure out if you should refi your home right now, it's a great tool for you. But back to the question at hand. What is a pre inspection and should I get one? So we always recommend as part of our smart home selling strategy that you get a home pre inspection. And that means both a home inspection and a pest inspection. So the home inspection is really kind of a honey do list or some safety concerns. Making sure that your groundfall indicators work, those outlets by, you know, water sources, things like that, so that they work properly and that if someone, you know, plugged in a toaster and it fell into the sink that they wouldn't get electrocuted, things like that may it means that the laser on your garage door is working properly so that you don't crush any small children or animals that might be walking in its path. So little things like that that are typically honeydew items, but also the pest inspection report, which is not just a, you know, an ant inspection, something like that, but really the structural pest wood rot, the fungus that kind of grows on wood like you're siding, but also termites that live under the home that destroy the structure of the house. So you want to make sure that that guy is of the Structural Pest Inspection Board for the state of California and is insured and licensed to do that work. Now, this does two things for you. Number one, it puts you in control of the process. You get to choose the vendors. You get to kind of deal with all that beforehand so that there's no headaches or surprises later. On number two, it reduces the ability for the buyer to negotiate the price for a second time. Typically, when they get their own inspections, you have no idea who they're going to use. And they like to ask for everything that's on that report to be fixed by the seller. So you can save yourself a lot of time, a lot of money, by getting those inspection reports up front and by taking care of those issues with a licensed contractor and not going directly through the vendors, because they tend to subcontract it. It'll cost you a little bit more, sometimes two or three times more. But if you get your own contractor, you can cut their quote in half. I've seen that a lot. So if you have any questions about that, feel free to give us a call. We'd love to help. And thanks for joining us again today. Have a great day.
